Nowhere left to go

The amount of plastic waste generated in our world these days have reached truly staggering proportions. From beaches strewn with garbage to landfills bursting at their seams to the infamous ‘continent of trash’ floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we are literally now stewing in our own filth. In the past, people would always have a ‘backyard’ of some kind where we could just sweep the mess under the rug. But with the global population explosion, the number of empty places where we can chuck or bury our thrash are rapidly shrinking. Even developing countries where we used to send boatloads of garbage and starting to reject them due to lack of free space.

How much raw materials do we waste in our ‘one-time use’ disposable economy, where we discard plastic cups and wooden chopsticks without thinking much of it? All these things require considerable amounts of resources to produce: petroleum and wood respectively in my example. Furthermore, all products today (even those that are non-electronic) are thrown away after a short while. What is truly shocking is that their parts are rarely cannibalized for raw materials (i.e. recycled); and if they are, the haphazard process that we go about it usually degrades the quality of the material so much that the recovered materials are often of a quality too inferior to be truly recycled. Planned obsolescence is simply built into our modern economy, which demands ever more growth and sales to be sustained that in turn put an ever heavier burden on the planet.

Given how quickly humans adapt and become accustomed to changes around them, it is worth mentioning that this phenomenon is fairly recent. Re-using and repairing were the norm just one or two generations ago. It is truly astonishing to remark how much our values have changed from those of our predecessors. All this got me thinking if there could be a better way that we could decrease the amount of waste we produce. Could I go a week, just one single week, without generating a single shred of garbage? Even today, when I bring own utensils and containers to avoid generating waste, I get funny looks of disapproval as if I were committing a social faux pas.

We have gotten so used to the conveniences offered by modern society that we often forget how much raw materials it takes to create them. Civilizations have always been very costly social organizations to maintain; it is all the more so for our modern industrialized one. Can the planet and our scientific ingenuity sustain this sort of profligate resource consumption and reckless waste generation or will the disposable conveniences that we have come to take for granted eventually be our downfall?

Keywords : Recycling, Waste Management, Landfills, Planned Obsolescence, Disposable Economy, Waste, Thrash, Natural Resources, Sustainability, Sustainable Development