Environmental Impacts of Packaging in the U.s. and Mexico

The rise in environmental consciousness in recent decades has included a focus on household waste. It is not the most urgent of the problems we face, but it may be the most immediately accessible. Global climate change, the destruction of the rain forests, and disasters such as Chernobyl and Bhopal are far away and hard for an individual to influence; but garbage disposal happens again and again, right at home under our personal control. Those who seek to act on their environmental concerns, therefore, often find it easiest to begin with the problems of solid waste. When a 1990 Gallup poll asked people in the United States what they had done in connection with environmental problems, 80% to 85% answered that they or their households had participated in various aspects of recycling; no other significant steps had been taken by a majority of respondents (Dunlap and Scarce, 1991, tables 44-46).