Michael E. Mann Quotes

It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here.

If you're not buying recycled products, you're not really recycling.

I'm mad keen on recycling because I'm worried about the next generation and where all this waste we're producing is going. It has to stop. I wash out my plastic containers and recycle envelopes, everything I possibly can.

The plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change.

Years ago, we all talked about recycling and not dumping things down your drain and all of that, but talking doesn't help much. Basically, it's going to have to be legislation because the impact is so huge and diversified.

One of my big pet peeves is single-use plastic bags. I think it's one of the stupidest ideas in the world.

Sometimes I worry about the amount of paper I waste.

We can no longer throw our waste away because there is no away.

The cheap and easy days of waste disposal are over.

If recycling is the future, then we must focus our efforts on mitigating negative impacts to our community while protecting our environment.

Consuming less means throwing away less, while reusing things actually helps to save the planet as well as the pennies.

We live in a disposable society. We throw so much away. But it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the planet and it comes from future generations' lives.

We can't have landfills forever, and we can't ask others to accept our trash.

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

We live in a disposable society. It's easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name - we call it recycling.

Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.

Number one I think we should impose a fee or a tax on the transportation of trash per mile.

My hobby of not attending meetings about recycling saves more energy than your hobby of recycling.

Just because you have a piece of trash and you throw it away and it gets hauled away, it doesn't mean that it's not affecting someone else.

One of the things that I've always thought I would like to do is to develop an environmental index. Then people can measure their own environmental performance on an index as they do in other ways.

We prefer synthetic rather than natural materials. Natural products are almost too valuable. Wood is much harder to produce than metal. And metal is recyclable, while wood isn't.

I actually believe 'Sustainability', as a concept, is one of the arteries leading to the heart of so many of our cultural transitions at play today. And it's this concept which leads me to bottled water, and its multibillion dollar industry.

The film business creates a large amount of waste, and I'm not immune to waste in the business.

As sustainability becomes more and more of a concern, we're going to see more plastics.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.