Sustainable consumption

I saw a very inspiring talk by Sir Brian Heap yesterday. The subject was consumption and happiness, and it was well off the topic of the rest of the conference which was focused on genomics. Anyway, he showed one plot which made a big impression on me, the generation and recovery of plastics in the US (see illustration). Your first question might be: "Then where does the rest of the plastic go?", and then you will realise that it is either burnt together with the rest of the house waste, or left in the roadside... So it is either consuming energy once again for its decomposition or polluting our environment. He also showed other examples that made me think twice. Now I feel like I should be looking more into sustainable choices for my everyday life. I do not want to be contributing to energy waste or pollution of our environment when there are other choices available.

Illustration courtesy: Earthcycle.com