Rethinking Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Since almost the very beginning of the environmental movement, the phrase “reduce-reuse-recycle” has been commonplace. And the idea behind it is great: we should only use what we need to; we should repurpose already-used things; and whatever can’t be reused should be turned into something new. But there’s a problem: if these ideas have been around for so long, where is their impact? Why is the economy still wildly unsustainable? How haven’t they prevented emissions from continuing to rise, or water from continuing to be depleted, or trash from continuing to pile up?

To answer those questions, it’s important to understand how the economy works in modern society. People often think of the economy as a bunch of disconnected individuals, producing and consuming and competing and cooperating according to their own self-interest. And this is technically true. The economy is, after all, made up of individuals. Under this logic, the idea of “reduce-reuse-recycle” as a basis for social change makes a lot of sense. If all consumption is just individual people making choices, then changing your individual habits and convincing others to do the same should be enough to change the world.

But this strategy hasn’t worked out. So what’s the problem? The economy may technically be made up of individuals, but this framework misses the forest for the trees. Individuals tend to take economic action through institutions, particularly corporations and governments, whose influence far outweighs any possible impact of individual home conservation efforts.

For instance, in the case of climate change, just 100 companies are responsible for almost three-quarters of world CO₂ emissions, so just a handful of CEOs and stockholders are able to make decisions which could literally end human life on earth. But couldn’t the workers at those companies just make the individual choice not to work? Not really, as they’d lose their access to the basic necessities of life. But even if every worker was able to quit, the companies would still exist. The aforementioned CEOs and stockholders would still be around, would still have an interest in making a profit off of the destruction of the planet, and would still control massive financial power.

Even if consumers chose not to buy wasteful products that still wouldn’t solve the problem. Some products are less wasteful than others, but the basic way that we structure our lives – the resource waste built into the existing systems of design, agriculture, transportation, and every other industry – makes it next to impossible to live sustainably by just choosing “green” products. And for as long as it exists, the business class will represent an extremely powerful group of people with a vested interest in resisting sustainable economic changes that threaten to hurt the bottom line.

This does not mean that the fight against climate change, and environmental destruction in general, is hopeless. But if climate change is to be stopped, or even seriously limited, it will be necessary to achieve radical structural change.