RE: Too much — Bilpcoin

I'm not entirely sure it's the corporations' fault but government regulations. At the same time I do think it's the fault of the corporations and not the government regulations.

From a corporate position it makes complete sense to recycle and reduce and conserve because it ultimately affects the bottom line. Companies like Apple are heavily into this mentality, going so far as to build entire systems to recycle their old machines into new ones.

On the flip side the corporation's responsibility is to their shareholders and most corporations will go for volume sales and race to the bottom. These corporations (think Lenovo, Acer, Samsung, etc) don't care so much about creating recycling systems with much of their gear going into landfills when they die within a year or two (average lifespan of a low end computer is two years - average of a Mac is 5).

Government regulations often stop proper recycling. Here in New Zealand we end up shipping most of our stuff to China for recycling because the government doesn't want to setup infrastructure here in New Zealand. However, we used to do a lot of recycling here in New Zealand because it used to be too expensive to send it anywhere else.

The government bowed to the corporations in the 90s and 2000s and so it flipped. Today New Zealand's recycling regulations are based on what China is willing to accept.

Here where I live, we used to recycle all plastics of 1,2,4,5,6,7 but now we only do 1,2,5,7. There's no infrastructure to recycle glass anymore and so we're not supposed to recycle coloured glass whereas before we had no problem doing so.

Once again, it comes down to regulations set by another country.

But if you got the corporations that want to recycle properly and the governments working together in order to setup infrastructure, then you'd get real far in fixing many of the problems caused by consumerism. At the moment though you've got governments preventing this from happening because of lobby groups that are willing to pay more to stop this from happening. It's crazy.