Congratulations. You recycle. You even have one of those cute compost bins that you dump your apple cores and banana peels in. You must feel really good about all the great things you are doing for the environment – after all not everybody takes those steps to reduce our solid waste volume.

The only problem is those steps are easy for all of us to do, but they do not really address the problem. Take a look around your house and observe your patterns of consumption. Despite all your green living fashion statements you are making, your not living a very green life—if you at all like most Americans.

Take a look around in your house. Was your house built in 1950? A bit earlier or later? How many things from 1950 do you still have in your house? How is that black and white television treating you? That harvest gold stove? The avocado green lazy-boy? The transistor clock-radio on your bed stand? The typewriter? The fake marble walls in the bathroom and the popcorn ceilings?

Indeed, not every house was blessed with the memories of a time when people talked about conspicuous consumption and the War in Vietnam. Many houses certainly existed back then, and most of the furniture, appliances, and consumables such as cans and bottles have long been sitting in a garbage dump near you, or have become air pollution as they have gone up the smoke stack. The things that surround you are disposable and will be disposed in the near future.

This laptop computer, that I purchased 3 months ago, will at some point in the future be toxic garbage. The pickup truck whose tailgate I sit on, will be in a few years be another half ton of waste. One ton of it will be scrapped into low grade steel alloy, the rest shredded and sent to a landfill. The house I look at and the barn I look at with all it’s contents will all be landfilled or burned. That’s the truth to it, even if we want to have a different perspective on it.

There is no government or capitalist conspiracy going on here. There simply is a lack of planning or thought about the lifespan of the materials that surround us. Most people agree that if we could scrap materials at the end of their lifetimes, and turn them into valuable products, that would be the best course of action. The thing is we can’t recycle most materials as we didn’t plan their life after usefulness. We put lead paint on our gypsum board walls, so it can’t be spread on the fields. We thousands of chemicals into that chair, that can not be separated out easily and effectively and made into other products.

It was a tragic oversight as it means that valuable products that we put a significant amount of energy and resources into to create have no potential to be used beyond their lifespans. There is no chance to do anything useful with them besides try to maximize their usefulness, then dump them in a landfill or burn them. There we can try to limit the toxins exposed the environment that can harm us, but we can’t do much to get the value back.

We throw away tins cans and bottles everyday into either the trash or the recycling bin. Yet, we are always in the process leading towards throwing away far more. We don’t see the old television set or the washing machine in the garbage every day, but it’s certainly on it’s way just like the material in those trash cans. We are getting better at scrapping those materials as time goes by, even then most it still ends up in a landfill or in the air – if not right now then soon.