People like to worry about waste. Food waste, energy waste, industrial waste, you name it. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" is the mantra that we sing to our kids.
But waste is a red herring. It's a fraction. It has both a numerator and a denominator and they both matter. Waste is a convenient number that fools us into making the wrong comparison.
Thinking about waste as a fraction triggers a cognitive bias called loss aversion. Put simply, we hate to lose. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize winning economist Daniel Khanneman demonstrates how the idea of losing $100 has much more psychological impact than gaining the same amount. Likewise, wasting a resource feels a lot worse than gaining the same.
Waste also tricks us by resembling a failed commitment. Robert Cialdini writes about our desire to remain consistent in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. One of the six principles of persuasion, Commitment/Consistency, is a tool that compliance practitioners routinely use to get you to say yes. Since waste represents unused or underutilized resources, it can feel like we're not following through on a commitment.
Putting these cognitive illusions aside, it's important to remember that at the end of the day, what matters is the absolute amount not the relative amount. The $100 in your account doesn't care whether you earned it all at once, or a little at a time.
So don't be fooled by fractional accounts of waste. If you use 10 bottles and recycle seven of them, then you have a recycle rate of 70%. Say your neighbor has a recycle rate of only 50%. Is that better or worse?
The answer depends on how many bottles they used. Did they use only two? Or did they use 20? It makes a big difference in absolute terms, the only terms that matter.
And one parting thought. They say that one man's trash is another man's treasure---what is waste today will be a resource tomorrow.
What waste can you turn into a resource? This is selling sawdust.