An economy of waste

In this episode we explore the paradox that we live in an economy that requires us to be uneconomical…

I’m sitting in my favourite cafe on a Saturday morning, writing this. I’ve been up for several hours already and haven’t eaten anything yet, so I’m in need of a literal ‘break-fast’. The catch, here, is that although their prices are good, their portions are enormous. And I grew up at a time when none of us could afford in any way to waste any food, so yeah, to avoid that old guilt I’m going to have to eat it all. I’m already overweight as it is, yet much of what should be excess waste will end up as excess waist instead. Oh well.

My doctor tells me that I now really need to watch my weight. So I drag out the old electronic scales from under the bath, only to discover that it’s so long since I last used it that the battery’s died. I turn it over, to discover that its battery compartment is held tight by tiny non-standard screws, and nothing that I have here will take them out. There’s no repair-service anywhere for this stuff now, and buying a drill to get the screws out would be far more expensive than buying a new scales, so the latter is what I’ll have to do. What a waste. Oh well.

Yet that excess is everywhere around here. Every few days there’s yet another email from a camping-store I visited a few times a few years ago, endlessly exhorting me to buy yet more camping-stuff that I can’t afford and don’t actually need anyway.

I go to the other local supermarket where most of the prices are low enough that I can afford to buy most of the basics that I need. But their other shelves are stuffed full of, well, stuff, basically.. Clearance-sales of stuff whose purpose just isn’t clear. On-sale ‘specials’ that don’t seem especially special. You know: stuff. Lots and lots and lots of stuff.

Oh, sure, there’s a lot of stuff in there that I would have liked to have, back in the days when I still had a real income and still had a house of my own for friends to visit and share. In amongst that lot there’s kitchenware that did indeed look good; all kinds of small delicacies that would definitely delight; gadgets galore that would help to keep my place more tidy and clean. From time to time there’s even stationery amongst those rows of short-term shelves, to feed that particular lifelong addiction of mine. Enticing indeed.

The reality, though, is that it’s just yet more stuff. Stuff that I might want, sure; but almost none of it is anything that I’d actually need. If I did buy it, most of it would just sit in a corner somewhere, unused, until it ends up in landfill in the cleanup before the next house-move. What a waste…

One of the few good things about now living on a very tight budget in a rental-house that never feels like a home is that that distinction between want and need has become a lot more clear than it had been before. Other than essentials for work, and to just plain survive, I just don’t buy so much any more. And not so much because I can’t afford it, but because there’s no point in doing so. The hardest realisation, perhaps, is that there never was much point in the first place. That’s hard.

What’s perhaps even harder is a bleak realisation about just how our so-called ‘the economy’ needs us to not notice that there’s no point. That that so-called ‘the economy’ depends on us not being economical.

What a waste…

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Yet that’s the trap: if we’re not uneconomical, the economy doesn’t work.

If I (and others, of course) don’t go to the cafe, the cafe doesn’t need to exist. If the cafe doesn’t exist, there are no jobs at the cafe.

There’s also no need for supply of ingredients or other resources to the cafe - so if that happens to other cafes too, then there’s no need for that kind of suppliers, or the trucks who supply them, and so on. So all of those jobs vanish.

The same for everything to do with the supermarket - not just the suppliers, but the growers too, and all the people who make that stuff somewhere that sits on those middle shelves in the supermarket.

And when all of those jobs vanish, there’s no-one left to buy anything from any other cafe, or to buy all that unnecessary stuff in other supermarkets or shops or whatever. So they all vanish too.

And when that happens, there’s nothing left for governments to base their taxes on, or for the parasites to excise away as ‘their profit’ for doing nothing useful at all.

The only way this mess can work - or seem to work, at any rate - is to get people to keep consuming more and more and more of all that stuff that they now neither need nor want. The only way to keep them consuming more and more, and to make more room for yet more of that stuff, is to get them - or, increasingly now, force them - to keep throwing more things away. It’s an ‘economy’ that has no concept of actual economy, but instead is built upon, and entirely dependent upon, more and more and ever more wastefulness. Almost literally, an economy of waste.

Not A Good Idea?

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And yes, there’s another trap here. An even more worrying trap…

This economy of waste has succeeded, really, really well. Sort-of, anyway.

It’s really successful at creating what it calls ‘growth’.

It’s really successful at creating waste.

It’s really successful at getting people to consume more and more and ever more.

It’s also really successful in creating profits for the parasites.

Which is why it’s really popular with all of those parasites who run this so-called ‘economy’.

Yet all of that success is only in the short-term, though. Because if we look any further into the future than that - anything more than maybe just a couple of decades ahead from now - then yeah, it’s not looking so good…

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This economy of waste just doesn’t work. Whichever way we look at it, it actually cannot work. And it should be obvious to everyone by now that we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet: there were real warnings about this decades ago, and we’re already consuming the world much faster than it can replenish itself. So yeah, we need to turn this around, as fast as we possibly can.

And yes, we can do this. It’s not like this vast over-consumption is inevitable - in fact for the most part it was actually invented, back in the 1920s or so, and only really took off in a big way in the US post-war economic-boom. We don’t have to have this insanely uneconomic ‘economy of waste’: and if it was just an invention in the first place, well, let’s invent an alternative that actually works! That’s a real task that, between us all, in every small way, we can all set out to tackle right now.

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