Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. This trifecta make up the essential tenets of what I grew up understanding as the principles of recycling. Notice how one of the tenets is also how I recognize the whole of the movement, the ideal. And that is because as I was growing up my whole interaction with any kind of reducing, reusing, or recycling was decided whether I put the trash in the gray bin or the green one, the green one of course displaying that perpetual image of the three arrows pointing towards one another in the eternal shape of the triangle. And I assume for the most of us that has been our whole lives, a quick decision between “is this trash or recyclable?” And then, for those who allow themselves to consider between these dueling realities, there is the potential following question of “is it even the kind of recyclable that my town recycles?” Such information is available online, but perhaps you’re moral enough to have even considered recycling the thing, so you swiftly toss the #6 plastic in the green bin and you whistle away. Such a quandary is not my concern here. In fact the whole domain of “recycling” I’m not concerned with in this writing, nor do I wish to delve into reusing, for, one it seems to me is the practice of using a thing or material over again on a large interconnected scale, recycling, and one on a local scale, reusing. 

I here wish to make a plea to humanity that we revamp our dedication to the neglected tenet of reducing. We ought to use less. If only for the sake of not contributing to the girth of our jewel plastic islands. Let us let them be and not do another skyscraper thing where the bigger ours is the better we are than you. They’re big enough as is. 

You might argue that to advocate for reducing how much material we use is anti capitalistic but I don’t (care). If your capitalism is predicated on the selling of the most useless low quality and over packaged junk then you don’t have my vote and you don’t have my capital. I’ll take it elsewhere thank you. 

Reducing is also a wonderful invitation to reprioritize on quality. Remember heirlooms? I don’t, but imagine how great it would be if we had the ability and conviction to make sizable purchases on goods that were so good that we could pass them down to our children and they to their children. That to me is beauty. 

I invite the genius of our inventors and thinkers to, as well as figure out how to get those awful plastic islands dealt with and get our turtles free from the claws of *gasp* Gatorade packaging, but also, rediscover quality and market to us products and lifestyles that incite a friendlier disposition to our Mother Earth and to our own sense of goodness and truly living well. 

And #6 isn’t recycled here. Or no that was #5… #6 is, or it was #7…

Oh, and for the consumers among us, there are good quality items out there, buy ‘em please. And maybe, just maybe, stop buying bs that you only use once, maybe.