Recycling in the United States took off with the first Earth Day, rising from 7% of municipal solid waste in 1970 to 33% in 2007. The average American now rinses and sorts a pound and a third more trash each day. Some 8600 curbside recycling and 3500 community composting programs operate across the country. Recycling is part of our lives, our fashion, and our ethic.

And it has gotten us nowhere.

That's right: In spite of all our passionate garbage sorting, we throw away the same amount (three pounds per person per day) as we did in 1970. Per capita waste generation has increased 42%, and we create exactly as much more trash - a pound and a third per person per day - as we have eliminated by recycling and composting. The net gain is zero.

What's in that extra garbage bag? We discard a pound a week of clothing - 3.5 times more than in 1970 - and ten pounds a week of containers and packaging. We waste more than half a pound of food per person per day, almost twice as much as in 1970. The things that are supposed to last - TV sets, luggage, and baseball bats; furniture and furnishings, carpets and rugs - we ditch at twice the rate, or higher. It takes a lot of consumption to support our recycling habit.

Even if we managed to recycle 80% of our solid waste (a rate no major city has achieved yet), half the material would be in the landfill after just three cycles (0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.5). And our actual waste is way more than winds up in the landfill: Five pounds of bauxite at the mine go into one pound of aluminum foil in the trash can.

Buying more stuff - even buying more high-recycled-content, eco-friendly and organic stuff - does not conserve energy or reduce pollution. Manufacturing uses resources whether they're harvested or scavenged. It took the energy equivalent of 25 million barrels of crude oil in 2007 to turn 23 million tons of corrugated cardboard boxes back into corrugated cardboard boxes.

Using less in the first place is (almost) always better - even for manufacturers. Two-liter plastic soda bottles weigh 25% less than they did in 1977. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, that's 25,000 cars'-worth saved compared to recycling the fatter bottles.

It may be that the best we can do for the environment is go broke. According to the Washington Post, some landfills are reporting 30% declines in intake since the recession began. That takes us back to 1970 - same amount of garbage out, less of it to landfills.

Those communities finally got it right: Reduce. Reuse. Recycling is the LAST thing we should be doing.

- By Jessica Ruvinsky, for the premiere issue of JUST CAUSE Magazine, May 2009