| My thought after reading Palmer's piece is that it was a first draft -- "thinking out loud" if you will. From the article:
Since no approach to conservation that relies on harvesting garbage can ever threaten the garbage paradigm, [recyclers] have no way to inspire the public. The way in which products are designed specifically for waste is simply not on their screen. Since that time, no new theory or even interpretation has been put forward until today. I think that's a bit of exaggeration on Palmer's part. There have been new businesses founded on using recycled materials to create something new. I don't remember being able to buy in the '80s reams of recycled paper for my printer or lawn furniture and carpet made of recycled plastic soda pop bottles. However, I think Palmer is correct in that recycling proponents have failed to make the use of recycled materials more attractive, whether it is by virtue of low raw-materials cost or manufacturing/accounting advantages of using these materials. The lack of demand for many recyclable materials makes it difficult to collect even what could be collected, further minimizing the impact of recycling. Recycling proponents should spend more time in industrial and political arenas to advise in making the use (and re-use) of recycled materials more attractive. Consider now the enormous waste of designing products to be fragile, breakable, trashy, lightweight and with signature, critically weak parts inside. This practice is part of the strategy called "planned obsolescence". [...] how does that compare to a product that is so well designed for reuse that only a tenth as much raw material ends up passing through the industrial meatgrinder? [...] For example, the unfortunately classical method of recycling a glass bottle is to destroy its function. As a
container, its function is to contain. [...] The common-sense way that zero waste approaches this reuse is by using the containment function -- by refilling the bottle. All of the value is recaptured and there is no reason to
transport broken glass across the country, remelt it, fill it in a distant factory and ship it back to where it started. Nice ideas. But they show a theoretical ignorance of business and human behavior. To take Palmer's glass-bottle example, what happens when the bottler discontinues Pepsi Blah due to poor sales but is stuck with thousands of bottles imprinted with a now-defunct brand name? Does the bottler fill the bottles with Orange Crush despite the name painted onto the bottle? How much energy (trucks, rail cars, etc.) is involved in getting Pepsi Blah bottles back to the appropriate bottling plant? What happens when (inevitably) some of those bottles break? And are we ready for a world in which technological progress is made that much slower by the standardization Palmer recommends? Species adapt by successful mutation. How long would we be without the benefits (low power consumption, greater visibility) of LCD screens if CRT screens had to be perpetuated because that's all that could be re-used? What happens to market competition (with its benefits in price reduction and feature addition) if standardization is king and any new initiative must be accompanied by an entire life cycle of product sale and recycling/disposal? Don't get me wrong -- on a basic level, I think Palmer is right. But his answer -- just re-use whatever it is -- is simplistic and ignores that re-use has its own costs. As a planet we need to decide if those costs are worth what we save. My apologies for writing a "book". | 
