This is just kind of a public rant... I don't know if it will go anywhere or yield anything productive. You have been warned. : P
I absolutely hate waste.
I mean HATE it. Nothing gets a bug up my ass worse than looking around at our modern capitalistic society and watching how much is flat out wasted through the philosophy of designed obsolescence.
My parents grew up in the great depression. Both of them had a packrat mentality, "dont throw it out you might use it someday" suitable for conditions of scarcity.
They had it even to a pathological level - a house filled with more stuff than room for people, every room full of boxes of organized, labeled "stuff we may use someday" which never came.
When they died I eventually had to throw most of it out. I hated doing that. I wish I could have given it to someone who could have made any kind of use for it at all, but nobody wanted it. Often I literally spent/lost money driving something to someone to give for free, then I had to stop doing that because I couldn't afford to anymore. I just hated to see it wasted.
Some of that stuff was curated collections. My mom was a lifelong person obsessed with sewing, spent like 40 years collecting everything you could imagine from rare buttons to sewing patterns. She had collections of things that
SHOULD have been of high interest to anyone else interested in those things, but when push came to shove, there wasn't time to wait for someone interested to take it all, so it mostly got trashed. I didn't have time to learn about it, research it's value, wait for ebay pickups, I just posted it "free to take" but nobody was
local enough to pick it up and I couldn't afford to keep driving pickup loads to someone at a loss. A week after I paid money to throw it away someone responded but it was too late.
My dad was a mechanic, when he worked in the auto center of a large corporation there was a time they had to smash all kinds of expensive test equipment that was STILL WORKING AND FUNCTIONAL merely so the corporation could write it off the bottom line as things removed from the market, otherwise the government wouldn't let them take the tax break.
...
I was at the metal recycler the other day dropping off some cans. I saw all this beautiful artistic wrought ironwork that was all 100+ years old just sitting in a pile waiting to be shipped out. Next to it was a box full of broken tools from the 60's - stuff like when the highest quality steel was made in the US. I'm sure it will all be shipped to china and used to make some total bullsh_t or something, like a garbage can or some spinning metal trinket to hang on the porch or turned into rebar to end up in chinese
concrete that will probably crumble in a year in one of those empty cities nobody even lives in, that $60 trillion property bubble the chinese govt encourages people to invest in because that's just their culture to invest in real estate without even looking at it first sometimes.
All I keep thinking is "what an absolute and utter total waste..."
I could go on and on, there are documentaries on this very thing - like about how most of the clothing in the US is chucked after being worn a dozen times or less, or even donated stuff to thrift stores gets shipped overseas or shredded, or the sheer amount of our electronic and computer waste, typically polluting and being dangerously recycled in china or africa under dodgy conditions.
Is this really the best we can do as a world?
Of all the things that piss me off over the particular nature of our global capitalism - it's been the sheer waste. I can even understand on some level the wanting to acquire lots of stuff, have lots of stuff, enjoy all your stuff - the mindset that really gets to me is when something good that someone else could still use, especially in a world of scarcity, gets flat out wasted. It's one thing to mine a metal (polluting), manufacture taking
alot of
energy, and then use an object for decades or even generations. It's another to do all that and then create more pollution and energy waste to destroy it and replace it when it's not even worn out. Do you know it apparently takes more total embodied energy to create a car or pickup than it will use in fuel it's entire life? Stupid crap like 'cash for clunkers' taking vehicles off the road so you buy a more MPG efficient one' dont actually save energy, they waste the already embodied energy which already created pollution in it's day. There's an economic incentive sure, just like subsidizing ethanol fuel from corn which is also a net loser of total energy to benefit some insider. But in a world trying to make sense such a strategy would be seen as STUPID.
I assume people are here to talk about solutions that aren't popular and aren't stupid though.
I've often wondered if some entire global market could exist for what we might call "everything one step from the scrap pile". Like a last chance market that if someone anywhere could find a use for something, they could say "sure i'll at least pay you scrap value plus 50% to pull and store that for me until I can get to it". Whether the use was artistic (like that wrought iron I mentioned) or practical (my moms sewing collection) or anything else.
I find myself thinking there must be some minimal cost way to get something needed eventually to the people who need it, if they need it cheap instead of fast. I brainstorm up silly (or not?) things like, we have an Uber for people to share their car as a taxi at times, well I bet you could have some discount 'slow freight' system bringing labeled boxes at a time halfway across the country for someone taking a trip anyways who wants to get a little gas money back for driving a little out of the way on both sides of the trip and whose SUV is just carrying them at the moment. I bet you could have a similar 'slow warehouse' system where people just rent half their garage to help store stuff en route if it has to hub-and-spoke from one major
city to another where it changes hands, just like the mail trucks do. And you could coordinate all of it with a couple of programmed apps and databases calculating minimum fuel costs, expected delivery delays, and other stuff. None of it would be as safe or fast as mainstream postal services but were talking about stuff originally destined for a junkyard so would it really be the end of the world if so?
There's no money in such a system, it'd have to be open source everything, figured out by people who can program up apps and systems either kept alive by volunteers or by some kind of petty credit thing - like if you host a server for the trading network, you get a few bitcoin-equivalent type internal credits to buy a few virtual dollars of someone else's useful junk you see on the site. There's always ways to incentivize volunteers I mean.
I know i'd happily participate in such a network, i'd think a world of less waste should be so much of a universal good everyone would be for it, but I don't have any way to build it or start a ball rolling.
So all I can do is rant for the moment... : P
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