For the environment to really benefit from your diligent recycling you also need to buy recycled goods, writes Sarah Pickette.

According to the 2010 National Waste Report, 98 per cent of households undertake recycling activities. But putting your recycling bins out on the kerb is only a part of the equation. "For any recycling program or service to be viable in the long term, there has to be a market for that recycled material," says Janet Sparrow, Manager of Recycling Programs for environmental group Planet Ark.

That's where 'closing the loop' comes in. This means buying goods that contain recycled content to help ensure an endless cycle from production and consumption to recycling and back into production.

"If we all incorporated one or two items made from recycled content into our household shopping, it'd have a positive environmental impact," says Sparrow.

Products with recycled content — toilet paper and tissues made from 100-per-cent recycled paper and pegs constructed from recycled plastics, for example — have become more visible in our supermarkets. When you buy a bag of compost from a garden centre you're also closing the loop as you're buying back the green waste that gets picked up by councils and sold for commercial processing. "A less obvious way to close the loop is to buy things packaged in aluminium or glass, both of which generally contain a percentage of recycled content," says Sparrow. "It's just that you may not see that on the label." A product made from something that would otherwise be destined for landfill, such as orange-oil cleaning products made from discarded orange skins, also counts.

When you buy an item that is packaged in or contains recycled content, you are preserving a portion of its embodied energy: that is, the amount of energy consumed by the processes associated with the production of that item, from its beginning as a raw material through to its delivery. Aluminium, for example, retains about three-quarters of its embodied energy when it is recycled. "Aluminium recycling is one of those areas where Australians are not great recyclers," says Sparrow. "But on the plus side, we're global leaders in newsprint recycling. In 2010, 78.7 per cent of all Australian newsprint was recovered."

If everyone looked at recycling holistically, she says, the environment would truly benefit.

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