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Recycling Quotes

Browse 208 quotes about Recycling.

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Recycling Quotes

“[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.”

EnvironmentFateTelevisionFootballGuiltGlobal WarmingCatastropheEnvironmentalismRecyclingImpotenceReassuranceFatalismOrganic Food20102010 Fifa World Cup2010 Eruptions EyjafjallajokulPaper Recycling
Author:Slavoj Žižek
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“The 400% Kindness Return: A True Story I firmly believe that every act of kindness ripples out into the world, returning to you multiplied. Here's a story that forever changed how I see generosity. A Mother's Sacrifice: Sarah, a single mother of two young children, knew every penny counted. Collecting aluminum cans with her kids was a small but essential way they scraped by. Trips to the recycling center were hard-earned rewards.”

CompassionSacrificeGenerosityRecyclingRipple Effect400 RuleGood InvestmentKy Lottery
Author:Cecilia Payne Kat Kaelin
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“Like any ecosystem, a modern economy cannot survive without recycling. Just as animals and plants are continually recycling the oxygen and carbon dioxide that the other provides, so too must workers recycle their wages by spending them in shops and businesses recycle their revenues by spending them on salaries if both are to survive. And just as in our ecosystems, in which a failure of recycling leads to desertification, so when recycling breaks down in the economy we end up with a crisis that results in devastating poverty and deprivation.”

MoneyCapitalismRecyclingMarketsEconomic CrisisEcosystem
Book:Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
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“It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn't.”

ChildrenBottlesMothersTreesFathersRecyclingSundaysFowls
Book:The Vivisector
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“Take it all, all of it!" Greg cried out. "These things here...I've been making them better, fixing them. It doesn't matter...they don't matter. I've been here before." He paused to try to collect himself. "It's my past, my present...these things--" He lifted a hand out to the objects around him. "These things are me." Now whispering, "Can't you see me?”

MysteryChicagoFbiRecyclingAntiquesJamaicaCubsAction AdventureSuspense RomanceTattoosWeddingsEco FriendlyHermesHarleyPorscheCybercrimeKittyGregCorporate EspionagePea PodVintage CarsWrigleyvilleChristian Louboutin ShoesCyber Action TeamTrump TowersZamantha
Book:Running Parallel
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“With superior sentience, come superior screw-ups. And this holds particularly true for industrialization. Even if we put aside carbon emission, in the year 2020 alone humankind has produced over 2 billion tonnes of trash, which is expected to rise over 70% by the year 2050. Thus, in the name of progress we the gadget-mad gargoyles keep acting as the true eco-terrorists of the glorious dumping ground, called the planet earth. 2% of all our waste is e-waste. And the alarming bit here is that, that 2% e-waste comprises over 70% of our overall toxic waste. So, what can you do, you ask? Simple - reject less, repair more. Try to make things last as long as possible, or pass them on to those who have need for them. Don't let things go to waste, just because you can afford new ones. For example, my kid cousin's laptop has been acting up for some time now. But instead of buying them a new pc, I ordered the replacement for the faulty part and repaired the laptop myself. This way, we not only reduce our e-waste footprint on the planet, but in the process, we teach kids to value things. The point is, whether you do it yourself or get it done by a professional, by practicing repair, you are actively participating in the making of a greener, cleaner and healthier world. It's not enough to be just a consumer, you gotta be a conscious consumer, otherwise there is no difference between a consumer and a slave. That is why, right-to-repair is not only a human rights issue, it is also an environmental issue. Repairing and recycling are the bedrock of sustainability. So I say again - reject less, repair more.”

ConsumerismEnvironmentalismRecyclingEnvironmental ProtectionIndustrializationShopaholicConsumer LawConsumer ElectronicsRight To RepairDiy Quotes
Book:Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament
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“Since 1963, LEGO bricks have been manufactured from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer - ABS copolymer for short - a plastic with a matte finish. It is very hard and robust - import criteria for a children's toy. Laboratories in Switzerland and Denmark regularly test the quality of the ABS. The plastic is distributed to factories as granules rather than in liquid form. These grains of plastic are heated up to 232ºC and converted into a molten mass. Injection moulding machines weighing up to 150 tonnes squeeze the viscous plastic mass into the desired injection moulds - of which there are 2,400 varieties. After seven seconds, the brick produced in this way has cooled down enough to be removed from the mould. The injection moulding method is so precise that out of every million elements produced, only about 18 units have to be rejected. Unsold bricks are converted back into granulates and recycled.”

MaterialsFactoriesPlasticToysRecyclingIndustrial RevolutionLegoPlasticsMaterials EngineeringMaterial ScienceMaterial EngineeringMaterials ScienceInjection Moulding
Book:50 Years of the Lego Brick
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“I'm not out there suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the [plastic] bag is one of them.”

EnvironmentalSustainabilityRecyclingPlastics
Book:Plastic: A Toxic Love Story – An Engaging Analysis of Cultural Dependency and the Resulting Environmental Crisis
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“Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.”

EnvironmentRecyclingIndustrialismGreen MovementAnti Civilization
Book:Deep Green Resistance
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“Dad's oil dehydrator was a contained electrostatic field, one electrode down the center, the other the container's inner wall. Principal problem was finding a dielectric to separate the two. Refuse oil poured in came out as oil of the highest grade, dry chemicals, and drinking water. Petroleum Rectifying Company successfully prohibited its use.”

RecyclingPetroleumTechnological ProgressPetroleum IndustryPetroleum Politics
Book:M: Writings '67–'72
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“If one cares about the earth—if one respects nature—it is better to consume vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains. If you care about the planet and wish to adopt an earth-friendly lifestyle, it is advisable to focus only secondarily on the car that you drive, or recycling, or turning off lights and turning down heat, and primarily on what you buy at the grocery store. What we eat has a much greater impact on the environment.”

EarthEnvironmentEthicsClimate ChangeVeganConsumingVeganismEmissionsRecyclingPlanet
Book:Animals and World Religions
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“Plastic should be a high value material... [It] should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that last minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it--I think that's not a good way of using this resource. (Robert Haley)”

PlasticNatural ResourcesRecycling
Book:Plastic: A Toxic Love Story – An Engaging Analysis of Cultural Dependency and the Resulting Environmental Crisis
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“In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?”

EnvironmentGlobalizationManufacturingRecycling
Book:Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
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“A very old wisteria rose snaking over an arbour. Nearby were tiny roses on a wall, mere tufty buttons that smelled of one's childhood in a horse-pace village. Thin bricks were set on edge around a bed of irises, bricks which had been stamped on by Tudor horses, when they had formed the floor of the old stables. Traces of them could be seen also in the path in the churchyard, like the backs of small old books packed in a bookshelf.”

TimeEnduranceBricksRecycling
Book:A Countryman’s Summer Notebook
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“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”

IfsWayHas BeensPoliticalLanguageCausesMoralClearDiseaseMajorityAidsAnalysisAttributesConspiracyWrathMedievalCiaEpidemicsRecyclingLeftistsUltrasWrath Of GodMicroorganisms
Author:Dennis Altman
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“Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always retro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', its 'relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling.”

TodayPastFormPrinciplesFashionIdentityBasesAffectedResurrectionRelevanceAbolitionRecyclingActualityRetroRecurrence
Book:Symbolic Exchange and Death
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“In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.”

GivingKindMayArtDifferentUsePastCultureBeliefAuthorityJokesPopsCampsDifferent KindsGesturesSixtyCompelledAltarsPop CultureRecyclingSatiricalZestLarger Than LifePop ArtShorthand
Author:Pauline Kael
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“It's can you, Steve Wozniak, design the same computer - maybe it's a Varian 620i - can you design it on paper with fewer chips than last month? Can you design it with 79 chips instead of 80 chips? I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can't even explain... Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association, recycling, and they loved to hear I didn't believe in waste.”

BelieveLittlesLongI CanStoriesLastsGamesDesignMonthsWastePaperComputerResourcesTricksRecoveryZeroAssociationFewerChipsRecycling
Author:Steve Wozniak
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“The greatest part of each day, each year, each lifetime is made up of small, seemingly insignificant moments. Those moments may becooking dinner...relaxing on the porch with your own thoughts after the kids are in bed, playing catch with a child before dinner, speaking out against a distasteful joke, driving to the recycling center with a week's newspapers. But they are not insignificant, especially when these moments are models for kids.”

YearsMayChildrenMadeMomentsKidsFamilyWeekBedModelsJokesLifetimeDinnerDrivingNewspapersEach DayInsignificantRecyclingPorchSpeaking OutDistasteful
Author:Barbara Coloroso
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