The recycling movement has gathered plenty of steam in recent years which is wonderful, there's far less hitting our landfills and resources being reclaimed.

However, there is concern building that the recycling wave is allowing us to still be rampant consumers, a throwaway society; and recycling some justification for maintaining this mindset.

For instance, those very handy cans of gourmet flavored tuna, great to pack in a lunch box but I can empty the contents with a single mouthful! I can alleviate my guilt somewhat by recycling the can, but in order to get that mouthful of tuna, an awful lot of resources have gone into the packaging - and that's not to mention the added costs in purchasing products in this way.

What's more economical and energy efficient is buying a larger can of tuna and spooning out the equivalent amount into a reusable container.

It's the same sort of situation with a plethora of other products - cans vs. large bottles of drink, traveller packs of anything - all these handy sizes which cost us more can be recycled; but we forget the amount of energy it takes to do so.

While the energy required to recycle the aluminium in a drink can is one twentieth of that to produce the can from raw materials; when you start thinking in terms of billions of cans; it's still a lot of energy consumed. You can buy the equivalent of 5 cans in a plastic PET recyclable bottle and I suspect (I'm not sure on this) that the recycling process would require less energy.

In terms of larger items, let's say an old busted washing machine - we can send it to scrap merchants who may strip it of useful components for recycling which is great; but Fred from down the road is handy with washing machines and he may find that it just needs a fuse or some cheap component. Fred may be able to make use of it or resell the item. Reuse extends the life of a product before it has to hit the recycling stage. You may have saved Fred (or someone else) some cash in having to buy a new washer, so there's also a definite feel good aspect to re-use aside from the consumption issue.

With the growing number of people understanding that reuse is the first option before recycle, all sorts of groups have started up where you can offer your items for free to others who can make use of them. One such service is The Freecycle Network™ which currently has nearly 3.5 million members globally. If you're in Australia, a great new service is E-Cycled.

I've been reading some amazing stories of people who believed *no-one* could make use of their junk, only to find it snapped up when posted to these sorts of sites.

Think re-use before thinking recycle :).