Though this trap of buying things and throwing them out seems to be without end, it does not need to remain negative. The writer, Annie Leonard, discusses how we can add hope to this cycle simply by recycling. Doing this lightens the load on the end and the beginning of the cycle: rather than adding mass to currently existing landfills, or removing more resources from nature, we take material from products that consumers are done using, and put them right back into the production part of the cycle. There is a lot of room in this circle of resource-mining, producing, selling, buying, and throwing out, for improvement, and a lot of it involves little things that we can control as consumers.
However, just watching a video of a woman I've never heard of before made me question the validity of some of the information she reported. One thing I couldn't believe was that we spend 3-4 times as many hours shopping as people in Europe. Do we really spend THAT much time at the mall? Well, according to the following sources, we do. The Huffington Post tells us that the average American (as of 2011) spends roughly 43 minutes a day shopping. Becoming Minimalist reports that the average American spends nearly 12 hours a month shopping. The Financial Press Gazette claims roughly the same information, reporting that the average American spends about one week a year shopping.
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