Consumerism is related to the constant purchasing of new goods, with little attention to their true need, durability, product origin, or the environmental consequences of their manufacture and disposal.
Consumerism interferes with the sustainable use of resources in a society by replacing the normal common sense desire for an adequate supply of life’s necessities, with and insatiable quest for things that are purchased by larger and larger incomes to buy them.
Especially in developed countries, landfills are being rapidly filled with cheap discarded products that fail to work within short time and cannot be repaired.
In many cases, consumer products are made psychologically obsolete by advertising industry long before they actually wear out.
The inordinate amount of waste that is generated by consumer-oriented societies around the world is now a serious environmental issue.
Most human activities are related to production and consumption cycle which produce excessive amounts of waste in the form of solid, liquid and gaseous waste products.
With the advent of and industrial civilization, the highly complex technological processes for production of goods have rapidly increased problems due to inadequate waste disposal.
With the rapid increase in population, the amount of waste in terms of quantity and quality has increased waste management pressure many-fold in recent years.
Our health will be affected by dangerous industrial effluents, and be will be smothered by clouds of smoke and unhealthy gases. Therefore, the reuse of goods and waste utilization should become a part of the production-consumption cycle.
For example, it is estimated that the per capita production of domestic waste is many times higher in a developed country hence compared to a developing country.
Large quantities of solid, liquid and gaseous waste is produced by urban industrial communities in the form of plastic, paper, leather, tin cans, bottles, mineral refuse, and pathological waste from hospitals.
Dead animals, agricultural wastes, fertilizer and pesticide overuse, and human and animal excreta are essentially rural concerns.
This attitude towards waste has led to disastrous effects on the environment besides the overexploitation of natural resources.
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