Reduce - Less is more!

Reuse

Yes, maybe it's not new, but still fully functioning and good to go. Maybe it's pre-loved, but has still a lot of life in it!

Redistribute

One wo/mns trash is another wo/mans treasure. If you don't need it anymore, maybe someone else does. And with sharing and swapping you don't even avoid wasting a functioning item, you also save someone spending money on it.

Repair

Things do break, even more so as manufactors nowadays seems to rely on cheap cheap rather than producing something that lasts a lifetime. Fix it, if it's broken, intead of replacing it.

Remanufacturing

If something is beyond repair, its parts might be well good to be used for something else, which again saves resources and avoids waste.

Repurpose

You have seen plants sitting in old wellies? or old Belfast sinks turned into planters? Maybe an item is not fit for its purpose, but it could be amazing for something else.

Revamp

A push bike, that got rusty, a dress that is not en vogue anymore... or anything that you used to like when you were at uni, but would never want to be seen with now. Get some paint, some beads, and jazz it up! Make it a unique state of the art item that makes everyone green with envie!

Recycle

If there is nothing you can do with it, than recycling is the last resort. It makes something else out of the resources, melts the materials down and creates something new from scratch.

Downside: especially with plastic the quality of the re-pressed items is way lower then the initial item. Only paper can be sufficiently recycled. And you need to make sure you only purchase items that can actally be recycled. A lot of wrappings still go into lanfill.

Recovery

If something can't be recycled at all, it can still be used to generate energy, ie, most things can be turned into energy by incenaration or other (bio-)chemical processes. Although it's not the the most efficient way, it still beats landfill.

Generally speaking, you should try to approach consumption (and waste) from top to bottom, meaning, you start with thinking twice if you need new items, give your items a second life, or find a new home. No waste is still better than recycling or recovering.

 This is called Waste Hierachy, and it's in the EU's waste framework: Directive 2008/98/EC and all EU countries are advised to stick to this hierachy, meaning, they rather avoid waste, shipping recycling to Asia or burning it.

As long as schools still teach recycling as the only solution, consumption will still cause as much waste (if not more).

In education, reusing items for arts and crafts is getting more and more popular, and children enjoy waste modelling, collages out of random objects and re-using single use items. Children are learning a new idea of beauty and value of items, and they will eventually bring forward sustainable practice.