While society has passed through the Iron Age, the Bronze Age and the Golden Age, one might argue we currently live in the Disposable Age.
From In these Times:
How much needless plastic packaging do you throw away every year? Why is it cheaper to buy a new DVD player than get your old one fixed? And where does all that garbage go, anyway?
In her new book, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, Heather Rogers answers these questions by focusing on the post-WWII boom, when planned obsolescence--the manufacturing of consumer goods designed to wear out--changed the way Americans consume and, consequently, the way we waste.
Rogers details the competing interests of manufacturers and the emerging American consumer in the early 1950's. In a recent talk at the Chicago independent bookstore Quimby's, she set the scene: "Most Americans have bought a car or a house, all the appliances they need. U.S. industry starts to realize they're going to have a crisis on their hands because they have such tremendously productive assembly lines. And they came up with built-in obsolescence. If you want to understand modern garbage today, you have to understand built-in obsolescence." This shift, she explained, was accompanied by a full-scale public relations campaign that acclimated Americans to using disposable products. It transformed the United States from a country that wasted relatively little in the late 19th century into a nation that uses and discards 30 percent of the world's resources while being home to only 4 percent of its population.
The articles continues with a in depth interview with the book's author about such things as where does your trash go, recycling, and how our free market economy plays a large part in the bigger picture.
In addition to all these disposables, Wal-mart and the like have also addicted this country to buying all sorts of stuff we don't need that ends up filling our households to capacity, making us feel as if we need more space which leads to buying bigger homes, lots of space saving items, and booming sales of books about Feng Shui and how to unclutter our lives. Thus we consume even more!
While Bush says we are addicted to oil, I would add we are addicted to sales and buying stuff we don't really need. We are addicted to convenience.
Thanks to a dKos user, I found Freecycle, which has yahoogroups in many communities whereby people can offer items they don't need to others in the community, rather than throwing it in the trash. It turns out my community has a very active group that swaps such things as baby clothes/items, household items, coupons, and even excercise equipment. The great thing is these items don't go into the landfill and instead get used by people who need them. And on a couple occasions they went to people in the community who lost everything when fire struck their home.
The less that goes into our landfills the better off we all are. For our need for convenience and saving money is leading us to polluting even more than we have to....and this is something we can each do something about individually.
And as they say, one man's trash is another man's treasure.