Can we go on like this?

No, we can't go on like this Eloethan, but I'm too tired to discuss it tonight. [exhausted yawn]
I'll come back to this thread tomorrow, but in the meantime here's a link:
www.wrap.org.uk/content/wrap-and-circular-economy

When I visit my local tip I am constantly amazed how much good re-usable stuff is dumped, especially furniture.

We can recycle mobile phones and some other electronic kit through our doorstep recycling bin and if I go to the tip they have special recycling facilities for all electrical and electronic equipment but many people just put such stuff in their bins.

It is the same with food. A woman quoted in a newspaper said she threw away £20 of food away each week because her life was so busy she didn't have time to draw up a shopping list! Apart from anything else, it is the sheer waste of money!

I think we will "go on like this" until it simply isn't possible any more. Then we will become inventive, as we usually do, and adapt to deal with whatever is facing us next. The adaptation may well include recycling much of the stuff we've thrown out. So it's in landfill? So what? Much of it was dug out of the ground as raw materials anyway. We can do that again.

Weren't they trying to implement a scheme whereby all phones, laptops etc would use the same recharger? I can understand up to a point the number of old mobiles phones etc I have floating round my house [my sons, not mine, I hasten to add...I'm on my third phone and the one I've got is at least 10 years old;I still prefer the second one I had but my son replaced it; the first one is about a foot long] but I've got loads of rechargers which I daren't throw away 'just in case'. Next to me in the pooter room is a huge box containing scart leads etc all of which have come with tv's that are replacing tv's that already have scart leads. I think the covering is stripped off wiring to get to the copper inside [?] if it goes to the recycling depot.

One of the problems is the "built in obsolecence", when something breaks it is either impossible to get repaired or cheaper to buy new. I recycle as much as I can and throw very little food away (usually peelings, egg shells etc - I don't have a compost heap). My general waste wheelie bin usual has a half sack of rubbish every fortnight, yet I regularly see neighbours with overflowing wheelie bins and often wonder how much could be recycled if they could be bothered to sort it.

thatbags You're not really serious are you?

Yes, I'm serious. Think about it and about necessity being the mother of invention.

Whether this is a good way to behave is a separate issue from my view that it is how humans behave.

I know of only one charity shop that accepts perfectly good but no longer wanted electrical goods. And that is about forty miles away from us. I think that's a shame.

Human beings are very creative when there is a problem to be overcome. A pity that they are not so creative at prventing the problem happening in the first place.

You could be right, thatbags. when things get so bad that we are rerally up against it, research and development will desert the frivolous projects and postgrad students will be pursuing PhDs in rescueing the world from imminent chaos instead of the strange non-research they seem to post on here.

Is that how you spell rescueing? It looks wrong to me (so does rerally)

And preventing.

I have turned off predictive text, It was driving me up the wall.

My kindle fire corrects rescueing to rescuing. So I guess that's right. You just missed the e out of preventing. And put an extra r in really.

It's the heat. I've got a cracking headache this morning.

See, my predictive corrects my spelling mistakes for me. I just have to watch it doesn't change the word completely.

I think in some ways we are getting better at recycling. Now all shops selling batteries have places to put old ones. Our local tip shows the latest recycling rates and last week it was 76% which is not bad at all. I only see half full or less black bags sitting outside our houses so think we are trying. The one thing I really notice is how few people take their own bags to the supermarket but that will change when we have to pay for them.

Our Freegle seems to grow almost daily.

I heard recently that if the UK stopped all activities designed to protect the environment it would make only 2% difference to the world but that is no reason to stop.

For a small country that's not bad. I worry that, with more and more countries wanting technical goods we're creating more and more..mainly because we're creating markets to sell to.

Maybe there is a renewed call for the rag and bone man to reappear.

Would there be an amount of caution regarding the slow down of industries if people recycled - that could lead to job losses if people cut down on purchases.

I take a lot of stuff to the recycling place where they seem to have a skip for just about everything - small electrics, big electrics, computers and tvs, batteries, light bulbs, garden waste, glass etc. etc. so obviously it is sorted through and hopefully reused where possible. The place is always busy so people are learning to recycle, unlike 20 years ago. Anything else, if not sold on e-Bay or given away on Gumtree, I take to my favourite charity shop, where again it is sorted and all used, apparently, to raise funds.

When I read these things and think about them, my overwhelming feeling is one of total impotence. I know, I know, I should not think like this; but I do my bit; I am careful to the point of madness about not producing waste, but I am a mere nothing in the face of global businesses who need things to become obsolete in order to make money, and if they don't make money, then people lose their jobs, and if people lose their jobs, they cannot feed their children............sigh. I have no idea whatsoever what the answer is.

The things that we do in terms of recycling, swapping etc. are just a pee in the sea.

DD lives in Letchworth Garden City and regularly has a rag and bone man come round.

I totally agree with 'sunseeker', I watched a couple of programmes on BBC2 (The Men who make us spend) about built in obsolescence and also how advertising agencies try to create discontent within us so we want the most up to date products etc. The proof of their success is all around us e.g. some people are falling over themselves to have the very latest phones, tablets, computers, cars, TVs, clothes... It would be almost amusing if it wasn't so potentially serious. I suppose I could put a positive spin on it - for those of us who prefer to buy second-hand, there's always plenty of choice on Gumtree etc.

But what about the economy? If everyone stopped spending wouldn't things go downhill? (employment, taxes etc)

If our economy is organised in such a way as to rely on us using precious resources to manufacture products that we don't really need and which we are encouraged to dump in landfill as quickly as possible and then replace with something almost identical, then I feel our economy needs a radical re-think.

This is the argument for the production of the sort of horrible weapons that are destroying lives all round the world - that jobs depend on these industries, that selling arms is an important part of our economy. It's also the rationale behind vast amounts of money being spent on "vanity projects" - that they provide jobs. I think it's about time we concentrated on providing the necessities of life rather than mass producing a lot of useless stuff because the "economy" demands it.

Who benefits from this consumer society; the higher eschelons of society or the lower members of society [the ones that can't afford the things that they're encouraged to buy or, if they do so,are encouraged to buy them on those great modern inventions, the credit card or the payday loan].