Sustainability Hypocrisy?

As I picked up the mail today and found nothing but a few cards, I once again threw away a stack of catalogs for companies we never buy from and a host of junk mail.  Once again I am struck by the stupidity of today’s world printing paper in full color, delivering it to my door, and then being forced to throw it away.  Years ago I put the paper recycling blue box right there under my mailbox.

Couple that with single use water bottles and the stack of boxes and packaging with my Amazon orders, I have to wonder whether we are all hypocrites.  We have come to learn that recycling is a delusion with less than 10% of the materials actually reused, and these catalogs are the kind of paper that is almost impossible to recycle.

Perhaps the attempts to bring these wastes into focus with Scope 1, 2, and 3 emission inventories will help, but I fear it won’t.  Maybe cities will start to ban single use water just like they are banning natural gas in new construction or the internal combustion engines.

But why don’t I hear public outrage with all this paper we are delivering to each household only to then pick it right back up and then have to landfill it?

Am I going to fast?  Or are we being distracted by something that sounds more threatening?

I attended an 8-hour virtual presentation on carbon strategies around the world and noticed now that they have changed the language once again.  Global warming moved to climate change because the warming was not showing up in the last decades of data and now the goal of net zero is being replaced by the phrase the pathway to safety … as if a 2 degree C temperature increase is now a good thing.

When are we going to get serious enough that we examine the way we live every day?