Photo uploaded to stock.xchng by hortongrou. “Reduce, Reuse,
Recycle/ Reduce, Reuse, Recycle/Reduce, Reuse, Recycle/because
three/is a magic number.” Jack Johnson’s “Schoolhouse Rock”
mash-up underlines an important point about the New Age
“R’s”—there are three! While tremendous strides are being made
in the areas of recycling AND reusing, not enough people are
making a concentrated effort to reduce the amount of waste they
create. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, the
recovery rate for solid municipal waste (SMW = trash) through
recycling (and composting) was up to 32% in 2005, a significant
increase over the less than 10% recycled in 1980. However, the
creation of SMW has risen 60% since 1980. The EPA estimates that
each American still makes about 4.5 pounds of waste each day
(most in the world), and that’s just not getting the job done.
No matter how much we recycle (or reuse), if we don’t reduce the
amount of trash we’re producing, we’re going to rubbish our
green Earth. It’s true that we l