Is recycling “part of the solution”? The role of recycling in an expanding society and a world of finite resources

Since the 1990s, recycling of waste has become a core element of sustainable development. However, in this article, analysis of the flow modelling shows that recycling in itself is inefficient to perform the necessary "decoupling" of economic development and the depletion of non-renewable raw materials. The depletion of the natural resource of raw material is inevitable when its global consumption by the economy grows by more than 1% per annum. Recycling can delay for some years or decades at best. Decoupling the economy and its material needs must be understood as a double decoupling, the two components of which being inoperative if they are implemented separately. Only the combination of the two makes a significant impact on the problem of resources: (i) A fundamental decoupling, namely to restrain the growth of total consumption of raw material (virgin or recycled) (ii) A relative decoupling to reduce, through recycling and reuse, the share of primary resources (virgin) in the total production of raw material. In this perspective, the actual role of recycling to protect the resources is not significant for non-renewable materials which consumption tends to grow more than 1% per year. Conversely, once the fundamental decoupling is performed by other means, so that the growth of total consumption of raw materials is reduced below 1% per year, recycling becomes indispensable if the rate of effectiveness is very high globally. Only recycling rates above 80% allow a significant slowdown of the depletion of natural resources. In conclusion, sustainable development policies can not rely primarily on recycling, even though it is an important component. These policies should primarily aim at reducing the consumption of each non renewable raw matérial so that the annual growth rate remains under 1%. And in any case, to be efficient as the indispensable second part of these policies, recycling should be developed to much higher rates than the ones observed for most recycled materials in the world today