I was reminded recently that “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” are not supposed to be equally important instructions. Reducing the amount of stuff you buy has the biggest potential impact on the earth’s health. Reusing what you do buy is not as helpful as reducing, but is more helpful than recycling. In other words, if, like many of us, you’re conscientious about recycling but mostly ignore the reduce and reuse edicts, you’re doing it wrong.
The reason so many of us fall into that category is that reusing and especially reducing are much harder instructions to follow.
Consider reuse. In rare cases, you have an opportunity to reuse something immediately after you use it the first time. When you unpack your groceries from the paper bag, you might be able to immediately plop the bag under your sink to use for collecting recyclables. But in most cases you either don’t know how to reuse the object (the paper bag today’s baguette came in asks me in a lovely blue typeface to reuse it, but what am I supposed to do with a baguette-shaped bag?) or you do know how to reuse it, but you have a big stack of similar objects already in line for reuse (I have about 30 paper grocery bags in a stack waiting to be used to collect my recycling). In either case, you can hold onto the object until you either think of a way to reuse it or exhaust your supply of similar objects. But where do you put it? I don’t know about your home, but mine is pretty full of objects already. And once you do discover or create a space to store it, when/if the big moment for reuse arrives, how do you remember a) that you have it, and b) where you stashed it? Then when you’re done reusing it, you’ll presumably want to store it again for a second round of reuse. That’s all fine if the object is something like a glass jar that doesn’t get dinged and dented with multple uses, but if it’s the kind of thing that wears out, when do you decide that it’s too worn to continue reusing? And no matter how hard you’re trying to reduce during this time, it’s inevitable that you’ll continue to bring some new objects into your life, which means your stack of ready-to-reuse objects will get bigger and bigger.
My point here is not that reuse is impossible, but that it requires an awful lot of decisions from someone whose life is probably way too full of decisions already. I find myself exhausted just thinking about the process, much less following through on it.
The more important act of reducing feels even harder to implement, since there are often no clear criteria for when you really truly need to buy something. For example, how do you know when it’s time to replace your car? Your current car can probably be repaired indefinitely. At some point the cost of repairing the car over the next n years might exceed the cost of buying a new one and maintaining it for those same n years, but it’s almost impossible to reliably identify that point. And the math is rarely so simple. Will insurance be more on a new car? Will it use less fuel? What price do you put on new safety features? How damaging to the earth is it to dispose of an old car? How damaging is it to make a new one? How much discomfort is your family expected to put up with as the kids get taller and no longer fit comfortably in your old, small car? If you think you need a new car for the sake of some lifestyle choice (maybe you want four-wheel drive for skiing), how do you factor in how much your interest in skiing is worth? What if you just really like cars? Does that excuse your decision not to reduce the number of cars you own?
A car is a big, earth-damaging purchase that involves a ton of hard-to-reason-about decisions, but smaller purchases present you with the same sorts of challenges (on a correspondingly smaller scale). Do I really need to buy or make dessert tonight? When is it reasonable to replace worn-out towels? How small should I let my kids’ clothes get before I get them new ones? And how should we respond to the horrifying amount of unnecessary packaging that comes with many goods today. Obviously buying food from bulk bins and filling your own reusable containers is a good way of minimizing this kind of waste. But many things that we genuinely need (foods and otherwise) can’t be bought in this way, and saddle us with obscene amounts of unnecessary packaging, thereby bypassing the “reduce” option completely.
I knew a minimalist in college who made a point of decluttering his life by making up songs in his head instead of buying CDs or tapes. I think he only owned three shirts, and a single pair of shoes. This seemed extreme to me, but is it? How much do we need, really? How much inconvenience, discomfort, or ostracism are we expected to endure in the name of reducing? Similarly, how much effort are we expected to put into figuring out how and what to reuse? How much of our limited time and money are we supposed to dedicate to recycling? Doing something is clearly better than doing nothing, but is there a point of diminishing returns for any of these three commandments?
Is the amount of effort we’re supposed to put into reducing, reusing, and recycling relative to the society in which we live? If no one around me is doing any of those things, does that let me off the hook? Or does it mean that I should try extra hard to follow these three commandments, to compensate for the laziness (or in some cases, inability) of those around me?
I’m some sure some academic has thought all of this through (surely there’s a Peter Singer equivalent for the environment?), but again: how much time and effort can I reasonably be expected to expand in looking that up, reading it, and returning to it from time to time to keep my memory of the proposed answers fresh? Some eminent New York intellectual (I can’t remember who) claimed that the day he stopped recycling was the most liberating day of his life. I don’t want to be that guy, but I also don’t want to be driven crazy by the “no level of effort is enough” mentality that I’ve seen in others. I haven’t yet found a reasonable middle ground, but I’ll keep looking.
Cowell in Cascadia 