The United States Congress recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act.  This new law aims to reduce inflation by spending stupendous quantities of dollars.  It will also save the environment.  The Penn Wharton Budget Model says its “impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero,” and the Congressional Budget Office is less optimistic, stating that the law may increase inflation.  But what do they know? It’s the Inflation Reduction Act.  The government wouldn’t call it that if it didn’t reduce inflation.

About $370 Billion, half the total tab, will be spent on environmental initiatives.  Some of the ideas therein actually make some sense.  But much seems likely to involve funding the manufacture of “green” equipment by the most horrific polluters on the globe, while further enriching the usual cadre of private-jet-but-zero-footprint billionaire types.  And there is plenty of other economic and environmental flimflam to boot.  But, like the bill itself, the flimflammy subsections also seem to have encouragingly euphemistic monickers, so maybe everything will work out.

Anyway, the main takeaway is that it’s a two-for-one deal.  Environment and economy.  Two birds, one seven-hundred-and-forty-billion-dollar stone.

But on the off chance that something doesn’t go quite right with our lofty leaders’ plans to legislate us out of our environmental and economic mess, we at Hearth & Field have been pondering what the average Joe might do on the ground, of his own accord, to work toward these same two goals.  And the most significant answer seems to be that Joe ought to be less wasteful.  That’s it.  Simply be less wasteful.  

During these challenging economic times, the typical first-world person can save a tremendous amount of money just by not buying (and thereafter disposing of) things he doesn’t actually need and finding other ways to avoid needless waste.  If lots of us made such a change, it would greatly reduce various demands currently put upon on the environment.

For instance, we collectively waste about one-third of the food we produce.  One third.  That’s roughly one hundred billion pounds of food each year in the United States alone. Your grocery bill has probably been increasing lately — what’s it up to?  Cross that number out and reduce it by one-third.  Meanwhile, clean your plate and start paying more regular attention to the leftovers in your refrigerator.  If you begin tracking this, you may be startled at how much money you spend on food you don’t eat.

Or consider whether some portion of your backyard might currently be wasted on growing more grass than you need, or more weeds than you need, when it could be growing dinner.  Lawns are nice and often beautiful; we’re not against them.  But all things in moderation.  There are roughly forty million acres of lawn in the lower forty-eight United States alone, making grass our largest crop. Is that not a bit lavish during these hard times, a bit wasteful? A proliferation of home gardens would reduce expense, inefficiency, transport fuel consumption, and many wasteful economic and enviromental perils that exist in our hyper-centralized food system.

Let’s move on.  How about clothing?  The typical American discards eighty-one pounds of clothes each year. Our clothing refuse (along with the unused clothing that is removed from our well-stocked stores at the end of each season) ends up in places such as Accra, Ghana. Some fifteen million garments arrive there each week from the U.S. and Europe. Colloquially called oburoni wawu — “dead white-man’s clothes” — these discarded items flood marketplaces, but because of their abundance, they also overwhelm landfills, creating toxic refuse of slowly degrading polyesters and other synthetic fibers. In Accra and other African cities, the discarded textiles are (almost literally) creating mountains of waste.  If we were a bit less concerned with arbitrary fashion trends and bit more concerned with natural fabrics and lasting quality, we’d save money, be less at the mercy of inflationary clothing costs, and maybe be liked more by the people of Ghana.

It’s not just food and clothes, though. Americans spend about twenty percent of their income on non-essential things (i.e. things other than food, clothing, housing, transportation, medical care, et cetera), and soon thereafter they often have nothing to show for it.  According to statistics from the Bureau of Labor, we spend about $3,200 on entertainment (about $1,000 more than we give to charity).  And our expenditure on consumer electronics is off the charts.  Does every human being really need a new phone every year?  Apparently so: Americans toss nearly four hundred thousand of them into landfills daily.  Did the brief lives of the four-hundred thousand phones that were laid to rest today improve the lives of their owners at all?  Did those fallen phones bring anyone joy, focus, or fulfillment?  Or just expense, distraction, agitation, and, ultimately, weird chemicals leaching into the ground?  Regardless of the answer, we can at least say with confidence that they weren’t much different than the four hundred thousand phones that replaced them.

Countless other examples might be cited.  Our society creates a marvelous variety of goods and “necessities,” yet, despite all our modern efficiencies, we also generate an unfathomable amount of refuse.  It works out to one ton of garbage per person per year.  Why?  Why do every man, woman, and child need to pay for, and then throw away, one ton of stuff every year?

Suffice it to say, our wasteful ways ought to be checked. The wanton consumerism driving them does not lead to greater levels of happiness nor increased altruism. Perhaps this is why the rich man in the gospel went away sad.  We may marvel at the multiplicity of things that twenty-first-century manufacturing methods create, but we must also recognize that the good life — the real good life — is not primarily about goods. Surely it is not about goods we don’t even use.

A practical means to curb wasteful consumption is to get in the habit of asking yourself “Do I really need it?” And if your answer is yes, a few other questions follow. Can I grow or make it myself? Can I fix my old one? Can I buy it used? Can I borrow someone else’s?  If the answer to all those questions is no, then return to the first question one more time for good measure.

Wasting less is something that we can all do to be better stewards of the gifts that God has given us and the environment in which he has placed us.  And it also can help offset and reduce inflation; it at least reduces inflation’s effects on our personal finances, and if enough people take part it might lower prices themselves due to decreased demand.  It is a solution that is not fancy, impressive, or expensive; it is no Act of Congress. But then, perhaps Congress is not an ideal authority on the topic of avoiding waste.