ABSTRACT
In Santa Barbara and most communities in the United States, sorted recyclables are sold to brokers, who sell it on to the facilities that actually convert them into secondary materials, ready to be used again. Reuse and recycling are probably as old as civilization itself, but it was the modern environmental movement that popularized them as strategies for environmental impact reduction. The impact reduction potential of reuse is even larger than that of recycling. The difference in environmental impact between cell phone recycling and equivalent primary metal production is modest, while the difference in environmental impact between cell phone refurbishment and equivalent new cell phone production is nothing short of spectacular. The renewed interest in reuse and recycling is generating an ever-growing wave of circular economy indicators, which are all meant to measure our progress towards circularity.
