Since I’ve gotten my TV to work I've become acutely aware of the many new products that claim to make life easier. The famous scrubbing bubbles have a commercial wherein the usual male-female attitudes toward toilet cleanliness are inverted by the use of nearly-magical disinfectant toilet wipes. Johnson and Johnson, purveyors of such miracle products as tearless shampoo and the original band-aid, have a new offering for baby: washcloths that are pre-moistened and pre-soaped. In floor care, several companies have followed the Swiffer's lead, creating dusting/sweeping cloths that attract and hold dust and dirt. And the key selling point of these new products? They're disposable.
At a time when a disproportionate amount of the Earth's resources are consumed by the United States, US manufacturers and advertising agencies have decided that developing and distributing products that continue to blatantly waste resources are not only profitable, but necessary.
Ignoring the ever-increasing disparity between those with sufficient means to indulge their tastes in goodies (where goodies can and does refer to the vast multitude of luxuries we like to pretend are necessities) and those who have insufficient means to provide for the basics of survival, a significant problem with this sudden glut of necessary luxury is the sudden (and the term is used loosely) increase in disposability. Just look at the trend in packaging: Rather than wrapping all twelve Pop Tarts in a single waxed-paper package, we now have the ability to wrap them in plasticized pairs so as to make them ever-so-much-more convenient for traveling. Are pairs of Pop Tarts truly central to the existence of modern society? Would government collapse into anarchy if we were to—heaven forbid—eat toaster pastries directly from the package, sans packaging? Perhaps, so we produce countless miles of excess plastic Pop Tarts wrapping. Multiply Pop Tarts wrappers by everything else, and we’re creating a rather hefty problem for ourselves.
A mundane result of the wonders of disposability is that municipalities are finding trash to be a growing problem. Strict federal and state laws governing the establishment of new landfills complicate the construction of new disposal facilities. The closure of existing landfills is terrifically expensive and difficult to complete. Some landfill owners are sufficiently short of cash that they find it cheaper to keep the landfills perpetually open—despite problems with toxic seepage and pollution. According to a 1997 report issued by the National Resources Defense Council, 20 percent of the nation’s most “hazardous and contaminated” locations are former municipal landfills.
The largest problem with landfills as a long-term solution is that they aren't designed to destroy or convert trash into something more appealing or useful—or even more compact: landfills are used to store trash as-is, until the trash disappears somehow. Needless to say, that particular bit of magic hasn't been undertaken by the likes of Harry Potter, David Copperfield, or King Dubya.
In 1987, a New York City barge gained national attention as it trooped about trying to find someplace to dump its load of trash. After wandering up and down the US coast, the barge’s operator unsuccessfully attempted to convince several Caribbean nations to accept the waste. Two months later, the barge returned to New York where the waste was eventually incinerated.
A 1998 CNN.com article claimed that New York City exported some 4000 tons of city trash out of state for disposal each day. But New York is hardly the largest culprit: according to the EPA’s figures for 1998, the average American produces nearly 4.5 pounds of waste per day; the nation as a whole produced some 220 million tons of garbage for the year.
Disposability seems to be a reflection of our consumer environment: the world is our trash can. On a Sabbath walk with my girlfriend in the hills behind Loma Linda, the otherwise barren hills were punctuated by bits of detritus: beer and soda cans, the rusted-out shell an orange VW van, a fifteen-foot length of two-inch rebar under a tree, the remnants of a fire pit surrounded by the rotting bits of an old leather shoe. What could be a beautiful spot is just another convenient place to toss aside the unwanted clutter from our outwardly orderly lives.
Nearly every other environment is the same: We come; we see; we litter.
I don't have a problem with disposable products, as such. I like being able to use something that makes my life somehow more convenient, but I find the trend—damned-near insistence on the part of advertisers—that people switch from products that aren't disposable to products that are disturbing. They’re educating an entire generation of children to consider the world to be a vast warehouse of disposable products created especially for them. I doubt they’re particularly worried about where these things go once the bins are placed out on their curbs.
How does this attitude encourage responsible use of resources? When a Tupperware container costs anywhere from 2 to 5 times as much as the disposable, is it any small wonder people will opt for the cheaper product? Perhaps this disposability is a motivating factor in the very purchase: why commit to something expensive when one can invest in products that serve the very same purpose for a respectable period of time at a significant savings? At the very least, the economics makes perfect, logical sense.
Yet won't such a disposable attitude ultimately cost more in the long run? If I purchase the disposable plastic storage containers at, say, $5.00 a set rather than the Tupperware at $15.00, yet throw away or lose them (they are, after all, cheap) and find myself replacing them quarterly, I've paid $5.00 more than if I'd bought the Tupperware to begin with. (This of course assumes I'd be significantly more careful with the more expensive stuff because it's inherently more valuable to me.) But why worry about that: disposable products are cheap; Tupperware is expensive and demand responsibility. Don’t worry about Tupperware: be happy.
Look in the dumpsters behind college dormitories (especially men’s dorms) or apartment complexes and you’ll find just how prone to disposing we are: rather than move stuff back home, some students simply toss televisions, computers, coffee makers, cordless phones and save themselves the trouble. Apartment dwellers, rather than take the trouble of selling or donating their used furniture, heft it up into dumpsters to be vanished. The trash’s only sin? It was bulky, or inconvenient, or outdated, or ugly.
In 1990, Ranger Rick magazine published a short story named "Trash Trek." A space-faring girl finds herself stranded on a planet covered in garbage. The indigenous creatures, strange amalgamations of rodents and men, have made a living of the garbage world—but their mythologies recall a peaceful, beautiful planet, green and blue, with clean water and air, sunlight and birds. The girl similarly recalls, from her own mythology, the reason why her people took to the spaceways: her world was threatened by garbage. Her people left; the rat-men stayed. As she prepares to transport back to her own ship, a rat-man calls out the ancient name of the trashed planet.
We don’t have to look to the stars to escape our own waste—but we're on our way.