I follow some non-consumer and pro-recycling facebook pages and like. I'm not sure how to explain this exactly, but some of them have a frankly unhealthy relationship with preservation and recycling. People will photograph an ancient threadbare shirt that's full of massive holes and 30% mould by volume and say "this was in my mum's basement and she wanted to throw it out! How do I save it?" People will show a stack of thirty empty margarine containers and say "what use can I find for these? I don't want to throw them out." Someone detailed their strategies for making sure that they only walk around their house barefoot or with slippers, never walking int heir socks, in order to make sure the socks wear out as slowly as possible.
Responsible reuse and care of your belongings is one thing, but for some of these groups, if they monitored food and exercise the way they monitored general consumption it would be an eating disorder.
This isn't a healthy relationship with possessions.
Right after this post was somebody bragging about how they're freeing themselves from consumerism by giving up manicures and pedicures so it's. A very mixed bag of standards.
Mood.
I walk a very thin line between recycling/anti-consumerism and my hoarding tendencies (don't think it's ever reached the point of full blown disorder but I'm very aware it's a constant lowkey battle to keep it that way) and my perfectionism paralysing me into keeping stuff until I can dispose of it in the Absolute Most Optimal Least Polluting way.
Any obsession can become disordered (I don't necessarily mean pathologically, but extreme to the point where it does you more harm than good or more harm than is safe/justifiable), and I think we forget that.
Unless it's made of easily recyclable or compostable materials like metals, glass or organics (NOT recyclable plastic, that doesn't count), it's basically all landfill. Dispose of chemicals and electronics in the appropriate way, put the glass and metal in the bins appropriate for whatever your local area's recycling system is, and everything else is landfill. "Oh, I can save this boot" it's still landfill, just a bit later than it would otherwise be. "Oh, I can recycle this old shirt into a bag" still landfill, just in your cupboard for a bit first.
For products for which a large-scale, practical and economic recycling system does not exist (recyclable plastic doesn't have such a system, it's a grift; recyclable metals and glass very often do have such a system but it depends on the material and product and where you live), there is no such thing as optimal disposal. There is only optimal production. Your environmental impact is measured in the effect you have on new things being produced and shipped. Once it is made in a factory, it is already landfill, it's just staying in your house for a bit first.
Trying to repair old boots at home doesn't save them from landfill -- the question is, did your repairing the boots stop you from having to buy new ones, and if so, did that stop new ones from being produced and shipped to your country? Does buying a new pair instead help because you don't have to buy the materials you'd use to repair them, and if so, did that have any effect on whether those materials were produced and sent to your country? In a modern economy, your effect re: repair vs. new is likely to have absolutely no environmental effect at all for most goods, though it does depend on specifically where you live and what the good is and how it's made. Either your old boots go to landfill and you buy a new pair, or you fix your old ones and the new pair goes straight from the warehouse to landfill because the company bought one too many pairs to sell. (It'll probably go on sale and mope around warehouses for a few years first, same as it otherwise would in your closet; this is a completely irrelevant temporary stop).
Depending on the industry, your individual shopping choices can have an impact, especially if it's part of a larger organised movement like a proper boycott (or even just an unorganised drop in sales as lots of people simply decide to stop buying so much). Your individual shopping choices can also have a big effect on your own budget; repairing old shoes is usually much cheaper than buying new ones. But if you're focusing on the optimal way to dispose of something (again, unless it's something dangerous that requires specific disposal methods or something that's part of an existing large-scale recycling network), you're focusing on something way too late in the game to be environmentally relevant. What matters is the impact on production and shipping; once it's produced, it is already landfill.
Important side note, because this is the piss on the poor website: there's nothing wrong with having a recycling or upcycling hobby. It's not bad to repair the boots, even if you can afford new ones. It's just not practical environmentalism. If environmentalism is the goal then a focus on reducing the wastage of things you already own is a waste of time and energy and often counterproductive; if your goal is environmentalism, then focusing on limiting the impacts of production and transportation of goods is far more useful. But lots of people just prefer to make, repair or upcycle stuff.
Sometimes those old torn sheets would make a nice rug, not because that would have any practical impact, but because you feel like making a rug and have a cool idea for a pattern. Sometimes mending that shirt is better than replacing it because you like the aesthetic of visible mending. Sometimes collecting coffee jars to store your pasta in doesn't have any effect on throwing out the packaging the pasta came in or save the jars in the long term, but you think it looks nicer in the pantry. It's not bad to do these things (indeed the skills you can develop and the general mindfulness towards waste might have positive effects on other things you do), it's just not a moral obligation for environmental reasons. And like anything, if you get anywhere near as obsessive over it as laundry basket person in the picture, that's probably not great for your own wellbeing.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it
painfully agree on how "zero waste" type stuff can spiral out of control in a mentally unhealthy way. I have hoarding tendencies and struggle to throw anything away to begin with, and if I encouraged that I would quickly live in a garbage pile.
Reusing single-use plastic containers is...I can't go down that road.
I don't really agree on mending items being pointless as a sustainability practice, because it isn't and doesn't have to be a completely isolated and individual behavior.
this is why specifically Visible mending is a cool thing: it is a way to repair clothes but it's also a visible, public display, which shifts the balance of what's acceptable in society. If people see you wearing clothes that have obviously been mended, that plants the idea in their mind that this is a thing you can do with clothes, and instead of just imagining what it might be like, they can see it.
Doing and talking about these things makes overconsumption more of a thing people think about and notice and less of an everyday, unnoticed norm.
And then, you can teach other people to mend, you can even fix their stuff for them if you're crazy. If you've got a community of people practicing these skills, it's not an individual thing anymore. It's the exact same as any other sustainability practice, you have to do it as a team with other people. It's not about the individual act, it's about the cultural change.
Also. Even if my choice not to buy a thing doesn't impact whether the thing got manufactured, Corporation still didn't get my money if I didn't buy it. On a scale of 1,000 or 10,000 people, that's definitely not nothing.
In contrast, if you are reusing plastic containers, you still bought the plastic container.
If you reuse them in a way that replaces your need to buy something else, that's fine, but the trouble with plastic containers is that you accrue them at a much higher rate than you can reuse them because the use they were manufactured for is so short-lived.
however this does not address the main reason I mend my stuff: because the quality of stuff has gotten so much worse that if I buy a new thing it will almost definitely be much shittier than if I just fix the old thing
Mending is great. Hoarding garbage is not.
