This feels right to me. At the peak material usage highlighted in the graphs, around 2000, consumer products seemed to built considerably more ruggedly than th

This feels right to me. At the peak material usage highlighted in the graphs, around 2000, consumer products seemed to built considerably more ruggedly than they are today - possibly over-built, really, in some cases. If you shave off 1 or 2% of the material going into a product year over year, that really amounts to something after two decades.