-- Aluminium can . . . No. You take the aluminium out of the ground, and then
you have a hole in the ground. No more aluminium grows there.
-- Wooden chair . . . Yes. You cut a tree down to get the wood, and if you wait
long enough, another tree grown in its place.
-- Glass fish bowl . . . Perhaps. Glass is made from sand. After you use
a dune to make glass, no more sand grown there to replace the sand you
have used. Still, there is an awful lot of sand on Earth, and it may well seem
renewable, or at least inexhaustible, at least over a period of several human
lifetimes.
-- Plastic bottle . . . Probably not. "Plastic" is our catch-all name for materials
invented in chemistry laboratories and produced in chemical factories, and
there are thousands of different plastics. Their ingredients are water, air, and
thousands of different ingredients obtained in nature. The natural ingredients
in plastics are not renewable, but the plastic products themselves are almost
indestructible, so they're re-cyclable without limit, if they can be kept out of
land fills and reclaimed.
-- Denim jeans . . . Yes. Denim is a cotton fabric with a unique weave. Cotton
is a plant. If fields are properly cared for, then another crop of cotton can be
grown from the same land where one was produced last year, and new jeans
can be harvested.
