[badtension]

Don't forget "refuse". A ton of stuff is not worth the materials from which they were made in the first place.

A nice thing to keep in mind is that complex products are essentially non-recyclable. A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again.

[fsflover]

> Don't forget "refuse".

I don't see how it's different from "reduce": you have to refuse to reduce.

[ASalazarMX]

I think the intention was pointing out that reduce implies you consume only the things you need, while refuse means you'll deliberately refuse wasteful things even if you need them.

For example, smarthome lighting. The lightbulbs could be dumb, and all the smarts could live in the lightswitches, that would reduce waste. Conversely, the traditional smarthome lighting approach is very wasteful, every lightbulb is a small computer, and who knows what percent of the discarded lightbulbs gets recycled.

[cush]

> even if you need them

By definition, that’s what reduce is. Whether you need it (reducing water consumption) or don’t (reducing smart bulb consumption), it’s reduce.

[em-bee]

so it's refuse - reduce - reuse - recycle - refuse (the kind that ends on a landfill or gets burned)

[nebula8804]

>A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again.

Can you name some examples?

[dopamean]

I often wonder where all the ipods went.

[nebula8804]

Don't think iPods are anything special, they are just small computers: they have CPU, ram, storage and a battery. I'd imagine they mostly went into e-cycling just like the billions of cellphones that are scrapped. They are similar sizes to cell phones.