Interesting thread.
Of course, determining what is wasteful ultimately comes down to how one defines waste, which itself is predicated on what we define as valuable. That's exceptionally difficult to define, with competing philosophical definitions, which is why we as a race use money/markets by way of proxying it in day-to-day life.
Monetary valuation operates as a weighted consensus on value/wastefulness but this is only true for common objects (even gold is actually quite common; there is well over 150k tonnes of it around above ground, after all). The rarer an object, there harder it is to define as valuable, with one-offs (eg. a Leonardo original, or your son's first drawing) being the hardest to value, being of active interest only to a very small subset of the population. Thus, the problem of waste eventually also becomes a highly individual one and difficult to discuss meaningfully as a common frame of reference is difficult to establish objectively.
For instance, those bewailing electric can openers, toothbrushes, bottled water, etc are ignoring the value inherent in the (very large) businesses creating them, along with GDP and jobs. Can a product really be wasteful if it generates such things? I suppose it depends on the efficiency by which human activity is translated into overall/aggregate output value. But on that measure, something like an algorithmic fast stock trading program would rate as one of the least wasteful products man has created, and I doubt all that many people would agree with that. Again, it boils down to the value system of the beholder, quite literally.
I'm rambling, but then again, what better way to, well, waste a few minutes...?
