GuidoWorld

The US is Getting Wasted

June 21, 2007 on 5:49 pm | In General |

As you know the last few days I’ve been talking about the short comings of the recycling industry. And a few of the bloggers out there are wondering why I’m hating on the garbage businesses.

They are saying things like, who is this Guido dude, and just because they pulled the plug on Tony Soprano doesn’t mean he can start dissing waste management. One wise guy even was reported to say to an associate, “Can you believe the coglioni on that little worm. Who’s he to talk about garbage. What could give birth to a twit like that? If he wants to talk about garbage, why doesn’t he just talk about his momma who I bet is an old bag?”

Hey there’s no reason to talk about my momma, the lady’s a saint. And anyway any guy who’d say that about my momma, well his momma’s got to be a bag lady. Yeah, I know I’m taking the whole garbage bag too far, but sometimes things have to be said.

Other bloggers gesticulate wildly as they snort, “who is this new boy. He’s barely even entered the game and he’s woofing like he’s some kind of superstar. He comes into our hood and right out of the box he starts talking trash.”

Now I’m new to this blog gig, and I’m just learning about who runs these streets. So far I haven’t been jumped by either the “scripts” or the “bloogs” but I do feel the heat coming.

Any way back to the whole profit makes waste argument. I still contend that our current economic system not only promotes waste, but is dependent on it.

If things in our society lasted a long time and were durable, our economy would fall. We’ve long ago accepted the premise of planned obsolescence. What this means is that we make things which have a short shelf life, so that people will have to go out and buy more stuff.

Sometimes we create this “planned obsolescence by making things which will break down and need to be replaced. Sometimes we do this thru creating an appliance or object that is dependent of constant servicing or on other devices which will have to be purchased often. Other times we make things which will be quickly out of date or out of style (ie:fashion and fads).

If we really created truly durable goods the Maytag repairman wouldn’t just be lonely, he wouldn’t exist. Just think of the millions of jobs and services which would vanish if we made things durable and easily upgradeable. In many cases we are talked out of fixing or keeping perfectly functioning machines and objects.

As they say necessity is the mother of invention. Go to Cuba and due to our embargoes and political pressures, you will still see cars from fifties tooling down their roads. Cars built now a days would not probably last as long, and for sure we’d be convinced and pressured into buying a new vehicle thru ad campaigns and even legislation if the bulk of us were to try and hang on to our old vehicles.

When i talked earlier this week about how we could make the recycling industry real by replacing plastic “recyclable” bottles with reusable glass bottles, I hinted at the number of people who would be out of work with the shut down of plastic bottle manufacturers.

Yet, those layoffs wouldn’t even scratch the surface of the total effect on jobs. Get rid of the plastic bottles and you get rid of all the jobs involved in design and advertising of the plastic containers.

I saw an article a couple of years back which talked extensively on the amount of waste which is generated by packaging. The article claimed that packaging makes up over 7% of all stuff that are manufactured. Now I don’t know about the real percentage, but it had me think about all the packaging that is involved in our culture. The bulk of those uncountable tons of packaging are not able to be reused unless they re-enter the marketplace after being toxicly and wastefully recycled.

Since almost all packaging is involved with the advertising and marketing aspects of products and corporations, businesses are very resistive to reuse. This is not only true of the packages sold in stores, but in the stores themselves. When a chain store closes down the building is seldom reused, more often it sits idle for years and years or is torn down. Competing chains almost never occupy that store, and often will opt to build next door to the vacant building rather than move into the existing site.

The major reason for this is that the buildings design, floor space and front are not their official design. The store name would not present itself the same, and customers would be forced to adapt to a foreign floor plan. The store isn’t a building but an image that advertises itself. This is just another example of how packaging produces endless mountains of waste and endless production of materials which have a unnaturally short shelf life.

The examples of how our society is wasteful and dependent of waste is endless. I will decline to expound upon other aspects of fad and fashion which generate waste. Instead I’ll leave it to you to find your own examples and write to me when you find them.

In most situations it is costly far corporations to manage their own waste. If my business is making cars or producing electricity, recycling the cars or the polluting waste caused by the use of coal would cut severely into my profits. Yet, those same materials can become the source of profit if my business is to recycle those waste materials. As I pointed out earlier the basic flaw of this system, no matter how efficiently it is structured, is that waste expands and does not contract in this system. And more importantly, the toxic aspects involved in the production and recycling process grow in a geometric manner.

From a logical point of view profit and waste are synonymous. Look at the following chain:

Profit = surplus = excess = waste

A profit is a surplus. In a totally balanced and efficient transaction their is no profit. A profit means more money was charged than the cost of the item.

So a profit is a surplus. Another word for surplus is an excess. And an excess being more than what was needed is a waste. At first glance you might discount this relationship and say that it isn’t true. Yet, I challenge you to think about it. I think you will find, as I have, that for every exception to this I find I can find a number of practical situations where this is true.

I’ll write again in a few days. My plan next time is to discuss how the game of monopoly can be used to talk about the real economy.