cancer boy, you brought up something I was just griping about - overpackaging.
I live in the US of A and think this country is one of the most wasteful of most. Disposable society.
The iced tea I enjoy drinking comes in bottles bound by a plastic thing that is not only useless and wasteful, but a real hassle.
It goes beyond just food packaging too. Technology has created more rubbish by making things like TVs, VCRs etc. easier to get rid of then have repaired. They also are more likely to crap out in just a few years. Or they're made so that you cannot use them any longer because they're outdated.
On the big trash dump days some of our cities have you would be appalled by the things people just throw away. Couches, refridgirators, scooters...
I agree that recycling isn't the compete answer. In an early childhood class I took we talked about disposable diapers vs. cloth. Landfill vs. resources used to clean cloth diapers. It came out as a wash in economic and environmental terms.
The only thing I do feel is great about recycling currently is paper. At leat that keeps newspaper out of the landfill (which takes ages to decompose) and the pulp can be reused, in hopes of preserving a few more trees.
We can learn a lot from so-called "dumb animals" and ancient peoples in how they live(d) w/in their environment w/o disrupting the ecosystems. Just seems to be too much of a bother for toomany "modern" humans. *grumble*
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