In grade school, the 3 R’s, “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.” were ingrained in me. Every kid in Becker knew those three words & yet, we were never taught what they meant. Recycling? Easy - just put trash in one can instead of the other one. But “Reduce. Reuse.”? Sure, the ideas were simple enough, but no one really paid attention to them. Which is a shame, because while recycling has benefits, I believe that reducing & reusing are substantially more important. So let’s talk about the first R: reduce.

We live in a world driven by consumerism. These days, it seems like new holidays are created every other year to give you more & more reasons to buy that new thing that you just really need. In our perpetual state of always needing more, we inevitably end up wasting more. We waste more gas to go to the store. We waste more air fuel from all our Amazon Prime deliveries. More packaging. More clothes we don’t need. More upgrades. More this. More that. We believe that we’re gaining the world, but in the end, we’re just losing our souls to consumerism & the Earth to our greed.

Brody Hed

Becker, MN