#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?

#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.