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Comment by kingbirdy | Hacker News Reader

We've been advocating "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" for over 40 years, and yet emissions and consumption have gone up every year. You will never be able to convince enough people to voluntarily reduce their lifestyle. To cut waste & emissions we need legislation, not shaming of consumers.

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Yes, proper incentives need to be in place. Taxes & regulation (and in some cases simply staffing up to enforce existing laws) are what are needed.

That said, I have personally stopped profligate purchases on Amazon/Express - promised the wife we'd clean out the garage before buying new non-essentials and have reduced online spending to 1/5th of last year (YMMV our garage was chock full of stuff).

Most of the times when people realize what you realized and go for a change of habits - less buying and doing the same with less/minimal lifestyle - the first step they take is to throw stuff away. I've done it myself. Now I really stress the reuse and the repurpose before throwing anything away. Otherwise sell. At the end of the day is one crap less that ends up in some landfill.

Not really. When that campaign came out, consumer focused companies immediately latched on the the “recycle” message and pushed it really hard, because they knew the first two represented a big impact on them. Almost everyone internalized “recycling” and promptly forgot about reducing and reusing, so most of the past 40 years have been spent with people patting themselves on the back for drinking nothing but bottled water, as long as they disposed of the bottle in the right bin.

If people were actually following the program, we would be in a much different place.

This has to be looked with global economic context, f.e. how many people join middle class by consumer standards per year. I feel like this "shaming" has different target audience - people who have been in this category for some time and not so hungry for new things/more things anymore.

> not shaming of consumers.

No need for that, some of consumers themselves have begun shaming their fellow consumers who buy way more stuff than they need. I know I've started doing that in the last couple of years, since I've realized that no amount of recycling or legislation is going to stop climate change, it has to start from us. Yeah, people who buy a lot of stuff are to blame, if you buy a lot of stuff you're to blame for all the bad things that happen to our climate.

While shaming consumers certainly makes me feel good, it’s a poor way to change behavior. [0] [1]

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/longing-nostalgia/20... [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306624X1141891...

Around these parts of the world (Eastern Europe) shaming has had its pretty good effects during the last 25-30 years. We used to litter a lot more just after communism fell, I remember that even I, as a kid, had no remorse at throwing some piece of paper or whatever at the side of the road. Nowadays I wouldn't even dream of doing that, and generally speaking people throw stuff by the roadside a lot less. The same discussion goes for smoking in public places, we even managed to have that outlawed a few years ago, a feat unimaginable a couple of decades ago when I used to have high-school teachers who were smoking in class.

But you now consume much more.

Better behaviour follows from imoroved standards of living and education.

On that I agree, which is why I’ve become a strong supporter of “de-schooling society” [1] ever since I’ve first read about the concept. But unfortunately this concept won’t have that much success in a society like ours that values efficiency so much, and said efficiency can only be achieved through “schooling”.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society

Time for "Hoarding is Beautiful" campaigns?

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