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Everything we buy need some kind of natural resources to make, and aside from food almost everything we buy ends up being thrown away eventually. On average in Massachusetts, we throw away more than 4 pounds of garbage every day, mostly paper products and food, but also clothes, toys, rusty tools, furniture, household cleaning products, and lots of electronics. Only about a third of our garbage is recycled, and much of what is left behind is material such as plastics that will take centuries or millennia to break down in a landfill. This does not include the huge volumes of solid and liquid waste created in the countries where the things we buy are manufactured. Most of those countries do not have the environmental protections that the U.S. does, and waste from that manufacturing as well as garbage tends to pile up in massive quantities in the poorer regions of the world. In the oceans, plastic is accumulating in alarming amounts, where it does not break down or biodegrade; instead, it gets broken into smaller pieces where it is then eaten by birds and other marine creatures, or it washes ashore and litters beaches and coastal waters.

All of these problems with garbage and industrial waste, Pope Francis says in his Encyclical, “are closely linked to a throwaway culture, which affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish” and he urges us “to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them.”

Many of the things we buy get thrown away in less than one year! Much of this relates to what Pope Francis, echoing Pope Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II, referred to in a 2014 address as our “throwaway culture,” in which “…we have a surfeit of unnecessary things, but we no longer have the capacity to build authentic human relationships marked by truth and mutual respect.”
 
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has called for us to live The Good Life, but from a Catholic perspective that turns away from the “work and spend cycle” that has been studied by Boston College professor Juliet Schor. 

If we embrace the adage that our parents and grandparents had to live by, and which Pope Francis reminded us of in Laudato Si,’ that “Less is more,” we can reduce our environmental impact at home by watching what we buy.
 
According to the most recent (Nov 2016) EPA Waste Fact Sheet, the U.S recycles less than 35% of solid waste. Recycling can simultaneously improve the environment, the economy, and to prevent waste from going to the ocean. All of the suggested actions listed above for parish and school offices apply to our home purchases.  However, we can also make purchasing and recycling decisions that relate to our personal lives.