If you're a good Oregonian, you are now busy "reassessing the impact of your consumption pattern on the generation of solid waste."

If not, you have not been informed about the "mandate" by the Legislature.

This has to be the melancholy conclusion to be drawn from the announcement this week: "Oregon Fails to Meet Waste Prevention Goal."

Failed to meet! Consider yourselves chastised.

The announcement came from the Department of Environmental Quality, and it reported that all of us in Oregon last year generated more than 5.5 million tons of trash, or more than 3,000 pounds per person.

"That means," the DEQ reports, "the state has failed to meet an Oregon Legislature-mandated goal of no increase in per-capita waste generation in 2005."

And as mentioned above, the DEQ adds, ominously: "Failing to meet the goal means that communities, businesses and individuals across the state will need to step up efforts to reassess the impacts of their consumption patterns on solid waste generation."

All this shows a couple of things:

• Just as legislators cannot "mandate" that everybody lose 20 pounds by Christmas, they cannot require the state to meet goals that are not within the state government's power to achieve. Such goals may be worthwhile to achieve, but they can be accomplished only by mandating or legislating the details. A person can force himself to eat no candy and hope that this will achieve the desired loss of weight. If not he has to try something else in addition. But if a state wants to reach a goal of less trash, it has to pass laws against certain practices, such as wrapping everything in plastic, and then hope that this will reduce the amount of stuff being thrown away. If not, additional steps have to be taken to reach the goal.

• In general, we do "generate" too much trash. Most of us arrive at that conclusion without the DEQ telling us so. We get the picture when we realize that for the third time this week, the trash can is full and has to be taken out, through the rain.

The good news in the DEQ announcement was that while we generated more trash, we managed to recycle nearly half of it - some 49.1 percent. And in Linn, Benton and Marion counties, people far exceeded the recycling ratio also set as a goal by the state. (Exactly how the DEQ knows how much everybody throws away and recycles is a mystery, but that's a topic for another day. For now let's assume they have it just about right.)

The lesson for all of us is that, even if that "mandate" means nothing, we could use some help from the producers and packagers of goods in reducing the volume of stuff we discard.

Is there hope? Some stores give you a modest discount if you use their reusable shopping bags. That's a small thing, but it's a start.