Let’s start this with the definition of luxury:
luxury
/ˈlʌkʃ(ə)ri/
noun
- a state of great comfort or elegance, especially when involving great expense.
“he lived a life of luxury”
synonyms: opulence, luxuriousness, sumptuousness, richness, costliness, grandeur, grandness, splendour, magnificence, lavishness, lap of luxury, bed of roses, milk and honey;
adjective: luxury
- luxurious or of the nature of a luxury.”a luxury yacht”
It is a state of great comfort and elegance that involves great expense. I.e. you have to spend quite a bit of sum to acquire the luxuries feel. Such as the days where white bread was considered a luxury as it is more expensive to produce compared to whole grain breads, as opposed to today where it is the opposite.
Luxury also is somewhat synonymous to marketing, to elevate the dream of owning something that no one else has, or acquiring it would make you a member of the elite. From luxury bottled water to luxury holidays and luxury phones. It is a simple and easy ploy – provide the impression the somewhat mundane but well-packaged is the perfect status symbol or of, market it so, but it mark up the price slightly above being affordable but still attainable, you will easily get a trove of desperate consumers drinking what you’re selling.
Problem is most of the luxury you get these days involve expanse and waste, specifically cheap luxury goods. You can see this from a range of things available for purchase out there
- Convenient disposable power banks – there’s a lot out there, just google them and you’ll find companies selling them for less than USD 1 a piece
- Individual one-time used straws packed in high-quality paper envelope, which will be ripped and disposed of.
As if the item you’re marketing lies within Maslow’s hierachy of needs, your budget is better spent elsewhere. I’m sure there’s a study somewhere that can back me up but most of the trash we produce are mainly from busy cities that are experiencing growth, lesser from already extablished towns or villages.
Our main reasons to promote recycling and reducing waste stem from a simple reasons:
- We are producing more trash than we can process.
- We are suffering from the consequences of #1 and we know eventually we will pay a higher price. Our future generations actually not really us.
- Human’s greed for economic growth is contributing to tremendous amount of blind waste
With the above, let’s clarify that we’re not having issues with trash but just trash that you can’t recycle easily. Any normal trash that one gets from daily living which are usually organic waste goes back into what we call a circular economy.
Luxury is not a necessity of life, but sustainability is. Great luxury comes from goood workmanship and design, however cheap luxury is just great marketing.
So the answer is no, good luxury is just harder to attain but it doesn’t impact sustainability on a mass level but probably it would affect one’s bank account.