I must respectfully disagree with you both.
This really doesn’t have anything to do economics or a superior culture. It has to do with wastefulness. I am guilty myself.
As recently as the 1960’s things were not as disposable as they are now. Consequently, things that could be used were kept. Just a small example...coke bottles were turned in for a couple of pennies. Of course one can sell coke cans for scrap, but I wonder how many people do.
I’m not an environmentalist or greenie by any stretch of the imagination. I just consider our current culture to be enormously wasteful. My grandmother would have a fit at the everyday items I throw in the trash. But she lived thru the Great Depression as well as WWII. We have never been forced to conserve to any degree.
I disagree.
The wastefulness is in the uneconomic recycling.
You mention a 2 cent bottle deposit -- that would be a dime these days after inflation -- yet deposits are only a nickel now where they do exist. As I pointed out in my original comment, people are not wasteful when it will cost them more than they wish to pay.
Which is why governments levy huge fines on recycling scofflaws. They know they must step in where the markets don't show a need for it.
It's no different now than then. Stop beating yourself up over it.
What you've just written above summarizes the grand success of our society - we've lowered the cost and not just the cost to manufacture something, but the environmental cost too, so much so that we don't have to ration or hoard anything.
Did you have air conditioning, a cell phone, or a microwave back in the 60's? These luxuries are now so affordable that the poor can have them too. You can make a personal decision to use your time/money resources to not let your personal trash enter the waste stream, but you're not saving or conserving anything in a financial or economic sense. We recycle things of value. It isn't worth recycling everything. We recycle used computers and get the metal out. The rest is burned off. It isn't worth it.
There was a time when you couldn't buy disposable rubber gloves. They were just too expensive. Now an average household can get them nearly anywhere. Think what that means to human health and disease transfer prevention. Would we be better off without disposable rubber gloves?
I agree. I have tools and other items which were built to last. Even vehicles from the '40s are incredibly durable, if not rife with creature comforts. We make things now to fail, to be thrown away, to sell someone a new, improved version. Most are difficult or impossible to repair.