The more we consume, the more we pollute

From waste to pollution

Waste and waste and waste

We've just seen how we're lured into buying short-lived items by our waste society, but there's more to it: that's not enough in this horrid system that's become a vicious circle, there's never enough to meet the needs of productivity; a new form of perversion of the system came about in the 70's: if producing the useful is not enough, then produce the superfluous!

Business people soon realized how easy it was to make consumers craze for a trendy product and have learnt to bombard slogans to entice people to feel they nedd their fashion gizmos. The media have of course played a great part in this marketing, plenty of programmes dedicated to a rampant consumerism: homeshopping channels, TV game shows, all these tend to give the idea that consuming is key to happiness.

Ironically, the most trivial gadgets are often the most expensive. Fashion victims blindly go for the newest craves and spend carelessly. This need to do like everybody, to be in style and lose one's free will and common sense sounds almost like pathological mass hysteria.

That's like a drug: the offer generates the demand and vice versa, as if there were a tacit complicity between the dealer and the consumer.

Modern man has become addicted: to TV, DVDs, GSM mobile phones, sophisticated electronic gizmos, de GPS, TV recorders, photoscopes or digital cameras, computers. And a full market to feed the system and continue to propose innovative techniques and create a feeling of frustration.

It's all a pure rage with manufacturers creating new items and consumers who are obsessed by the newest trends: launching one new item every 6 months for the formers and keeping up-to-date for the latters...

A golden rule we must always bear in mind:

This our consumption-waste society keeps producing huge amounts of wastes. In the western industrialized countries, the annual average amount of garbage per head is about half a tonne^[5]. True, some of these are organic but less than 40% are really recycled.

These wastes are not only what we dump at home but appliances and items that can't be easily disposed of: PCs, TV sets, bed bases and the like...

We all know those breaker's yards, rusted metal parts that could be recycled. And there are plenty of such yards for various types of bulky garbage, some of which containing polluting substances. No real policy exists to tackle this growing issue, no proper statistics, only esmates but they seem to represent about 100 millions of tonnes.^[6]

Saddly, the fact is we intentionnally produce short-lived items that are meant to be disposable or quickly thrown away, the quicker, the better for manufacturers and sellers.

In the past, things were meant to last, the craftman's son would inherit his father's tools. The houses and the furniture were made of sustainable and long lasting raw materials and were passed on from to the next generation. Today, everything is disposable or temporary, as if we were only to rent things for a while.

Дата добавления: 2015-05-07