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In 2023, Michaela Barnet asked study participants to rank the words "reduce," "reuse," and "recycle" in order of environmental impact. More than 78% of participants did it wrong.
The phrase is ordered the way it is for a reason: Reduce first and recycle as a last resort. But decades of recycling campaigns have inverted the hierarchy in public understanding.
"Producers create products that eventually become waste and saddle individuals with the responsibility of disposal," Barnett, an environmental researcher at the University of Virginia, said in releasing her 2023 paper.
The Environmental Protection Agency's waste management hierarchy ranks source reduction first, reuse second, and recycling third. Preventing a product from being manufactured eliminates its extraction, production, transportation, and disposal emissions. Recycling it recaptures only a fraction of those costs. The gap between the two strategies is large, and EPA research hasn't changed that conclusion in decades.
