We thought we were doing the right thing!

Reduce, Reuse, Repudiate

While recycling campaigns can help limit what heads to the landfill, scientists are now saying that it’s masked the glaring problem of over-production and de-emphasized other waste reduction strategies that are far more sustainable.

In a new essay for The Conversation, an interdisciplinary group of researchers out of the University of Virginia that’s been studying the psychology of waste found that many people over-emphasize the recycling aspect of the waste management industry’s “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” slogan. The result, they say, is a major backfiring as the public has come to mistakenly consider recycling a get-out-of-jail-free card, confusing which goods are actually recyclable in the first place and ignoring the growing waste production catastrophe.

In a series of experiments, the UV researchers first asked participants first to list “reduce,” “reuse,” and “recycle” by order of efficacy — the correct answer being the same one