EcoHearth Environmental Website - Best ecology websites, environmental blogs, news, activism, green jobs, green products

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle."

Rather than starting at the beginning of this adage, we as a society have chosen to say the phrase over and over, but then take action on the words in reverse order. Recycling got popular in your town in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, depending on its proximity to Woodbury, New Jersey, where in 1972 the first publicly supported curbside pickup recycling program was established). This was an easy enough change for us. We still threw our trash in a bucket, only now it was a blue, green or yellow bucket.

The next (backwards) step in this progression is Reuse, which is what we are seeing today. Items like the Klean Kanteen, its now-heinous predecessor Nalgene, and Chico Bags are all signs of an increasingly popular trend in green consumption.

While buying reusable goods is a valid step in reducing the amount of waste we individually generate, why do so many people suddenly need to buy bottles and sacks? Haven’t these always been around? When we started recycling glass bottles, why didn’t we think to just fill them back up with tomato sauce, beer, pear butter, seeds or anything else? And when they started calling plastic sacks disposable, it didn’t mean that we really had to dispose of them right away—they could always be reused a couple of times.

All goods come from somewhere and are made by someone. A new wave of consumption, even if green, still demands a new round of production and resource use. Rather than fueling this wave, how about finding creative ways to reuse the trash that we’ve already got to deal with?

The green movement in the mainstream is nothing more than the most recent iteration of many existing products. It’s the next step in an endless circle of product creation, consumption, destruction, recreation and re-consumption. When we equate consumption with participation, we’re really selling ourselves and our ideals short. When you make a purchase, the only thing you really participate in is the market. If we believe that the main way to participate in a sustainability movement is through consumption, what do we do when we’re out of money (or if we never had any to begin with)?

Creativity and ingenuity in the home seem to have been replaced by an ethic that values Klean Konsumption, making the right purchases, easy environmentalism and changing the world with the least amount of effort. What we seem to value is expert society, division of labor, trust that someone else can do it better/best, and alternately that we are incapable of doing many things ourselves. With that has come a loss of useful, empowering knowledge.

Frugality is not a dirty word that belongs only to those who survived Depression-era scarcity. Rediscovering how we can make the so-called waste we already have last longer—and breaking out of the industrial production cycle to become producers, not consumers—can be a more powerful way of participating. Perhaps the dollar in your pocket isn’t the most powerful tool you have. Perhaps it’s you!

[This piece was written by Houston Wilson, Anya Kamenskaya, and May Nguyen and provided courtesy of the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology. – Ed.]