I am a maintenance supervisor for a hotel, once a week I go to the dump, you would be amazed at the perfectly good items people dump, just to buy more "new" stuff, working t.v's. furniture, windows, doors etc, there is one person that work's in the local market, she is constantly pushing the bottled water, tourists are buying it, because the water on the island, has kind of a nasty flavor, the hotels need to provide filtering pitchers as well as set up water filters.
We as a species can be disgustingly wasteful and shortsighted.