Since 1955, after Life magazine named them so, the United States of America has been called "The Throwaway Society". In the United States, society is based on the principle of convenience. In every aspect of life, Americans seek to maximize their output while minimizing their input. Americans buy fast food so they can eat without the burden of shopping, cooking or cleaning. Americans have their clothes dry cleaned so they don't have to worry about the burden of washing, drying and hanging their clothes. And Americans want everything in a neat, ready-to-use package to avoid the burden of preparing it themselves. But these millions of disposable bags, disposable bottles and disposable cups add up to a real rubbish disaster. person per day. For comparison, all this garbage equals 125 million elephants, 1.5 billion burly offensive linemen, or 500 billion pounds of garbage. Image 1 provides waste generation statistics that support the claim that the United States is a disposable society. With all this garbage generated daily as a nation, it would be hard to argue that America is not a disposable society. Those who argue that America does not have a disposable society would be unable to explain the fact that, although America has only 20% of the world's population, it consumes 80% of the world's resources. This makes America by far the highest producer of waste per capita in the world. Recycling is not enough to compensate for waste production. Of all this waste, only 34% is recycled... half of the paper... its disposable society has caused.Works CitedCapt. Charles Moore on the seas of plastic. Performed by Charles Moore. TED. February 2009. http://www.ted.com (accessed November 29, 2011).Cooper, Mary H. “The Economics of Recycling.” CQ Researcher, March 27, 1998: 265-288. http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/ (accessed November 28, 2011).Griffin, Rodman D. “Garbage Crisis.” CQ Researcher, 20 March 1992: 241-264. http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/ (accessed 28 November 2011). “Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2010.” United States Environmental Protection Agency. November 2011. http://www.epa.gov (accessed November 30, 2011). Weeks, Jennifer. “The Future of Recycling.” Researcher CQ, 14 December 2007: 1033-1060. http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/ (accessed November 29, 2011).