Refurbishing vs. recycling. It’s an interesting question for the sustainability-minded, often involving a complex and far-reaching balance of pros and cons. But local recyclers, such as the United Kingdom’s Pli Design, are making the decision just a little bit easier.

Consider an old Playstation gaming console.  While continuing to refurbish it over time does keep the larger unit out of the landfill, it also requires frequent production runs and shipments from the other side of the world, and all the carbon impacts those things involve. Recyclers often restore plastics to a raw, reusable format for far less energy than it takes to create them from oil, but they, too, need to be shipped and reprocessed. 

Local recyclers can cut down on energy lost to transit, and can see to it that their products are created with an eye to sustainability all the way through the process. Pli’s Reee chair, for example, is designed to be easily broken down and re-recycled once its fashionable lifespan has been exceeded.  Now all we need is more of these recyclers to spring up around the world, reducing carbon impact from bringing our recycled products to them.