Forgetting about the "Reduce" in "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle"

As Americans have gotten better at recycling over the past few decades many forget that recycling is just one of the steps in the sequential “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” process to try to minimize our impact on the Earth. In 2008, the recycling rate reached an all-time high of 33.2% for Americans (per data from 2010). This is great as recycling rates overall have risen steadily since the 1960’s. But with this it may not be apparent to everyone that the amount of waste sent to landfills has also risen dramatically since the 1960’s. Recycling doesn't have as direct an impact on the amount of waste sent to landfills as reducing what we buy, reducing our waste streams, or reusing items within our households. The 3 “R’s” of waste reduction are really a sequential process in which everyone should try to first reduce the amount of waste they procure or produce, then reuse the materials they have, and finally recycle materials left over from there. Even with recycling rates increasing, we as Americans and a global community will only see the amount of trash we send to landfills increase in the decades to come from increased consumerism and rising population numbers. With this we need to remind our children and generations to come about the importance of reducing our waste streams and how the 3 “R’s” all work together in a specific order.