Story of Stuff kitabından

Daha önce bahsettiğim videonun kitabından seçtiklerim:

“Is recycling a con that keeps us deluded into feeling like we’re helping the planet while leaving industry free to keep churning out ever more badly designed toxic stuff? Heather Rogers, author of a book about garbage called Gone Tomorrow, writes that ‘industry accepted in lieu of more radical changes like bans on certain materials individual processes, production controls, minimum standards for product durability, and higher standards for resource extraction” (Leonard 2010, 292-293).

Programs like weighing “residents’ recycling bins at the curb and awards people points for heavier bins … give recycling a bad name, by encouraging more consumption and more waste. They allow producers to escape responsibility for their wasteful packaging and, subsidize the generation of disposable stuff. And perhaps worse of all, programs like this claim to be making real change” (Leonard 2010, 294-295).

“Dr. Paul Connett says that ‘recycling is an admission of defeat; an admission that we were not clever enough or didn’t care enough to design more durable, to repair it, or to avoid using it in the first place’…

there must be greater awareness of the limitations of recycling…

Recycling is easy: it can be done without ever raising questions about the inherent problems with current systems of production and consumption, about the long-term sustainability of a growth-obsessed economic model or about equitable distribution of the planet’s resources. Clearly, sorting used bottles and papers into a blue bin is not going to fundamentally change, or even challenge, the massive negative impacts of the way we extract, make, distribute, use, and share or don’t share all the Stuff in our lives” (Leonard 2010, 297-298).

“…because it makes us feel good, because it makes us feel like we’re doing something useful, the worry is that recycling may actually bolster those very patterns of production and consumption that are trashing the planet and distract us from working for deeper change” (Leonard 2010, 298). 

“…individual responsibility to save the planet can be a big drag. …

There is too much wrong with the system for even the most obsessive-compulsive among us to get every action and every choice just right. And because that scenario is so overwhelming, the individual-responsibility model of change risks causing people to freak out, throw their hands up in despair, and sink back into overconsumptive, wasteful lifestyles. …

…Maniates lamented …’Obsessing over recycling and installing a few special lightbulbs won’t cut the environmental damage. We need to be looking at fundamental change in our energy, transportation and agricultural systems rather than technological tweaking on the margins’” (Leonard 2010, 308).