What is Waste?

Currently, we are producing much more waste than ever before: A study by the World Bank has shown that ten years ago there were 2.9 billion urban residents who generated about 0.64 kg of municipal solid waste per person per day (0.68 billion tons per year). This report estimates that today these amounts have increased to about 3 billion urban residents generating 1.2 kg per person per day (1.3 billion tons per year). By 2025 this will likely increase to 4.3 billion urban residents generating about 1.42 kg (3.1 pounds) per capita per day of municipal solid waste (2.2 billion tons per year). Just imagine those numbers: 1.42 kg (3.1 pounds) of solid waste per person per day! The prediction is if we don't change our consumption or recycling habits, solid waste production will exceed 11 million tons per day by the end of this century. Since the process of urbanization will continue now and in the near future, an increasing amount of waste will be produced that cannot be easily discarded. As the cities grow into megacities (most drastically in East Asia), new ways of dealing with the rising masses of garbage will have to be developed that will allow people to live in cities, without being stuck in their own waste.

In the U.S. alone, every individual produces on average of 4.38 pounds of waste per day, of which only one third is recycled or composted. The average American also discards 70 pounds of textiles per year, which means about 1.3 pounds per week! This doesn't only include clothes (whether used, outgrown or unused), but also any other kinds of fabrics like bed sheets, tablecloths, curtains, etc. Unfortunately, most of these textiles (85%) do not get recycled properly, but end up in the regular trash and then serve as part of landfills. How can we explain this huge amount of waste? What causes this attitude of purchasing and subsequent discarding? And what does it say about us as humans that we randomly buy and throw away things without much consideration for the effects on the global economy or our planet? Considering that many of us struggle financially, it is even more astounding that the amount of garbage we produce keeps rising steadily.

Clever advertisements make us believe that it raises our social standing, if we get all those outfits, gadgets, games, or devices that are currently trending and give us more satisfaction with life and more confidence in ourselves. We often cannot ignore those never-ending, spectacular sales that give us much more than we actually need for a great price. So we may end up with four beach chairs instead of two, two umbrellas instead of one, 20 new plates instead of ten, etc., etc. Consumerism is so deeply ingrained in our culture, that it is almost inconceivable to abandon it. Shopping has become a type of social outing that is also used for bonding. While buying and shopping is part of every day life and most people don't think twice about a purchase, peer pressure and brand consciousness also plays its part. Refraining from buying anything on a shopping trip, may spoil the mood for everyone involved or look odd. In addition, shopping serves not only the material satisfaction of owning a certain good, but it also fulfills a deeper emotional void.

A recent study maintained that more than half of Americans say they have shopped and spent money in order to improve their mood, but not because they actually needed what they purchased. Emotional buying and thoughtless shopping lead to people accumulating a lot of things that in the end, will not use. For many, the act of buying itself has become a hobby. It is casually called "retail therapy" and refers to an emotional need to buy when we are depressed, anxious, sad, angry, in a bad mood or simply bored. Research suggests that retail therapy actually works, meaning that many people really experience positive emotional effects through shopping. The TV reality show with the same name depicts people having this obsession of constantly buying things (mostly clothes) and how it affects them and their lives. Many of them keep the purchased goods piled high in their wardrobes and/or stacked in numerous garbage bags, since they cannot fit them anywhere else. They don't even get to make use of them, because they obsessively buy new ones which makes the other (still new ones) obsolete. As a result of this uncontrollable drive, some individuals completely indebt themselves, deplete their funds, and have to declare bankruptcy. So in the end, even if retail therapy may work by improving their mood temporarily, it does not seem like a sound solution to a set of much deeper problems that such individuals face. In the end, this drive seems more closely related to social issues like forms of alienation from family, friends, and psychological issues related to self-confidence and self-acceptance.

One major side-effect of this mindless shopping is that people's homes get cluttered with all the stuff that is not being used. Entire basements and garages contain the results of this trend. Some better organized individuals manage to maintain a clutter-free home by getting rid of stuff regularly by donating or gifting it to less fortunate, while they still keep purchasing more and more things that they again don't really need. It is an infinite cycle of buying and discarding, which doesn't make sense, especially considering its drastic negative economic and environmental impact.

The trend of overbuying doesn't stop with imperishable good, but unfortunately also includes food items. Just like clothes and all other kinds of things, an enormous amount of food is wasted in the Western world every day. A study of 2013 showed that almost 50% of all food production ends up as waste every year. The reason is not only the tendency of people to purchase more than they need, inadequate storage facilities or too strict guidelines for food sales, but also Western consumer's demand for cosmetically perfect-looking food. The lack of appeal to consumers was responsible for more than 30% of all crops produced in the UK in 2013 to not even get harvested! The amount of food thrown away in the world per year ends up being worth around 1 trillion USD per year. This trend means that every 1 in 4 calories produced will be disposed of, instead of consumed. It also means that every year, consumers in industrialized countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (222 million vs. 230 million tons). In the U.S. alone 30-40% of all food is wasted, equaling more than 20 pounds per person per month. Even for American school children studies have shown that about 1/3 of their packed lunch is not consumed, but discarded before it is even touched every day. 

One of the answers to these versions of mindless consumerism is freeganism. Freegans not only reject the economic system that produced this types of consumption, but rather than contributing to further waste production, they curtail garbage and pollution, reducing the over-all volume of the humongous waste stream. Freegans usually include groups of conscious residents of big cities who are very concerned about the social and ecological effects of our consumption economy. Amongst each other, they share valuable insights into the garbage disposal system on the local levels with their peers: e.g. information about who throws away the best (still good) sushi, most delicious bread, best vegetables, etc. But they also disagree with the individualism that our way of life has created and want to revive some aspects of communal living. Freegans generally regard their so-called "food dives" as social events in which they collect still good and healthy foods from garbage disposals and afterwards prepare meals from the salvaged items for the entire group. The joint meal that follows is equally a celebration of their all-inclusive community as it is a celebration of saving perfectly good food or other still useful manufactured items from being wasted. These items may include beverages, books, toiletries, magazines, comic books, newspapers, videos, kitchenware, appliances, music (CDs, cassettes, records, etc.), carpets, musical instruments, clothing, rollerblades, scooters, furniture, vitamins, electronics, animal care products, games, toys, bicycles, artwork, and many more things that are still okay to use and will not cause any health threats. Although digging through garbage is most likely not appealing to everyone, saving perfectly good items from being discarded every day seems like a very reasonable and rational thing to do. In the bigger picture of the planet's destruction through mindless garbage production and ecological threats, this way of life seems to make perfect sense. While freegans are usually politically awakened individuals who actively seek an alternate life-style, this way of optimizing discarded surplus does only reach a small portion of needy groups who cannot afford to feed themselves and their families at market prices. In order to make these foods available to a much bigger portion of disadvantaged individuals, a better organized system of food donations must be created that would help meet two ends: less wasted food and fewer families in need.

Another, different way of not to get caught up in the spiral of consumption and production of waste is to become self-sufficient. A few months ago, I noticed a blog by an impressive young woman who refuses to produce any waste at all. As a student of environmental studies in NYC, she realized one day at lunch that a broad range of individuals produced a lot of unnecessary waste, even though they packed their own meals. As reaction to the thousands of snack bags and plastic forks, aluminium wrap that she saw being used, she decided to go garbage free. She refused to produce any garbage at all by cooking at home, buying in bulk, bringing her own containers to the stores, and by manufacturing all the toiletries that she needs every day herself (creams, make-up, tooth paste, shampoo, etc.). Since all her organic waste gets composted, her clothes are bought and sold at second hand-stores, and she rides her bicycle to get around, and she manages to live a "zero-waste" kind of life. By becoming self-sufficient or autarkic, she can completely avoid the economy that engages in the endless cycle of consuming and discarding goods. Heads-off to this young lady, who can lives on zero waste! 

As this year's Earth Day that just passed a few days ago, all the media information made us aware of the ecological state of affairs of our planet. It has become clear that if we do not change our consumption habits drastically in the near future, our planet is in real trouble. It is frightening to think about the enormous amounts of foods and manufactured goods that are being wasted in the Western world every day. We have to do everything we can to possibly to save our planet, which includes little things like bringing your own bags to the grocery store, recycling your paper, bottles, batteries, plastic, abstaining from buying water in plastic bottles, and reducing our waste as much as possible. But it also includes more drastic measures like breaking our cycles of buying things that we do not need, and addressing the underlying social causes for such behavior patterns. It includes teaching our children to develop a more responsible attitude towards ourselves as humans and our planet. In addition, we much also seed for national and global measures to help better distribute the surplus to the people in need. Ideally these solutions will be also linked to the need for foods and manufactured goods in other parts of the world.

What is Safety?

In a world where police officers shoot people they have prejudices against, where individuals get assassinated because they express their opinions openly, where pilots crash planes on purpose, and where people get arrested for allowing their children to walk home from school unsupervised, issues of safety are a top priority. While the degree of actual threat varies greatly depending on neighborhood, social class, ethnic identity, racial appearance, economic background, sexual preference, and gender, we are all united in the high concern for our own safety and that of our family and friends. As best we can, we try to regulate our environment by controlling the social world that we engage in. The general rule for this is: The more expensive the neighborhood and the home property prices, the lower the crime rate and the better the school district. Although this helps asserting a feeling of increased security, there is no guarantee that a higher-end neighborhood will actually prevent you from any kind of harm. You can never completely control your environment and have to live with the fact that in the end, something could happen (and it does), even in the most expensive neighborhoods. Despite any efforts, you still may encounter random school shootings, abductions or any other random acts of violent aggression.

Constant concerns for the physical safety of children turn parenting into a special challenge. While helping on the National Incidence Study of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART 2) as a research assistant more than a decade ago, I learned that 1,315,600 children went missing in the U.S. during the period from 1997-1999. The enormous number can partially be explained by the fact that it also included children that voluntarily ran away from home and those that were missing for more than an hour due to misunderstandings between child and caretaker, but reappeared. Last year's number for missing children, whose absence had been reported to the authorities, amounted to 466,949, which means close to half a million! So far this year, Amber Alert helped recover 758 missing children. These numbers demonstrate that the perceived threat to our kids' physical safety is real and has to be taken very seriously.

Another danger that we think about quite some time, and that unfortunately becomes real all too often, is gun violence. Many of the incidences could be easily prevented with stricter gun laws. This would alleviate us from the worry about angry criminals roaming the streets waiting to kill someone (or like in our neighborhood recently a suicidal, armed veteran who roamed the area close to the local elementary school). The change in legislation would make guns less accessible and prevent many of the violent incidences that occur in a heated moment when there is easy access to a gun. Often times fatalities happen unintentionally, because of simple avoidable mistakes like storing guns inappropriately and not keeping ammunition separate from firearms. Remember the unfortunate incident last year when a 9-year old girl shot her shooting instructor with a machine gun in Arizona? Or the more recent incident from last December when a 2-year old boy unintentionally shot his mother in a Walmart store with a loaded gun that his mother carried around in her purse while shipping? Unfortunately, there are many more horrific, unforgettable incidences, like school shootings, drive by shootings and lethal hostage crisis that further highlight the danger of accessibility of firearms.

Even if we act responsibly and are successful in raising our kids to become upright and respectful citizens, we cannot control our environment and guarantee that we or our children are safe. No wonder that as a result, parents often become overprotective of their children. The constant fear that something could happen to them while playing outside, keeps parents worried non-stop. In other countries that have a much lower crime rate and where guns are far more regulated than in the U.S. (like Scandinavian countries or Germany), children of all ages have a lot more freedoms and parents worry much less. Kids there are encouraged and taught how to use public transport alone, how to ride their bikes to friends' houses (even if that may be a few miles away) and how to walk to a shop unaccompanied. Nobody in these cultural environments finds this dangerous, irresponsible or unadvisable. In fact, studies have confirmed that it helps kids to learn how to become responsible, independent, and find their place in society. The current generation of children in the U.S. not only does not have a life similar to those children, but they also don't have a life similar to that of their own parents who enjoyed many of the same freedoms that kids in other countries still have. Due to the understanding of safety in the U.S., kids have a very structured life where they go from one supervised activity to the next and barely have any unstructured time. While this method assures us that they are accounted for, it also deprives them of acquiring many skills learned by free play they will need as adults. We have yet to see, what kind of effect this will have once this generation enters the workforce.

But today's threats on personal safety do not come from violence alone, but also from the foods that we consume. Often times we don't check carefully which foods go in our mouth and may not be aware that we stuff ourselves with harmful ingredients. Lots of foods are genetically modified, enriched (with chemicals) or processed in ways that are dangerous to our bodies. While many of us check the labels and try to protect ourselves from as many harmful substances as possible, often times information about certain ingredients becomes confusing, and as consumers we don't really know what is safe and what not. In those moments, the thought in my head is often, 'If official/authorities allow foods to contain these ingredients, then they cannot be so bad, right? After all, they are the experts and they wouldn't want to people to get sick.' But should we really trust this inner voice? In some other nations food labeling and identifying harmful foods undergoes much stricter guidelines than in the U.S.. I remember in a Danish supermarket that Heinz ketchup had a big neon sticker across the label indicating that the product contained high fructose corn syrup and that the local authorities highly discouraged the consumption of this product, because this ingredient was harmful. The point is, consumer self-education to a certain point has to be expected, but it should also be in the interest of the authorities here in the U.S. to create awareness and educate. They should alert us about potentially dangerous foods and prevent these foods to enter the market while instead directing consumers to cleaner and healthier choices. If no attention is raised about harmful ingredients, serious health hazard remain disguised.

Another threat that has become very real for many families is that more and more kids grow up with dangerous, sometimes fatal food allergies. I got to know a family with a child haunted by severe peanut allergy. For the kids it could be fatal just by coming in contact with peanuts or food containing them and by coming in contact with something that had touched peanuts or foods containing them. For this particular family it meant that the mother accompanied the child everywhere to supervise the surroundings and make sure that it was safe, at least until school age. Once the child started Kindergarten, the mother still came to school to observe the child's lunch and eliminate potential threats. Since a drastically increasing number of children suffer from allergies, more and more parents have to send separate snack packages for their child to those birthday parties that they attend, pass on eating and drinking instructions to the supervising parents before playdates, and have to trust that they will remember this significant information. All these considerations lead to constant worries on behalf of the parents, something that earlier generations of parents did not have to do.

What does this all mean? That we as individuals, consumers, and parents should remember our right to the pursuit of happiness which clearly includes issues of safety. We should demand more protection against threats from guns and harmful foods that could be eliminated with the right kind of legislation. For officials and authorities it should be a clear priority to protect the rights of the people to personal safety and not place economic gains of big corporations before the needs of individuals. With stricter gun laws and higher health standards in place, we may even be able to revive some of the lost freedoms for our children and us.