Recycling (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

new to MIT series, as a civil engineer who loves to learn about infrastructure, I really enjoyed the book. It gave a good history of how and why different products have been recycled over the history of the world and did not sugar coat the obvious hipocrisy in current status of things. I would have enjoyed more technical detail about how exactly the products are recycled but that is ok

I'll summarize the main messages of the book so you don't have to read it. "Recycling" as we know it is a relatively modern invention because in the pre-industrial era so many more things were repurposed, reused, or repaired; the disposability of the modern age is a modern invention. Industrial processes need to recycle more, household recycling is akin to fighting a riptide... but still do it please. The U.S. has a more disposable-inclined worldview than the Nordic countries. Reduce, reuse, and recycle were ordered that way for a reason, and we need to remember that.

The recycling symbol has become symbolic

Good book

Rather than focusing on technological aspects of recycling - which are almost completely neglected - the book has a major philosophical-sociological approach to waste and recycling. The book delves into the problem of waste production in the first place basically being equally critic of the capitalistic production of waste and that of recycling as a failed approach to waste management. It dwarfs and somehow set an aura of absurdity to household recycling, stating that 97% of total waste is industrial waste and household waste is the remaining tiny 3% of the problem. The book discourages then without providing any technical, sociological or philosophical solution to the problem if not a generic 'raise awareness' approach. Closed in a sort of deconstruction which sounds like a paralysis analysis of the problem, the book is void of new idea and approach. Definitely not an enlightened view on recycling as I expected from a MIT publication.

Un gran libro para entender la complejidad de un tema que parece mas sencillo cuando no se sabe nada de el. Ojos que no ven, corazon que no siente.