#9 – The Disposable Society

How many trips a day do you make to the trash can? How many times have you not been able to recycle that bottle that you just finished? One of the greatest failing of our economy is that it prefers the disposability and convenience over quality. Just look at the most expensive things on the market today. Everything from laptops to fruit cups all is more expensive than buying a bag of apples and cutting them yourselves. This practice of consumption is the main reason why we have so many environmental issues, and why the health of the average American person is in decline.

Fast Foods are the poster industry for the disposable industry.

Let’s take a look at one of the egregious followers of this consumption trend, fast food restaurants. The first thing to realize about fast food restaurants is that they are not selling food. Places like McDonalds and Burger King are not in the business of creating quality food.  When you are ordering your Big Mac you are not ordering a burger, rather you are ordering consistency and convenience. We all know that you could probably find a better or similar tasting burger elsewhere, but we continue to go to these fast food places mainly because you know what you get and it is relatively convenient. But the price of that convenience is cleverly undersold to the consumer. Fast Food restaurants are the largest purchaser of beef (a natural depleting industry on its own), products are loaded with additives and fat to make them taste better, and are meticulously put together and package into an assembly line burger.  Not to mention the plastic cups, water usage, waste, and all the other natural detriments that occur from calf cradle to the wrapping of the burger. Afterwards we throw away our wrappers and cups to go to the nearest landfill where it will probably be for the next century. The fast food industry is a disposable industry mainly because the product is unimportant only the convenience of the product.

The world is full of land to be used up and then abandon.

Webster defines disposable as an item that is ‘design to be used once and then thrown away.’ There is no life cycle cost of a disposable object; there is only the bottom line of convenience. The product is only as important as it satisfied a minimum requirement; the product is actually the disposability of the product. Just think of other products that are similar to the fast food case: laptops, candy bars, processed foods, pre-prepared foods, cars, buildings, and etc.  A lot of these types of products are traditional disposable. Take a building for instance. A building typically design for a lifespan from anywhere from 20 to 100 years. But little is traditionally though of the life cycle cost of a building, in fact when a building is design and construction the only factors that are considered are the construction costs yet buildings need constant maintenance a steady supply energy, and water. On top of that after the building passed its prime a decision needs to be made to renovate or demolish because no life cycle plans were made for the building. Owners will find it cheaper to demolish the building even though the building materials will just end up in some landfill slowly decomposing. But if that building had a life cycle plan, the materials used in the building could be salvaged more effectively or allow for cheaper renovation.

Recycling gets you more bang for your buck, not convenience.

There are plenty of less disposable systems out there in the world. For example take the glass bottle industry in other countries. Glass bottles are usually used for beers and sodas but are expensive to manufacture. So instead of manufacturing glass bottles, companies set up a cycle to reused returned bottles. After all it is a lot cheaper to clean and refill a glass bottle then it is to create on. The process is less convenient because you have to return your waste, but the product not only has a lower cost, but a lower environmental impact. People are no longer buying convenience but the actual product. You don’t need the glass bottle but you need what’s in it. In this type of process the waste is reduce significantly because the life cycle cost of the bottle is consider and the bottle is used to its fullest potential. Disposability and convenience is not important but the efficiency of the system is now the deciding factor.

Convenience will ultimately lead into a dead end.

The American society is dependent on disposability and convenience. The easier and timelier products always become the dominant product in the market place. Cars were more convenient then trains and passenger services, plastic bottles are cheaper to produce then glass bottles, corn syrup is cheaper then sugar. These consumer shifts have resulted in a less safe, less healthy environment has well as a less healthy society.

The Disposable Trash Can. What will they think up next?

#8 - The Natural Capital Crisis

Many of the economics of today depend on questions of 'how much wealth do we have'. The economy of a nation is determined by how much it produces or how many customers they serve. The metrics comes down to estimating the value in monetary growth; “how much have we made the past year?” The purpose is to measure the increase in value of our country and to take pride in false since of economic security. The reality of the matter is that we are losing value rather than gaining value. There are valuable resources being destroyed in order to provide the next fad technology, or extravagant lifestyles that are only allowed due to the perceived economic wealth of the country. Economics is essentially limited by physics. Matter can neither be created or destroyed. So if the economy is growing, it is growing at the expense of something else. Natural capital is the energy that fuels economic growth, and the fact that the world doesn't put a value on our natural capital is leading to crisis.

Mountain Top Remmoval For Coal Stripping the Land Bare

Ignoring the true value of the nation has been done before throughout its history. One can put forward that slavery was a crisis of human capital, not just a moral or sovereignty challenge. Lincoln didn’t argue against the morals of slavery, but the economics of slavery. If you could get a slave to complete a hard labor task, there would be no reason to invest in more efficient machine or system to replace the laborer. In the system of slavery, the labor is free and inherited like property. Why buy an expensive machine to farm tobacco, when we have free labor to do the same work? The system was ultimately unsustainable for the simple fact that because there was no value in the human capitol there would be no value in investing in it. For the exception of the slaves brought up to do more administrative task, slaves were not educated by their masters and were only giving enough food and clothing to efficiently complete the labor required of them.

The Crisis of Human Capital in the U.S.

Now if this is starting to sound familiar too you, then maybe not all hope is loss. Right now we have reached a new false stability in our economic system. It is the crisis of natural capital. Just look at the energy industry and you can see the parallels of abuse of the environment similar to how the system abused the slaves. Things such as trees, mountains, streams, and ground water cease to be describing in the romantic sense but in such grim terms as factors of production, sites, and raw materials. Nature is full of things to be used up and toss to the nearest landfill or storage facility.  There is no planning for how to take care of those resources or rather the water used as coolant will recharge, or the heat gained by the waste water won’t kill off plant and wildlife. These things are not considered because the world decapitalizes the value of nature in preference to that of financial capital (a societal construct to place a unifying value on things).

Natural Slavery

Look at some of the problems arising from not valuing our capital; nuclear waste, acid rain, smog, lead poisoning, asbestos,  CFCs, greenhouse gas emissions, drab bleak suburbia, deforestation, mountain blasting, asthma from dirty air, and the list can go on forever. To draw a parallel to the crisis of human capital, what were the various negative impacts of that period: oppression, unequal rights, illiteracy, racism, discrimination, poverty, health concerns, violence, and etc. The effects of slavery are still being experience today, and the effects of the natural capital crisis will definitely be similar in scope especially if the crisis isn’t solved. 
     A quick glance at current events, such as BP Gulf Oil Spill or Arkansas Fracking Earthquakes, reveal that problems are beginning to pile up. The problems of devaluing our natural resources in favor of economic growth from decades past are just now beginning to take hold.  The system has to allow for a change in how we value things and it can’t just be monetary. There is value in natural resources outside of being a factor of production mainly because we are part the environmental system. The same resources destroyed in the production of coal, is used to produce oxygen, provide a sense of wellbeing. The same waste water released into the environment, eventually leads back to us in drinking water. We should really start making the tough decision to tackle the natural capital crisis before it becomes another human capital crisis.

"We should really start making the tough decision to tackle the natural capital crisis before it becomes another human capital crisis."

#7 – The True Cost

The Gross National Product (GNP) has been used for decades to measure the growth of the economy and the improvement of the people who work, produce, and buy in that economy. But the GNP indicator only provides the “market” value of the services and products produced by labor and services. GNP only measure economic growth and nothing else. GNP doesn’t measure how technological advance, the improvements in poverty, economic distribution, economic justice, resource depletion, environmental degradation, nor does it take into account the negative effects of the economic growth. Economists make a basic assumption when using GNP, that economic growth is the only way to continue prosperity. Why economist have a fetish for only measuring one part of the economic system to draw such a broad conclusion is unfathomable?

To illustrate the point of how absorbed the use of GNP to measure prosperity, would be to take a completely fictional futuristic T.V. show, Star Trek. How would economist measure the prosperity of the universe in which Star Trek exist? From the apparent technological advances in science, information technology, travel, and quality of life, the planet Earth hasn’t been more prosperous despite the occasional alien attack. The economists today would rate the entire planet has a third world country. Why; because in that Universe, there is no gross national product. There is no “market” value in production. In fact in the Universe of Star Trek money has been abolished completely, because technology has advance to a state where economic growth is pointless, and only would be a detriment to society. Economic growth does not mean prosperity, or economic stability. Economic growth only means what it means, that the economy sold more than last year.   

"The economists today would rate the entire planet has a third world country."

Economic growth also has that hidden cost that nobody mentions for fear of being laugh at. Economic growth has several side effects such as, environmental disasters, overloading the environmental systems, social disorder, and economic disparity. The GNP fetish has been so intertwine in the conventional wisdom that any attempt to attach a social, or public cost to a product is considered heresy. The economic theory has failed and the economists haven’t realized it. The model is too simple and economists in their quest to simplify and understand the abstract invisible hand have forgotten that the economy doesn’t measure wealth or prosperity. It measures only part of the environment and a new theory needs to prevail in order to adjust the model to fit the needs of the day.

"The model is too simple and economists in their quest to simplify and understand the abstract invisible hand have forgotten that the economy doesn’t measure wealth or prosperity"

GNP after all is a number; it is the people that put value into that number. GNP can be more meaningful if it reflected the true cost of production. What if GNP not only took into account production but also the results of that production? How would the growth trend look then when the cost of pollution is added?  How would that trend look when it also represents the displacement of communities due to shifting industries? How would the growth be affected when looking at the wars caused by the increase in the “market” value of food? GNP is just a number and has no social or environmental constraints. Using GNP has anything but the amount of goods produce, is unsustainable.