Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Plastics
What kind of a society do we want to be? Sometimes, when I start waxing poetic about reusing, recycling, slowing down someone will say to me, “yeah- but if everyone did that the markets would collapse.”
Hmmm… I’m not an economist, but it doesn’t take a genius to see our world is a topsy-turvy, out of whack- or at the very least, askew. We buy more cheap goods every day, meanwhile we can’t pay for college or healthcare or housing. We are supposedly a rich country, but stuff isn’t the only measure of wealth.
I was blown away while reading Bill Gates’s book (passed on to me from a client) about the environment. As we all know, driving is bad for the environment, but where do most greenhouse gases come from? Production: steel and plastic.
Oh, plastic. We just can’t quit you. But we should.
I dragged my son to Unique Thrift in the Bronx to buy him kitchen things for his first college-apartment. “Is it really cheaper than Target?” he asked, looking at a plain, white, cereal bowl. Maybe not, but that really isn’t the point. The stuff we got him was nice enough and non-descript enough that he can claim it is from Target, or my kitchen if he wants… but we didn’t buy MORE CHEAP STUFF from China. I know, we are only one step away from that, but hey, what if everyone started buying more stuff second hand? Does Target improve the economy because it is a publicly held company, while Unique isn’t? Maybe if we all started shopping there it could go public? Or maybe the stock market isn’t the only measure of our economic health? I don’t know all the answers, but I’m pretty sure that cheap-shiny-stuff is the new opiate of the masses, and I wanna just say, “No.”
I’ve often thought that part of my work is to help my clients not just to organize, but to look at the root cause, which is often the sheer volume of stuff they are dealing with, and that the answer is to buy less. Very few people I know actually NEED anything. Most people could probably live with what they already own for a long time and be perfectly comfortable. So, think about the landfill, think about the factory where this object you desire is made, think about a worthy cause that you could donate to instead of buying that item. Maybe you’ll think about all of those things and still buy it… but maybe sometimes you won’t, and that will be a little bit of progress, which is better than none at all.