A woman who rifles through New York’s garbage, exposing the city’s excesses
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I've gotten the lion's share of my furniture either from individuals or from Craigslist. Right now, I'm sitting in my kitchen eating lunch, on chairs that I did buy new, and looking around: my "decor" are plants, empty espresso roast cans, mason jars salvaged from sauces, and empty craft beer cans from various local breweries (we're lucky to have three or four per town, and they all have super-creative labels). This is after just getting home in a used luxury car, earlier today having woken up to a 70s Realistic clock radio, typing this post on an off-lease (but rock solid) ThinkPad, and so on.
The picture I'm trying to paint there will differ depending on your own attitudes towards the "waste" stream. Most people around me have commented positively on it - the furniture is "nice", from old-money brownstones in downtown; the beer can collection is a great conversation starter. But of course, there are still some (and luckily, seemingly, a minority) who can only see it as trash, a sign that I've "opted out" of basic economics, or at worst, that I just don't care enough about my appearance.
We take great pains to make sure we donate whatever we don’t need that isn’t really trash. What shocked me is that a lot of time the typical places like Salvation Army and Goodwill won’t even take stuff because they get too much! We had a perfectly good fridge to give away (everything working, clean, cosmetically near perfect - just didn’t fit in the new place we moved to) and literally no one would take it. Finally was able to give it to a friend of a friend.
EDIT: Also remembered that we tried to give away a commercial-grade dishwasher to Habitat for Humanity who build/rehab housing for low income folks. They politely explained that they couldn’t take it because it didn’t meet efficiency requirements. While I’m all for being efficient with power, it feels like a waste of resources in this case that could have gone towards more housing (it’s an issue of laws in CA).
I'm not convinced CVS throws away enough hair brushes and toothpaste (examples from the article) that they'd care about the incentives.
Keep in mind that homes for Habitat for Humanity go to low income people. Energy efficiency standards for appliances have made them drastically more efficient over the years, and it's probably not great to saddle low income people with higher energy bills.
In fact, a big problem with continued improvements in this area is that low income people are the most likely to be living with less efficient appliances, homes with inefficient heating, cooling and insulation, etc. and they also do not have the money to actually upgrade any of that and lower their bills.
I’ve probably bought more appliances in 15 years of home ownership than my parents did in 50.
There’s an incentive to get better test results by undersizing motors or fans that provide cooling.
The heat related stuff is easiest to see in consumer fridges and freezers.
The motor sizing stuff is easiest to see in washing machines. If you compare a model that is used for commercial laundromats like a Speed Queen to a like “consumer” washer, the Speed Queen will use 5-7% more power, due to a larger motor and heavier parts. It also costs less and includes a 5 year parts warranty.
Obviously energy regulatory stuff isn’t the only driver, but it’s a one dimensional regulatory framework that has bad consumer outcomes imho. (Unlike cars, where emissions controls made cars better)
In Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" they have this book scanning machine that just shreds the books then scans all the sheds super fast as they fly by and reassembled computationally the documents (like how DNA is read). Sometimes I worry about a future where this is possible with garbage and garbage mining is happening. Not only would a garbage mining company be able to sell the materials but the vast amounts of detailed very personal information stored discretely in each person or family's bag would also be invaluable. There would be economic motives to automate information retrevial from landfill garbage mining.
Depending on how far in the future this happens it could either be a privacy nightmare or a cultural treasure.
It's incredible to try and search for, say engineering practices we've lost, that happened only one or two generations ago. I'm sure there are buried textbooks that would uncover such practices that someone in academia thought, "Well it's probably time to throw this out."
There are buildings today constructed with materials processes that are exceptionally difficult to find information on.
The juice was pretty good though.
As far as food, I have known people who regularly go to drive-they’d, get 6 tacos, eat one or two and throw the other 4 away. I’ve accompanied some friends to dinner who routinely order large meals, eat a fraction and leave it at the table. This casual waste at the consumer level is even worse when you consider the proportion of food that didn’t even make it to a plate.
What I perceive is a common lack of appreciation of the total cost, in every sense, of creating any food item or consumer product. Any sort of production involves suffering for someone, whether it’s the lowest paid workers, local people and animals suffering the effects of pollution, or even the problem of roads and air congested by trucks carrying products that will eventually be 2/3s wasted.
It boggles my mind that with more organization and efficiency in distribution and usage, we could grow less food, but feed more people and eat more, yet most people don’t see any need to even try to change the system.
Luckily, most of the stuff I have is used/cheap or was obtained for free, though. I try to just accumulate less now, even if free.
What I've noticed with my dad is that most of the stuff he hoards, practically no one would want. Some of the stuff he hoards is valuable, but after a short term of hoarding, it gets damaged from neglect to a condition where no one would want it.
He knows that none of his children want the stuff, and he knows that I will be renting a trailer-sized dumpster to empty his house after he dies, he even knows he can't use the things himself, but he can't stop accumulating new things or get rid of any the things he already has. I believe his stuff is what will kill him. I've witnessed him trip on piles of stuff (think of his house like an ant farm, where there is only one narrow path to walk through). The air quality conditions are extremely terrible. He didn't even notice an ongoing water leak that was damaging valuable things.
I'm all for reduce/reuse/recycle, but in some instances it's a net gain just to throw things that might be perfectly good, away.
It's not the corporation, it's laws, it's sanitation and accountability, it's logistics. It's far more complex than she's either researched or would like to admit.
It doesn't make it any less embarrassing for these organizations though. We should be expecting them to do better than this.
> Sacks repeatedly comes back to the idea that retailers could give away unsold or lightly used, returned (but still good) items to their low-wage employees, instead of tossing them, or jumping through bureaucratic hurdles to donate them. This could be an “added perk”, she says, or an additional form of compensation, to bolster employees’ wages.
This perversely incentivizes the employees. I had an acquaintance who worked in retail in college. This was a large Midwestern store that sold everything from groceries to car parts to home stereos and TVs. They had a policy that if something was damaged it couldn’t be sold and the employees could take it for a significant discount. It wasn’t long before lots of items started having just enough damage to not be sold, but always on a part of the item where it wouldn’t be noticed when installed in your home. He was eventually fired for intentionally damaging stock.
“I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he would’ve given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, “Why are we here?” You want to know what I think your purpose is? It’s obvious. You’re here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse”
I don’t want to think of humanity as parasites on Earth, but we truly need to do better.
According to Wikipedia [0], the eponymous expression occurs in Chapter 25, "which describes the purposeful destruction of food to keep the price high:"
> [A]nd in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
The idea of taking in returns from customers and just throwing the product out seems absolutely insane to me.
And the food waste is just depressing. When there's so many hungry people in the world. I understand that distribution is a concern here, but this has to be a workable problem somewhere in here to reduce this waste.
> And the food waste is just depressing. When there's so many hungry people in the world
You hit on it, yourself. It's not like food I don't throw away is going to feed a starving orphan in a developing country. Those orphans aren't starving because the world doesn't produce enough food.
It takes far more energy in most cases to sort through, assess items, locate buyers and transport items then you could ever hope they'd be worth.
wait there's multiple: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/photos-visiting-the...
and yet none of these problems are unique to New York or about New York. These are transparently excesses of _capitalism_, not this city or that
> Because Sacks’s videos pull back the veneer of corporate pledges to commit to sustainability, they are often shared by followers who say capitalism is the root problem. But Sacks says she finds that argument “polarizing” and that it “immediately alienates” those who equate critiques of capitalism as endorsement of socialism or communism.
amazing. The name of the system we live under is unspeakable
The incentives are also very transparent. It takes no special insight or deep research to discern why grocery stores destroy edible food when they throw it out, or as happened recently in Portland, post armed guards at dumpsters. Artificial maintenance of scarcity through the destruction of overproduced goods is not a new or rare feature of the capitalism that we have.
That the volume and treatment of garbage on display here is a feature of our economic order should be no more controversial than observations about parallel features of it, like planned obsolescence.
Do you demand that people make recourse to personal experience with alternative economic systems every time someone mentions the business cycle, too?
It's reprehensible actions like these - total disrespect for life - that makes action against much vaster things, such as climate change, seem like Pyrrhic victories. People need to fixed just as much as climate and ecosystems.