When we go to malls and grocery stores, the aisles are filled with millions of products for us to choose from, many of which we could really live without. And pretty well all of these products contribute to our environmental woes. Take, for example, the life of a plastic fork...

The plastic fork is made out of oil (a limited resource) in a factory that uses up a lot of energy (made from burning fossil fuels, which causes air pollution).

The fork is packaged in a cardboard box, made from paper that comes from trees.

Th box travels on a ship that burns fossil fuels, and then on a truck that also burns fossil fuels.

When the box finally reaches the store and somebody buys it, chances are it travels to that person's house in a car that, yep, burns even more fossil fuels!

Then the fork gets used once, before being tossed in the garbage, which gets picked up by a fuel burning truck and transferred to a massive landfill.

That's a lot of pollution for a single plastic fork!

Just imagine how much pollution has been, and will be, created by everything in your home! It's madness! That's why it's really important for us to try not to consume too much more than we need. If we keep buying and using as much stuff as we do now, then companies will keep producing more stuff, and we'll just continue to hurt the environment.