Recycling: mining the waste resource 

Self-sufficient resource management has two main benefits for consumers as well as policy makers, according to the author: 

• Consumers benefit from lower prices for raw materials because the supply will be secured on a long-term basis; and; 
• Governments can "minimise the risk impact of being wholly reliant on one or two key suppliers" and set their energy supply on a broader basis. 

For recycling to work effectively, the loop between the "end of the pipe", the consumer, and the "start of the pipe", industry, needs to be closed, the author argues. 

"Waste is merely another form or resource to be mined as any other" and "recycling can be viewed as a manufacturing process in all but name," the paper states. 

"We need to create the equivalent of an 'environmental clunk-click campaign' similar to the successful promotion that encouraged seat belt wearing among car users in the 1970s," according to the author.

Environmental targets and profit targets go "hand in glove", Calliafas argues, making it clear that markets for the key components – metal, paper, glass, plastics and wood – already exist. He demands that policymakers that they further support this evolving agenda, despite the financial and technical challenges such new technology always pose. 

"Recycling by its nature is going to be more expansive as a process and if this pricing difference is allowed to remain, then there will be no adoption of the technology", the paper states. 

Calliafas concludes that resource efficiency, not waste disposal, must be the ultimate goal, with clearly defined end-user markets "so that the recovery loop is complete in its entirety". 

He adds that "unless another three or more Earths are discovered in the foreseeable future", this resource management aspiration will soon be realised.