Who causes more trash to be created?

The past decade has been one where governments within the USA has started to force people to recycle. There have been countless expensive studies reporting the amount of trash being thrown away - generated - per person in the USA and how we far and away exceed the same studies in foreign lands. This figure is usually expressed in pounds per day produced by the "average" household person.

But NO study shows how this figure is really generated - by the same government.

How?

It is done by the regulations that all sorts of government agencies IMPOSE on manufacturers to protect us from ourselves and the companies / distribution systems that brings goods to us.

Walk into any modern grocery store and you can see the waste IMPOSED onto the distribution system. Individually packaged meats since health concerns forbids it being laid for people to touch. Plastic wrap, styrofoarm, soaking cloths for the meat to rest on, labels, all was produced just to hold the meat for us to walk by and grab. Too  much food needs to be distributed to make it feasible for people to walk up to a counter and have the meat individually cut as needed.

With items being made thousands of miles away from the consumers, everything has to be packaged and shipped - and of course people want it to arrive undamaged. Add onto this the regulations imposed that requires items to be uniquely identified so they can be tracked and recalled, so this imposed something has to be around the product before the consumer gets it just so that taxes can be collected by the governments along the way.

So, as an end consumer, people have virtually no control over these decisions. Laws are actually created by agencies based on vague directives of Congress and impose waste on the whole distribution channel - and then the local governments that directly control the people blame the CONSUMER on all the waste when it all originates much further up the lawmaking chain at the Federal level.

So the next time you get your recycle bill, and they impose rules on you on what you recycle and if you don't do enough fine you, remember these are the same people that made the companies create the waste to begin with.