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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

It promotes their growth -- say packaged good companies like Coca-Cola, Trader Joe's, or Starbucks. Clothing companies like H&M and Zara. Most unnecessary material stuff.

A statistic from The Story of Stuff https://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff comes to mind that something like 99% of things Americans buy end up in landfills within one year.

Manufacturers slap the word "recyclable" on those products to get people to buy more of them, hence growth.

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> 99% of things Americans buy end up in landfills within one year.

What "things" means here? A car is a "thing" and a toothpick is a "thing". I can use the car for 10 years and I use several toothpicks per day. So on average, I throw nearly everything very quickly, but the picture seems to be misleading if we remember we're comparing toothpicks to cars...

Another way to put it is whether this is 99% of “individual items” or 99% by mass or volume, etc., and which such way of measuring gives the fairest picture of the lifecycle of products going to landfills.

How exactly is it misleading? I know that things are things, and include both short- & long-lived things.

Averaging over categories of wildly distinct things is misleading. It's like taking average temperature of all human bodies in the hospital and judging public health by that measure - ignoring the fact that some of those are dead bodies in the freezer and some are running high fever. Or, another example, if you look at average wealth of people in a pub, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet walk in to have a pint, the average wealth would jump up, but nobody really became any richer. Conclusions made on this kind of measures make sense only in specific conditions, but when we could a huge expensive car as one thing and 1000 tiny toothpicks as 1000 things and averaging over that, it can not help but being misleading.

Slapping "recyclable" on the product also reduces guilt in buyers with some conscience, therefore it is a winning marketing strategy.

You're right! I was thinking only of corps not producing physical products, but that's only one part of the world.

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