recycle, reuse.... does it reduce?

After watching the two videos on trash, I was shocked at how little I really understood about recycling. The idea is great, but its effectiveness is only relative and in many cases has a tragic outcome that is only found if you are looking for it. To reduce our waste, it is going to take more than separating paper and plastic into containers when we throw out our "trash." Its going to have to mean using LESS OF IT; "it" being man-made materials that realistically only humans can reuse, and creating more "trash" that is of natural/biodegradable components that can re-enter the circle of the revolving ecosystem of our planet.

Unfortunately, my idea of recycling has changed, and while in my mental dictionary it no longer has a positive connotation, it is none the less more accurate and true to its nature. Recylcing simply means re-using.
That is it.
It does not mean reusing ALL of something, or even re-using that object in the best way possible. It does not mean that there is less "waste" involved, in fact, the movies show that sometimes it can be harmful to re-use the things we throw away and just makes more waste in lots more little pieces.

The contrasting points that the videos had complemented each other visually and metaphorically. The first video about recycling gone wrong has visual elements of clutter, of piles and piles of rubbish and small scraps of unwanted objects. A visual picture of how much we end up not using in our consumption loving economy.
The second film is just the opposite, with gaping wholes of places where humans have become greedy and taken so much from the earth that we can change the topography of the land. Large empty spaces that were once untouched are now somewhere else, somewhere "unnatural." (probably in those big piles)


It is like comparing an obese person to a starving person, neither of them are good because they lie at both extremes, and one inevitably causes the other. Didn't our parents teach us to share? I guess we dont consider nature one of our friends.