How to Use wasteful in a Sentence

wasteful

adjective
  • We must eliminate wasteful expenditures.
  • Idling my truck just to take a shower seemed wasteful and loud.
    — Kelly Bastone, Outside Online, 22 May 2021
  • All these projects will be made more costly by this wasteful law.
    — Nick Langworthy, New York Daily News, 3 July 2025
  • What are these wasteful projects doing?
    — Steve Inskeep, NPR, 3 Oct. 2025
  • Aren't there any less wasteful options?
    — David Beaulieu, The Spruce, 8 Jan. 2026
  • But buying a new tube for every hike is wasteful.
    — Zoe Gates, Outside, 28 Oct. 2025
  • But dishcloths are less wasteful and very easy to clean and reuse.
    — Brandee Gruener, Southern Living, 29 Oct. 2025
  • They’re done with wasteful beauty.
    — Angela Lei, Forbes.com, 12 Aug. 2025
  • The amount of plastic used here for the two alignment tools feels a bit wasteful.
    — Julian Chokkattu, Wired, 1 Oct. 2021
  • If these things sound mostly ridiculous and wasteful, well, many of them are.
    — Rachel Metz, CNN, 27 Nov. 2019
  • Not only that, but one of the tenets of my endeavor is to be less wasteful.
    — Washington Post, 17 Jan. 2020
  • The most festive time of the year is also the most wasteful, experts say.
    — Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 23 Nov. 2022
  • Who has the guts to stand up to wasteful government spending?
    — Chris Cillizza, CNN, 9 Mar. 2022
  • To us, this revealed how entrenched the belief that leisure is wasteful can be.
    — Selin Malkoc, CNN, 11 Nov. 2021
  • These become anchors, and the idea of cutting them loose feels wasteful.
    — Benjamin Laker, Forbes.com, 29 Aug. 2025
  • To do otherwise would be wasteful.
    — Brandee Gruener, Southern Living, 23 May 2026
  • To do otherwise would be wasteful.
    — Brandee Gruener, Southern Living, 27 Dec. 2025
  • To do otherwise would be wasteful.
    — Brandee Gruener, Southern Living, 23 Sep. 2025
  • That’s far cheaper (and less wasteful) than buying a new smartphone.
    — Brian X. Chen, New York Times, 13 Oct. 2020
  • Well, here’s something that should help the pushback against this alarming, wasteful trend.
    — David Meyer, Fortune, 28 Mar. 2024
  • Most of us know that plastic bottles are wasteful and are told to use reusable ones.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 27 Sep. 2019
  • This also leads many to believe that taking time to one's self is wasteful or selfish.
    — Christina Montoya Fiedler, Parents, 29 May 2024
  • Democrats have seized on the reversals as evidence that the cuts were hasty and wasteful.
    — Aliss Higham, MSNBC Newsweek, 24 Sep. 2025
  • Ultimately, a wedding day should be the best day of your life, but not the most wasteful.
    — Lizzie Hyman, Peoplemag, 3 Dec. 2022
  • Tolkien talks about him wanting to rid Middle-earth of wasteful friction.
    — James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 Oct. 2022
  • Whether text tokens are wasteful and just terrible at the input.
    — Beatrice Nolan, Fortune, 23 Oct. 2025
  • With toilet paper out of stock, bidets are booming, which is good news for our behinds and less wasteful.
    — Usa Today Staff, USA TODAY, 23 Dec. 2020
  • And more than a dozen have banned plastic bags — the poster children of wasteful, single-use plastics.
    — Susanne Rust, Anchorage Daily News, 19 Aug. 2023
  • This, in addition, could raise drug prices and result in wasteful spending.
    — Anna Chorniy, The Conversation, 27 Feb. 2026
  • Aside from being shown how to not be wasteful, no one ever talked to us about how to save, invest, or budget.
    — R29 Team, refinery29.com, 17 July 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'wasteful.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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