Keeping ‘stuff’ is not necessarily hoarding | Letters

If I don’t save things, they will either end up buried in landfill or be burnt, writes Stephen Lyons; Paula Terry-Lancaster asks why billionaires who hoard money are not reviled

Samira Shackle presents hoarding behaviour as if it were some kind of sickness situated in the individual (‘You reach a point where you can’t live your life’: what is behind extreme hoarding?, 4 July). I prefer to see hoarding objects that, in the words of the NHS definition, “most people would consider rubbish” – such as cardboard boxes and empty plastic bottles – as a perfectly sane and rational response to living in an extreme throwaway society. A society that is itself incurably sick and destroying the planet by pointlessly wasting resources.

I hoard all sorts: used Jiffy bags, cardboard boxes and tubes, single-use plastic bottles, obsolete consumer electronics, and even the odd second-hand book. I know that if I don’t save these precious objects from the binperson they will either end up buried in landfill or be “recycled”, which in reality means being burned for energy (releasing CO2) or exported and very possibly dumped at sea.