4January2009
9November2008
“If the upholstery fabric isn’t abrading an allergen, the paint and the office furniture are off-gassing formaldehyde. If the carpet is said to be recyclable, it might be backed with PVC, a polymer built with a vinyl chloride monomer, a known carcinogen”
~ William McDonough & Michael Braungart, from the essay redefining green
waste = life
There was a time in human pre-history when we were primarily consumers. We ate, and we drank; any parts of an animal or plant which were unused in nourishing, clothing, or housing ourselves was left for scavenging animals, fed to pets, or for the earth itself to consume. Our structures and clothes themselves would, when abandoned, become food for further production by other animals or the earth. In this kind of pre-historic state, the word waste (should it have existed) would not have been a negative: nearly any waste was fodder for growth.1
Stone, used in the early construction of some of our smallest and most enormous structures alike, can also be swallowed by the earth, in eons long geological processes. Stone is constantly being eroded by wind, water or sun, or broken apart by plants and freeze/thaw cycles, and while mountains of earth and stone turn to fields of soil, volcanic and seismic activity make new mountains.
Simply to observe the earth is to realize that it wants constantly to reuse everything (and that come what may, it will reuse everything, whether to it’s health benefit or not). When we speak of a closed loop industrial production cycle, like the one being begun by HP for sale and take-back of it’s ink-jet cartridges, it’s based on exactly this: earth’s basic cradle to cradle closed loop of energy and matter.
waste = death
“consumption”
Now, as the descriptor “consumer” gains everyday use and acceptance in characterizing our increasingly world-wide lifestyle, we see it become increasingly abstract (as with so many things in our culture). In the mid 18th century, political changes began generating the first middle class—a group of people able to buy things they didn’t need—to this group, early economists applied the word: consumer. (the word had existed for at least 400 years by that time, but was used to mean “to take, to use, or to eat.” it now carried the specific economic meaning it still has today, “to buy.”)
For a period in the U.S. of A, beginning in the 1920s (with a gap during the depression), and lasting until quite recently, the word was used by politicians, and public-relations men almost exclusively; and generally, the public resented the implications that they were of no good to the country other than as spenders of money. During the cold war, political promotion of spending was veiled in anti-communist rhetoric, imbuing the spending of money with an ideological importance. In campaigns from this era, the word consumer was generally absent. Recently, however, it has been taken up with some pride by the public, and can now be used unabashedly. It is even politically correct: President Bush told us to fight the recession by buying, to help our country by consuming.
And we are able, by and large, to do just that (although, how much it will help our financial predicament is debatable). Various facets of the industrial revolution gave the United States middle class citizen more income than they need (and by the widest margin in the history of having income (in the form of money)). Based on U.S. census averages, our necessary expenditures break down as follows: 17% of our income on food, 21% on housing, and 15% on cars. This leaves 47% of our income “expendable.” Certainly you can argue about just how necessary the car is—or could be—in the above figures, along with the choice of not including other “necessities” like digital communication tools: computers or cell phones, TV or cable service, et cetera.
What most of us are able to ignore or forget in this “consumption,” is that all we’re really consuming is that same old food and drink from 100,000 years ago. The difference with our waste, then to now, is that not only could the earth reuse that pre-historic waste, but it was actually beneficial to do so, it was nourishing to the earth and benign to us. Most of the waste we create now is dangerous or deadly to us and the earth. We often call this kind of waste pollution.
A question might leap to mind: how is this possible? If we are indeed a part of nature (undeniable), and we’ve been using natural resources that have always been on the planet to make what we make (equally true), then what are we doing wrong? how is it so dangerous? The answer, it turns out, is that we’re just not thinking about our future, or not putting any value on it when deciding how to make what we make. In efforts to make things as efficiently as possible, to achieve a limited set of productions goals (often cost and profit related), we make poor decisions. These decisions have led scientists and tinkerers alike to make combinations of things that nature never made before we came along. As when Leo Baekeland mixed tarry carbolic acid and formaldehyde in this garage in Yonkers to make the first commercially made plastic: “Bakelite.” Leo’s process (and those of the rest of the world’s chemists soon at work trying to make their own polymer breakthrough) did not put much thought into what would be done with the stuff once it was no longer useful. In other words, as a species, we’re making poor design decisions.
So let’s look at just what it is we buy, briefly address how it’s made, and what pollution that creates. First our food: industrially grown and processed plants, industrially fed and processed animals, both shipped over great distances for our convenience, some shipped and processed under refrigeration in an effort both to keep it fresher longer, as well as to combat the time taken up in processing and shipping.2