While most of us find it irritating to receive unwanted junk mail in our mailboxes, only a few of us are aware that it also is necessary to reduce junk mail for the sake of the environment. Roughly one tenth of a billion trees are sacrificed each year in the US just to produce the paper that is used for printing this junk mail and based on a census, every household in the US receives about 18 unsolicited mails every week. What is more disturbing is that the process of manufacturing the paper involves carbon emission levels that are equivalent to the emissions of around 3 million cars. To add to the tally of wasted resources, 28 billion gallons of water are used up in the production and of course the recycling of paper from the mails that most of us throw away without even reading properly.

If the statistics above makes you think like it should, then you would be happy to know that it is possible for you to contribute to the environment by taking out a little time to reduce junk mail. The best way to reduce junk mail is to unsubscribe from the lists of the companies that send you these mails. According to analytic experts; catalogs, credit card offers, insurance offers, fliers and brochures are the main forms of junk mail and though you might not have signed in for most of them there are ways to unsubscribe from even these unwelcome mails. You will find websites that are specifically created with the purpose of stopping junk mails from crowding your mailbox like https://www.catalogchoice.org/
What it will do if you sign up is that it will take the necessary steps to stop the associated companies from sending you catalogs, brochures and such. Just by taking this one small step, you alone would be helping to save at least two trees, and reduce carbon emission by roughly 100 pounds per year.

Albert Ike and Dorinda Dallmeyer, both of the University of Georgia, have stated that environmental ethics must move beyond academic debate and into the policy arena, examining global environmental conflicts including first versus third world, consumption versus conservation, and the needs of transitional economies versus environmental protection. Of these, our paper and web site foregrounds consumption as a key problem, and argues that to promote a healthy environment, we must have a clear understanding of its intrinsic value, and that understanding must be shared by policy makers and the public alike.

Ethics implies intrinsic valuation, not merely the instrumental view common to cost-benefit analyses or resource allocation issues. It is, in modern society, impossible not to consume. The issue is one of quantity. As J. Baird Callicott notes, “Human occupation, from the perspective of the environment, does not have to be destructive…ethical limitations require that trees cut for shelter, or to make fields, animals slain for food or fur, and so on should be carefully used so as to neither waste nor degrade them…individual plants or animals transformed by human use deserves to be treated respectfully.” In short, consumptive practices are as integral to preserving nature, as are production or distribution practices.

Unfortunately, intrinsic value is not something that can be taught, nor quantified, so that instrumental value will remain critical to a public consensus for the foreseeable future. Businesses have as their primary goal wealth generation, and it is unrealistic to expect them to adopt lower consumptive practices unless such practices can be made consistent with increased shareholder value. We are not suggesting that businesses lack social conscience, nor do we suggest that businesses consciously attempt to pass on all costs of over-consumption to the public. We are suggesting, however, that a proper valuation of environmental goods be taken into consideration, and that instrumental costs which incorporate intrinsic value within nature represents a more accurate, richer picture of the true social costs of over-consumption.

The ethics of excessive consumption simply cannot be divorced from public policy, which seeks environmental protection. Until such time as nature is valued intrinsically, we suggest incentive schemes for business that promote environmentally friendly practices, and which do not compromise their mission of producing goods/services that maximize shareholder value. This is, admittedly, an instrumental approach, for intrinsic value, as we have mentioned earlier, cannot be legislated. When profit incentives are aligned with socially conscious practices, and when businesses benefit directly from lowered consumption, then we will witness change.

Incorporating conservation ethics and values into public policy and social decision-making will require imaginative thinking, for we are all trained to regard resource usage as necessary to value creation. We are also trained to think in terms of utility rather than inherent value where our surroundings are concerned. Yet, just as we regard our children as having inherent worth aside from mere property or income generators, we must develop similar understanding and appreciation for our fragile environment and the destructive consequences of excessive consumption.

From an early age, western society bombards us with images of wealth, and seeks to link our identity and sense of self with the acquisition of material possessions. Consumption of an increasing array of goods is equated with prosperity. Although some ethical/religious viewpoints, such as Buddhism, pinpoint desire itself as the source of our materialist society, it seems unrealistic to expect that desire can be eliminated wholesale, nor is it self-evident to most westerners why such a goal is necessary.

As Jacob Needleman has pointed out, western thinkers from Christ to Socrates have examined desire, and concluded that desire is not inherently evil, but that when we allow desire to define our identity, we then become slaves to the things we desire. Ownership becomes a form of modern addiction. Consumption becomes an endless spiral, further removed from awareness and concern of its effects on nature. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, the poet Virgil defines Hell as the state in which we are barred from receiving what we truly need because of the value we give to what we merely want. Needleman quotes John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Affluent Society, as arguing “one cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.” Yet, without thinking, we assign intrinsic value to a host of activities that have no market value—being with loved ones, or examining ideas, or being creative in some form. Likewise, we condemn unfettered consumption as greed, or “avarice.” Why, then, does it seem so natural to consume what we do not need, paying little heed to finite resources or to the resultant environmental degradation? Why are ethical concerns so easily jettisoned when they conflict with material satisfaction?

San Francisco State University student Kris Watanabe reflected on her experiences within a social subset where conspicuous consumption was both desired and expected:

The thought of making money is on the minds of every college student, who have goals of one day affording to buy mom a house and dad a sports car. In the life of a college student, money for food, rent and tuition are the highest priorities.
During my first few months in San Francisco I had the opportunity to work and “rub elbows” with high profile celebrities and socialites, and to my dismay, found their lives dramatically different from mine. As I worked on the elaborate store opening of Louis Vuitton, I realized that the “needs” of the rich were much more than what I considered to be my needs. The best champagne, wine and mineral water was ordered , as well as hors d’oeuvres, valet service, musicians, and floral arrangements spared little expense at creating a “smashing” party. Those ranked as high on the socialite list drove up in their Rolls Royces, Bentleys, limousines and the like. Dressed in Prada, Oscar de la Renta and Versace, everyone wore their best and looked like a million bucks.

Looking at the larger ethical and social implications to society and the environment of unrestrained consumption, she reflects on the excesses she observed:

“As a society however, we must ask ourselves how much is too much? In the 21st century we have become a society that bases our accomplishments on material objects. In order to achieve and survive, we purchase products that symbolize wealth and prestige.
With the fall of the Silicon Valley Empire, technology companies have laid off thousands of its employees to “downsize” and perhaps save their already drowning companies. Those affected by layoffs are now facing large accumulated debt for extravagant purchases made while they were employed. Fast cars, big boats, mansions, expensive clothes now seem like novelty items.
Do these luxury items make us more powerful? As individuals, do we ask how these material possessions will affect our lives, our children’s lives and the possibility of destruction of the environment for future generations?
Hopefully, strides will be made to educate society of our environmental dangers if we follow along the same path. Ironically, those who have the most power and control over the market of goods, and ultimately the most educated seem to disregard all environmental cautions. As precious and fragile our environment is, it seems still that money is what makes the world go round.”

Jacob Needleman echoes her thoughts when he observes that “the making of money has become an end in itself, and exchanges of money in an endless spiral of consumerism, far from being a reminder of our dependence on one another…are conducted in an atmosphere of impatience and cunning.” As Watanabe observes, the “needs” of an upper-income subset of society are more aligned with social acceptance and status seeking than with any basic necessity. While it is not our goal in this paper to disparage wealth, we nonetheless argue that limited resources, population increases, and environmental entropy are incompatible with a psychology that prioritizes desire satisfaction through material accumulation far in excess of one’s actual needs. Furthermore, this psychology objectifies the natural world as just another possession to satisfy individual desire, and minimizes the role of nature as a “commons” and as a source of wealth in its own sense.

Arguments for smaller, more manageable consumption often revolve around issues of limited economic growth. There is a direct correlation between the amount of goods/services we consume, the size of the economy, and stresses imposed upon the natural environment. If we limit our personal consumption to that which is necessary to sustain us, the environment will be able to withstand increasing population growth, as well as make better use of finite resources. Economic activity is destructive insofar as it ignores resource limitations.

Ecologists such as Paul Hawken have proposed the concept of “natural capital”, defined as the environmental limits to economic expansion. In doing so, he argues against the view that human ingenuity will limitlessly expand our resource base, and that marginal costs to the environment from economic production and its “externalities” can be overcome. While economics as a discipline acknowledges scarcity, it generally holds that growth can be sustained through technology, increases in our knowledge base, resource-base expansion, or ingenuity. Fundamental ethical questions such as how much consumption is too much? are generally minimized, given that increasing consumption is necessary for economic growth and “prosperity”, according to the model.

According to Mark Sagoff, the World Resources Institute (WRI) has dismissed the idea that shortages of nonrenewable resources will prove a limiting factor in global economic growth, arguing instead that development will be checked by technology trends that create substitute resources. Consequently, in the WRI’s estimation, consumption as an ethical concern is not a pressing environmental issue for the foreseeable future. Sagoff dismisses this “blind faith in technology” by likening it to “the man who fell from a ten story building, and when passing the second story on the way down, concluded ‘so far, so good, so why not continue?’”

It is the contention of the authors of this project that economic growth must take into account ecological costs that pollution and other “externalities” impose upon our ecosystem, and furthermore, that ethical concerns regarding the depletion of non-renewable resources can no longer be ignored or minimized. Finally, we assert that on an individual level, it is incumbent upon each of us to re-examine our consumptive patterns and question whether “more is better?” Economists should be ethically bound to include the optimal ecosystem carrying capacity when formulating the scale of growth models.

As the World Bank notes, economic growth must be consistent with environmental protection. Although ethical concerns do not fit easily into quantitative model formulations, we maintain that there must be an appreciation of the intrinsic value nature bestows, and a recognition that ethical principles, cultural beliefs, aesthetic judgments, and even religious ideals which attach value to limited consumption must be honored in a complete conception of economic activity. Immanuel Kant argued for intrinsic value, noting that nature has an inherent dignity aside from its market price, and the pleasure we take from nature has value beyond calculation. Sagoff illustrates the difference between intrinsic versus instrumental value by citing children. Children should be cherished for their own sake, being human, says Sagoff, but in many parts of the world they are instead considered valuable only as economic resources to be sold as prostitutes or owned as slaves or sent out into the fields or mines to earn wages. Likewise, nature has an intrinsic value often overshadowed by its immediate instrumental usage.

Consumption beyond our means as individuals or societies is ethically equivalent to recognizing only the market value of nature. When we begin to see clearly the link between overconsumption and environmental degradation, then the ethics of limited consumption become clear. In the words of San Francisco State University philosophy professor Jacob Needleman, “authentic morality is the child of understanding.”

Environmental activism has attempted to gain legitimacy through an appeal to scientific rationalism and objectivity, while maintaining a sometimes uncomfortable alliance with ethical concerns, considered by some to be subjective and thus outside the realm of verifiable fact. Ethical and philosophical issues regarding consumption center on empirical studies of sustainability and increased carrying capacity. Ethics is relegated to the realm of values, and values are believed to deal with personal biases and, as such, are unsuitable to scientific study and rigorous analysis. Why one should consume beyond sustenance levels is a question often believed to be outside the province of environmental study. Yet, we argue in this paper, no environmental ethic is complete without an analysis of consumption, its causes, reinforcements, and consequences. Further, to ask “why?” is an ethical concern, and situates ethics central to any discussion of consumerism or environmental activism. A body of environmental protection laws has been constructed, with various agencies promoting ecological, historical and scenic values, as well as scientific, geological and educational ones. Such laws aim to reinforce our role not merely as consumers, but as citizens with ethical claims on our environment as well.

Legislation protecting the environment incorporates a variant of the following three ethical positions; Utilitarianism, in which the greatest good for the greatest number is sought through appealing to environmental conservation as means of protecting the “commons” for current and future generations. Implicit in this argument is the ideas that the common good is correlated with limits to consumption, so that finite resource management is the mechanism of ensuring the common good. Laws derive their legitimacy through appeals to ethics and a presumed common value. Utilitarianism’s limitations derive from its assumption that pleasure/happiness equals good, so that one could argue against conservation on the grounds that profligate exploitation of the environment often brings short-term “pleasure.” Because of this, utilitarianism alone is inadequate as an environmental ethic or as the basis for legislation. Correspondingly, it is most often combined with a form of pragmatism that defines the common environmental good in terms of its utility.

Pragmatism elevates the idea of instrumental value (as opposed to intrinsic value), arguing that benefits derived from environmental conservation trigger instrumental feelings of pleasure, and are thus good independent of any intrinsic, aesthetic appeal. Yet, this view is also problematic when applied to a limited consumption view. If value is equated with instrumental pleasure, surely more and more instrumental pleasure yields more and more value. It is precisely this exponential increase, which results from growth, that is at odds with a vision of limited, sustainable consumption. Clearly, net gains in instrumental pleasure do not add up to net value gains when resources are limited and consumer desires multiply. As a result, an environmental ethic that appeals to limited consumption and increased conservation cannot count on either utilitarian or pragmatic approaches to advance its argument. Thinking merely in instrumental terms, or in terms of the common good, leaves an essential element missing. Ethicists have responded that nature, like individuals, have value for their own sake, and as such are entitled to “rights.” Species rights are an important component of legislation, for they postulate that individuals act to preserve and protect species as a whole. Individual species members are often accorded rights based on their membership in a category considered “endangered.” The larger problem with the “rights” argument is that it is based on sovereign individuals with free will, and does not transfer well to abstract concepts such as the “environment.” In what sense can the non-sentient, inanimate world be said to have rights? If such rights can be established a priori, then humans have a corresponding obligation to honor those rights, and it makes sense to speak of conservation and limited consumption as a vehicle of honoring the rights of the inanimate world.

As Eugene Hargrove, in an essay entitled “Taking Environmental Ethics Seriously” has noted, it seems unlikely that an effective environmental ethic centered around limited consumption is possible if the notion of “nature ought to have rights” is discarded. What is left, then, is the hope that nature will come to be valued intrinsically, aside from any legislative obligations to honor rights, aside from any pragmatic appeals to instrumental value, and aside from any utilitarian claims of pleasure maximization. If the environment has intrinsic, or inherent value, then limited consumption as an ethical response has great appeal. Yet, an appreciation for the intrinsic value of the environment cannot be legislated, unlike limits on consumption of, say, fossil fuels. Recognition of intrinsic value is a personal act, and in this sense environmental ethics are an individual activity, manifesting itself in hundreds of daily decisions. Recognizing our individual consumptive patterns, and delineating the difference between what we want versus what we need, is an ethical choice with environmental consequences extending well into the future. In this paper, we seek a foundation of awareness regarding our own consumption, and look at ways in which individual and societal consumptive patterns affirm and displace environmental concerns.

We only have the one planet and despite the ever advancing technology and all the sci-fi we are surrounded by in this day and age we will not be getting a new one any time soon.

The best way to make the most of the planet is make the most of what it gives us and this really means recycling.

In the 80’s it was cool to recycle and magnets were handed out in school so kids could check if cans were made of steel or aluminium so that they knew if the individual can they had just drank from was recyclable, this indirectly put pressure on manufacturers who in turn stopped using non-recyclable materials. About this time a fuss was also kicked up about recycling paper and other household items.

2011 is the age of mobile phone recycling, while this process has yet to take off or even really become mainstream knowledge it is picking up.
At the moment peoples motivation for recycling can be questioned as companies are often offering 100’s of pounds to people who are willing to send their used handsets in, however, this can be looked upon as 21st century bribery with the same group of people. The child who was happy to be given a magnet 30 years ago is now quite happy to receive £200!

As time goes on people and manufacturers will become more knowledgeable and informed about the mobile recycling process and, hopefully, the same level of interest and concern that was given to the cans will occur again.

While there are far more cans produced and disposed of than mobile phones the actual damage per unit when you put a mobile phone handset alongside a can is astronomical, the phone wins hands down.

A mobile phone that is disposed of in an irresponsible manner can seep chemicals and toxins into the world for hundreds of years. As you would expect, with something so much more damaging the recycle process is also much more challenging, breaking down the components in an mobile phone is no easy feat and to make matters more complex the process that is used today could be obsolete tomorrow with the new technology and advances in phone design and components.

The ever evolving mobile phone battery (and charger for that matter) are a recycling case study to themselves, these two elements need specialist attention to make sure that they are broken down in ways that cannot cause serious damage to the environment.

Hopefully by 2031 (or ideally much sooner) people will be as aware and clued up on mobile phone recycling as they are with recycling of everyday household items today.