It occurred to me yesterday that if we all took one moment to think, we’d realize how hideously wasteful we are. For example:
Every day I fetch my mail from the mailbox on the front of the house, walk though the kitchen, and without bothering to read it, rip it in small pieces and dump it in the recycling bin at the back of the house. The vast majority, close to 100%, of the mail I receive is junk, circulars, ads, credit card solicitations, loan offers. I might as well attach a shredder directly to my mailbox to save me a few moments.
And yesterday, the phone company dumped a big, heavy phonebook on my front stoop. This necessitated another trip to the recycle bin. It would have been much more efficient, cheaper, and kinder to the environment if AT&T had simply chopped down a forest and then dumped the trees into a landfill. They wouldn’t have had to use the oil to transport it all, the heavy chemicals for the ink, the glues for binding, the plastic to wrap each one individually (when did they start doing that? More waste) and the gas to power the trucks that haul them from street to street. Not to mention the costs now involved in recycling a million phone books that people almost never use, especially in the era of Google.
