In fact, there is something good about recycling and such similar activities - they buy a little time for us, they soften the deadly assault that we, humans are leading against our home, the Earth, thus postponing the Judgment Day, but those benign activities will never stop, ever revert the environmental degradation. Recycling, buying organically grown, buying used and refurbished goods, etc. would be a good thing to do, if we used the time thus bought to figure out how to really stop the assault on the Earth, and how to start healing the damage done already. The statistics show that the damage to our Earth ecosystem keeps on accumulating with consequences that we are afraid to estimate, and that recycling and such similar activities hardly effect the mounting degradation at all. Who today would remember that recycling, eating organically grown food, and such were originally supposed to save the Earth - however unlikely this would seem today to expect of those activities? The original purpose of recycling got forgotten on the way from the days when recycling (and other good things to do) was initiated on a large scale in the sixties and the seventies. Recycling then was to be only a temporary measure that was to be employed only till no recycling would be necessary - till the day when people would live in a benign balance with all other life and themselves, when no waste (to be recycled or otherwise to be disposed of) would be generated at all, when - if one would need to wrap anything for the purposes, say, of transportation, the wrapping itself would be useful for something in one's household upon arrival, etc. This idea of eventually achieving a balance between humans and the rest of the Universe got forgotten and receded into some realms in the consciousness where things that, even though aesthetically pleasing, get shelved away if there is no profit to be made of them. The discipline of recycling is still being religiously pursued, but as in the case of religions, a dogma replaced an originally beautiful idea, because the idea had no place in the pathological pursuit of one's happiness at the expense of others - the leitmotif of our currently prevalent paradigm. It is obvious that recycling exercised by the many today will not result in the creation of a Paradise-on-Earth, and even the majority of the most intelligent from amongst us, to be found on the campuses of our Universities (:-), does not believe in it (it is not intelligent to blindly accept a dogma, no matter how holy the dogma might seem to be), as evidenced by the amount of recyclables that can be found in the trash cans on the campuses at any time.