After downing a disgusting container of yogurt from Superfresh last night, I let my friend’s dog lick out the inside of the container and then went to throw it into the trash. And it struck me how stupid and inefficient of a system we have: somebody countless miles away makes nasty yogurt and has it shipped, possibly around the globe. Then I have to go to an over-priced store to buy it, and it tastes like shit. Then I’m supposed to throw away the plastic container the thing came in, and not think about it ever again.
How dumb is that?
Even recycling this container doesn’t really solve the problem as I see it. First off, recycling is rarely financially viable. (I have a link to a good documentary on this someplace laying around). Second, it is an after-the-fact solution which doesn’t even address the underlying issues of why our system is set up this way in the first place. Who is benefiting off of us consuming products and producing humongous amounts of “trash”? Certainly we aren’t the ones who are winning in all of this: we have to have shitty jobs where our minds and bodies become numb so that we can buy unwholesome products and then throw away perfectly good containers, packaging and other objects.
Saying we need to recycle is not enough. Advocating the crash of civilization is simply not a realistic or humane option either. Global warming pales in comparison to the ridiculousness of this underlying problem to begin with.
And what is trash really anyway? Trash is merely objects which have had their value unassigned to them. What if we could begin reassigning value to trash objects? How would we do that? How would we make it viable? How would we do it in such a way that would impact the system which spawned it?
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Trade Goods & Barter Objects
- Replanting your tree
- Can’t touch this
- Decoding the Trash Stratum
- Big Elk - “Life Can Go To Hell” [Lyrics]
9 Comments
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006...row-the-hidden-life-of-garbage-video/
there is NO SUCH THING as trash!
“trash” is most certainly a made-up concept, and essential to any system or economy which is based on the illusion of perpetual limitless growth and acquisition.
let’s take the time machine back several hundred to a thousand or so years–what is “trash”? i mean, you have left-over parts from animals & plants you’ve eaten and made into clothes and homes and tools and such, and what is that? well, today, some of us would call it “compost” yes? and you have totally worn out items at some point: broken flints, splintered spears, disintegrating tent-hides…and what is that? uh…i think we’re talking “compost” again.
now zip back into the so-called “pioneer” era in the Americas…we make more complex items and tools, and they do break, but metals are hard to come by, and expensive, so do you just toss them? hell no! there are entire sub-economies based on trading you for that metal, and re-working it or fixing it and later re-selling it. do you know that many towns in the east of the colonies/U.S. would actually PAY you, if you decided to pack-up and “Go West” to NOT BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN…why, you ask, would someone burn down their old house before leaving? well, to get the NAILS of course! nails, made of metal, not so cheap, not so easy to come by (whereas wood, at the time, well, that seemed to be in endless supply!) so often people would BURN down the wooden cabin, in order to collect those nails to take with them!
there IS no “trash” until really quite recently. people used to have shops, you know, where they just *fixed* broken things, or salvaged the parts to make new things. if there is a long-term career path today, this might be it!
plastic and various chemicals made into items that break within months of purchase…that’s what we’ve worked our way up (down?) to now…and these things do not quickly “compost” nor are they easily re-made into something new and useful. plus, they’re often poisonous. but still, eventually, over the LONG LONG haul, if they can’t be recycled, they will break down…but it takes SO long…and kills a lot of fish and birds in the process when they eat those teeny plastic pellets by accident.
i’ve been hoping my whole life to awake one day in a world where “trash” no longer exists. you fix it if it can be fixed, if not, you break it down into parts and use those to fix something else, and otherwise, it’s compostable–it makes new soil for growing things and food for insects.
the whole concept of “trash” is a scam, a con…how did we arrive in a place where the oil and energy involved in making, shipping, advertising & selling a plastic spoon, is considered “more efficient” than just freakin’ WASHING the same metal spoon to use it again and again and again?
modern eCONomics, indeed.
(i thank my Depression Era pack-rat Gramma for starting me off early in a way that allowed me to see this. thanks Gramma Z.!)
now, go find your nearest surviving “junk man”!
: )
*interesting to see you back in the eastern time zone, Tim…what do you think of center city Baltimore? it seemed very post-post to me last year when i was there. not quite on the Detroit scale, but getting there.
I absolutely agree. Junk man as a career path!
Remind me to write about circus/revival and Depression era social organization if I don’t do so in the next week or so.
Baltimore is… as usual very interesting. Still too early to see which way it’s going to swing. Should be fun regardless though!
U been reading Ran Prieur?
No
Where do packrats fit into all of this?
People who refuse to re-assign value to objects to a “null” meaning?
But I guess what I’m thinking is that:
What if you have so much stuff that you don’t even remember having it most of the time, it’s not really doing anything consistently useful, but it’s also not in the trash? Is it possible to have everything in circulation and use at the same time without having things becoming “null”? And if not, is that entirely different from trash, or is that just more like a true “bank” of sorts?
Very good points. To make a suggested answer to your final questions, perhaps we should boycott U.S. legal currency and instead reassign “Trash” the value or role of currency. Surely if enough thousands of people immediately began using trash as currency rather than less valuable and even less likely candidate which we’ve been told to use, either great change would inevitably take place or something rather interesting none the less. take care and safe travels, thanks for the change inviting inquisitions and thoughts.
joshua
One Trackback
[...] Maybe this doesn’t sound like a very big deal. But compare this to the way we treat objects nowadays - we just throw things into the trash and don’t think twice about them. The idea of “trade goods” represents a whole *other* system of valuing objects, one which would be sure to catapult back into the limelight should we ever face large scale economic catastrophe. Part of me wonders though: if we begin to re-value objects according to more classical or traditional standards, would that actually act as a hedge against economic catastrophe, because we aren’t storing all our value needlessly in functionally useless slips of paper currency? [...]