Who hasn't driven through some wealthy town on garbage day and spotted a new-looking sofa, TV, lawn machine, piece of furniture? It looks like the stuff you buy, only it's being thrown out! And where does it go? Either in the ground, or to China<ref>Electronic waste is often shipped to China to be "recycled," i.e. crudely smashed, burned, or otherwise dangerously broken down by workers. One village in China has become known as an "e-waste village" because it is a major center of this primitive recycling business.</ref>. All of these perfectly good items end up useless, dumped in a landfill or scrapped for parts. And yet, they could be donated, even sold, to those in need. Thus, the issue of waste reduction is not only environmental (wasted resources) but social (reduces supply of cheap used items for the disadvantaged). There should be a powerful Christian motivation here to reduce consumerism, or at least to reduce the amount of waste that ends up in the landfill.
Another detailed point must be made under this heading. There is a lot of talk about recycling, and recycling is good. But when an item is reusable (e.g. an old TV) and there is someone who wants that item, it is wasteful even to recycle it. It is economically wasteful (because the market value of the item will almost certainly exceed its scrap value), environmentally wasteful (because it takes no resources to continue using an item, while it takes at least some resources to reprocess an item), and socially wasteful as explained in an earlier the above paragraph. In short, [[recycling]] should not take the place of re-use.
==="Capitalism" in Garbage Disposal===