Week 6 Entry

The Laziness Factor

All throughout this year my eyes have really been opened to just how big of a factor laziness is in the American lifestyle. People that live the typical American lifestyle, more often than not, will avoid completing a task if it requires any amount of work above the bare minimum. This practice certainly applies to efforts in reducing, reusing, and recycling items as well, much of the population will not make the effort to reduce their trash, reuse or recycle items simply because it takes more work than it would to throw those products in the trash. It’s hard for me to come to terms with the idea that the human population is so vast and for the most part stuck in their ways to approach environmental issues from a strictly mental standpoint, instead I think the only way to get people to actively commit to following the reduce, reuse, and recycle ideal is to make it as easy as possible for them complete the necessary steps of the process while still maintaining a relatively lazy lifestyle.

This thought process leads me to unanswered questions like:

• Is it possible to make every product recyclable in some way so that tossing things into the bin in your house will no longer send them to a landfill or dump and could potentially put quite a large dent in the pollution problem of today?
• Is recycling even making that large of an impact that it would be worth the effort to take on such a large change?

All I know is that we can’t just lazily sit around and hope the Earth gets better, at some point we will have to exert a great amount of intentional hard work to fix the issue(s).