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Advantages and disadvantagesReuse has certain potential advantages which can be summarized:
Disadvantages are also apparent:
Example schemesRemanufacturing
When the distinction requires court intervention in the USA, it is easy to imagine the difficulty in discerning between "reuse" and "counterfeiting" in less developed or rapidly developing nations. Deposit refund schemesThese offer customers a financial incentive to return packaging for reuse. Although no longer common in the UK, international experience is showing that they can still be an effective way to encourage packaging reuse. However, financial incentive, unless great, may be less of an incentive than convenience: statistics show that, on average, a milk bottle is returned 12 times, whereas a lemonade bottle with a 15p deposit is returned, on average, only 3 times. Refillable bottles are used extensively in many European countries; for example in Denmark, 98% of bottles are refillable, and 98% of those are returned by consumers. [1] These systems are typically supported by deposit laws and other regulations. Sainsbury Ltd have operated a plastic carrier bag cash refund scheme in 1991 - “the penny back scheme”. The scheme is reported to save 970 tonnes of plastic per annum. The scheme has now been extended to a penny back on a voucher which can be contributed to schools registered on the scheme; it estimates this will raise the savings in plastic to 2500 tonnes per annum. In some developing nations like India and Pakistan, the cost of new bottles often forces manufacturers to collect and refill old glass bottles for selling cola and other drinks. India and Pakistan also have a way of reusing old newspapers: "Kabadiwalas" buy these from the readers for scrap value and reuse them as packaging or recycle them. These scrap intermediaries also help in disposing other articles and metals from the consumers and is a lucrative business for the resellers.[citation needed] Closed loop schemesThese apply primarily to items of packaging, for example, where a company is involved in the regular transportation of goods from a central manufacturing facility to warehouses or warehouses to retail outlets then there is considerable benefit in using reusable “transport packaging” such as plastic crates or pallets. Tesco have established a series of nine recycling service units which wash returnable plastic trays; it is estimated that this operations saves around 50,000 tonnes of packaging per annum. Marks and Spencer operate a similar scheme with 90% reuse or recycle of transit packaging. 65% of their foods are transported on reusable plastic trays saving 25,000 tonnes of cardboard per year; they also have a 3 year plan to eliminate transit packaging on textiles and home furnishing product lines saving another 28,000 tonnes per annum. The same company started a coat hanger reuse scheme in 1993 and now reuse over 20 million of these annually saving 1,200 tonnes of plastic. The benefits of closed loop reuse are primarily due to virtually no additional transport costs being involved, the empty lorry returning with the empty crates. There have been some recent attempts to get the public to join in on closed loop reuse schemes with the so called “blue basket” schemes (green in the case of Safeway) where shoppers use reusable plastic baskets in place of carrier bags for transporting their goods home from the supermarket; these baskets fit on specially designed trolleys making shopping supposedly easier. Refill packsThere have been some market led initiatives to encourage packaging reuse by companies introducing refill packs of certain commodities (mainly soap powders and cleaning fluids), the contents being transferred before use into a reusable package kept by the customer, with the savings in packaging being passed onto the customer by lower shelf prices. The refill pack itself is not reused, but being a minimal package for carrying the product home, it requires less material than one with the durability and features (reclosable top, convenient shape, etc) required for easy use of the product, while avoiding the transport cost and emissions of returning the reusable package to the factory. Internalising environmental costsThis is an economist's way of saying introduce an environmental tax: a charge on items which reflects the environmental costs of their manufacture and disposal. This makes the environmental benefit of using one reusable item instead of many disposable ones into a financial incentive. Such charges have been introduced in some countries. Such schemes are said to encourage reuse. RegivingSome items, such as clothes and children's toys, often become unwanted before they wear out due to changes in their owner's needs or preferences; these can be reused by selling or giving them to new owners. Regiving can take place informally between family, friends, or neighbors, through explicitly environmental organisations such as Freecycle and Freesharing Networks or listing websites such as Efreeko [2] and free to collect[3], or through anti-poverty charities such as the Red Cross, United Way, Salvation Army, and Goodwill which give these items to those who could not afford them new. Every year, the average American throws away 67.9 pounds [4][5] of used clothing and rags. With the US population at approximately 296,000,000 people, that translates into twenty billion pounds of used clothing and textiles that are tossed into the landfills each year. In the UK the Furniture Re-use Network co-ordinates the work of over 400 charitable projects involved in the re-use of furniture, IT and electrical appliances. There are also other regiving ideas. Old computers can be formatted and donated to schools or organizations in need. Donating a cell phone is another way. New life reuse and waste exchangeReuse is not limited to repeated uses for the same purpose. Examples of reuse for a new purpose include using tyres as boat fenders, steel drums as feeding troughs, and plastic carrier bags as bin liners. This type of reuse can sometimes make use of items which are no longer usable for their original purpose, for example using worn-out clothes as rags. Waste exchange is using a waste product from one process as a raw material for another. As with new life reuse of finished items, this avoids the environmental costs of disposing of the waste and obtaining new raw material, and may still be possible if the nature of the process makes avoiding production of the waste or recycling it back into the original process impossible. This sort of scheme needs to have a far broader base than is currently the case, it requires organisation and the setting up of waste brokerages where lists of currently available wastes are and the quantities available. One of the problems is once a demand for a waste is known or shown then the material is no longer a “waste” but a sellable commodity which often prices itself out of the market, c.f waste cement kiln dust and N-viro (lime conditioned sewage sludge fertiliser). In the former East Germany, organic household waste was collected and used as fodder for pigs. This integrated system was made possible by the state's control of agriculture; the complexities of continuing it in a market economy after German reunification meant the system had to be discontinued. Comparison to recyclingRecycling differs from reuse in that it breaks down the item into raw materials which are then used to make new items, as opposed to reusing the intact item. As this extra processing requires energy, as a rule of thumb reuse is environmentally preferable to recycling ("reduce, reuse, recycle"), though recycling does have a significant part to play as it can often make use of items which are broken, worn out or otherwise unsuitable for reuse. However, as transport emissions are a major part of the environmental impact of both reuse and recycling, it is possible for recycling to be better where reuse requires a long transport distance, and which is better for a given item may depend on location. A complex life cycle analysis may be required to determine whether reuse, recycling or neither is best for a given item and location. One difficulty is the need to estimate consumer behavior: redesigning an item to be reusable may do more harm than good if only a small proportion are actually reused, due to the increased material use per item. See also
References
sv:Återanvändning de:Wiederverwendung
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