I remember being in grade school and being taught the motto that was going to help us save the environment: "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle", collectively known as the 3R's. Sounded really good at the time. If we could do all three of these things, we could stop a lot of pollution. Now, 20 years later, how have we done at meeting the 3R's?

Recycle

At the time that the 3R's were being preached to us in school, educators were heavily touting the benefits of recycling. In my estimation, I would say that recycling got more "air time" than either of the other two R's. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It brought community awareness to the recycling movement and look where recycling is now! Most cities have curb-side recycling pick up that doesn't need to be sorted and will accept most major forms of recyclables. Granted, recycling still needs some improvements in many areas. I'd like to see better recycling opportunities for Styrofoam, batteries, electronics, and compact fluorescent light bulbs. That being said, I'd say that recycling is the R that has advanced the most in the past 20 years.

Reduce

In the last 5 years or so, Reduce is probably the R that has gotten the most media coverage. With threats of diminishing fuel supplies and spikes in energy costs, everything these days seems to be related to reducing our usage of these materials. Recent topics include Hybrid cars, compact fluorescent light bulbs, geothermal heating/cooling, solar power, and wind power. Politicians are jumping on the media bandwagon and touting their plans to reduce dependencies on oil and other fossil fuels. I imagine that within the next 15 years, we will see the same kind of revolution we saw with recycling. Energy efficient devices will become common place.

Reuse

The R that I think has gotten the least attention and improvement is Reuse. In fact, there is even a case to be made that we have gone in the wrong direction here. If you look at TV commercials these days, you see what appears to be more commercial for disposable, non-reusable products. There's disposable cameras, razors, toilet cleaners, plates, flatware, and food containers (i.e. Gladware). I wonder if we now think that since people recycle, it's more acceptable to use disposable products. Or have we just become too lazy to bother cleaning and reusing some of this stuff. It's obvious to me that we have a long way to go in the area of reuse.

Overall, I think we've come a long way on recycling, gotten a good start on reducing, and have yet to really focus on reusing. Maybe this is just a natural progression. Perhaps recycling was focused on first, because there was low-hanging fruit that was easy to accomplish. The increased exposure of reduction was possibly expedited due to fears of rising prices, shortages, and global warming. If this trend continues, we should see focus switch to reuse in the next couple decades. This could be spurred by massive over crowding in landfills or similar problems. However, at this point, my guess is that the American people can only handle advances in one R at a time.