> The problem in my view is that we take limited resources and combine it with slave labor to create landfill. Those few years of usage are not even that relevant.

That's an important insight.

I only recently realized this too, and conceptualized it as a pipeline:

     RAW    >   PRODUCT  > FINISHED >  A BIT > WASTE
  MATERIALS > COMPONENTS >  GOODS   > OF USE > MATTER

Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too! The economy, as it is today, is essentially a rapidly growing system for turning usable resources into useless waste.

Here's the bad part though: adding recycling to any stage of this pipeline doesn't alter the overall behavior. It only recirculates some of the matter - recycling is never perfect. But as we know, if you recycle less than 100%, and then re-recycle that, and then re-recycle again, it still converges to zero. With an exponentially growing pipeline, recycling is only delaying the crisis a little bit.

Ultimately, we need to remove the exponent (or at least couple it to population growth, in the scenario where humanity expands into space). For now, we need to reduce it. And one of the best ways of doing that is... reducing use. Buying less. The less matter flows through the pipeline, the longer we have before it runs out.