Psychological Contributions to Achieving an Ecologically Sustainable Future for Humanity

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Stuart Oskamp

The Tragedy of Underconservation

Paralleling the problem of overconsumption is the third main source of the Earth's environmental problems: underconservation of natural resources. The solution to worldwide overconsumption is twofold: reducing overall consumption and shifting to universal reuse of products (e.g., resale, remanufacturing, or sharing) and recycling of their constituent materials when the product's life is ended (G. Gardner & Sampat, 1999). These changes toward full conservation of raw materials would constitute a revolution in modern Western production and consumption practices, but there are already many successful examples of these needed conservation practices that can point the way for producers and consumers alike (cf. G. Gardner & Sampat, 1999).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1992) has popularized the slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" to describe three key ways to decrease our overuse of natural resources. "Reduce" means attacking the problem of overconsumption by using less natural resources in the first place. "Reuse" and "recycle" refer to two ways of conserving raw materials by using them again. "Reuse" means using them again in the same form, whereas "recycling" means collecting manufactured products and changing their form (e.g., by crushing, shredding, or melting them down) for use in making new products.

Reuse

Many older Americans can remember when soft drink bottles (such as glass Coke bottles with their famous voluptuous shape) were returned to the bottler, sterilized, refilled with soft drinks, and resold. This reuse process saves the raw materials and the energy involved in making new containers for every batch of soft drink that is sold, and it also provides employment for individuals who collect and process the returned bottles (Shireman, 1993). It is still used in some places: for example, for refilling milk bottles in some European countries and soft drink bottles in many developing countries. Though this reuse process has been abandoned for most liquid consumable products in most developed nations, returning to it would save huge amounts of raw materials and avoid the environmental problems involved in recycling used materials or disposing of them in landfills or by incineration.

Recycling

Recycling has been adopted in the United States and many other developed countries as an easier way of ensuring that large amounts of natural resources are used again in productive ways rather than being dumped in landfills, where they often contribute to pollution problems. For instance, aluminum cans are melted down and used in making new aluminum products, many sorts of glass are collected and melted to make new glass containers, old tires are shredded and used as one ingredient in making new pavement, and recycled paper and rags are made into new paper products. In the case of some materials like aluminum, recycling can save enormous amounts of energy and pollution that are entailed in the original smelting of ore. However, there is always considerable waste resulting from original products that are not collected and recycled (around 10% in the case of aluminum cans--even in states where "bottle bills" provide cash payments for their return--and much higher percentages for most other products; Shireman, 1993). Also, the recycling process is less efficient than reuse because the raw material typically becomes degraded in recycling, and consequently the recycled products have lower quality than originally (e.g., recycled paper products have shorter fibers and therefore are less useful for some purposes).