When I promised you more Mollie Engelhart, I was anticipating drawing on a backlog of her earlier columns that I've marked for the purpose. But today's jumped out at me and took precedence. "When Did Everything Become Disposable?" is her reflections on the trend of travelling to an event empty-handed, buying everything needed at the site (coolers, tents, chairs, clothes), and abandoning it all when the event is over.
I worked at Coachella for years as a food vendor, and I watched some version of this happen every time. People would fly in from another state or another country, stop at Walmart or REI, buy everything they needed for the weekend, and then leave much of it behind. ... At Coachella, we actually used to get excited when the festival ended because other people’s waste was valuable to us. ... The person who bought a cooler, tent, or canopy on Friday saw garbage by Monday. I saw equipment I might use for another decade.
It would be easy to ... blame spoiled festivalgoers or “kids these days.” But then I look around my own house. ... I would never buy a tent and leave it in a field three days later. But how fundamentally different is the mountain of barely used stuff inside my own house? Maybe my version of the festival campground is simply accumulated over 11 years and hidden behind walls where nobody can take a drone photograph of it.
I don’t want to wag my finger at the people who left their tents behind. I want to ask what happened to all of us. ... Maybe what we have lost is bigger than our ability to recycle. We have lost our relationship with objects. ... For most of human history, things were expensive not simply in money but also in human labor and resources. Clothes were patched. Shoes were resoled. Tools were sharpened. Jars were saved. Furniture was repaired. Children’s clothes were passed down among siblings and cousins. Things stayed in families long enough to acquire stories. ... Now, we live in a world where a tent can cost less than checking an extra bag on an airplane. When that happens, disposability isn’t simply a character flaw. We have built the economics around it. Something can be incredibly costly in resources while being incredibly cheap in dollars, and throwing it away becomes the rational choice for the person who bought it.
Maybe that’s one small place to begin. Before buying something, we could ask not only “How much does this cost?” or “Do I need this?” but also “What happens to this thing when I’m done with it?”
The problem isn't new, Mollie says, and I agree with her. I remember a story told by Don Aslett, probably back in the 1990's, in which he took over a unprofitable service that did the job of decorating a venue for Christmas every year: taking the decorations out of storage, setting them all up, then later removing, repacking, and returning them to storage. Under Aslett's direction, the money-losing business began making a substantial profit. How did he accomplish this? Every year, he bought new decorations, throwing them away when the event was over, saving a great deal of money that had gone into labor and storage charges. At the time, I understood the point he was making, but it made me feel queasy. It still does, even if it makes economic sense.
I couldn't resist making my own comment on the article:
You’ve put your finger on something that has been bothering me for several years. When my father moved from his big Victorian house to a small cottage, my daughter was newly married and thrilled to be the recipient of some of his furniture. Nowadays it seems people would rather buy “disposable” furniture from IKEA than inherit a beautiful, well-crafted antique that has been in their family for generations. Given how mobile many people’s lifestyles are, that makes some sense, but it’s just one more of the many pressures that are stripping young people of their sense of history and family.
The lease I signed for my apartment specifies that I am not allowed to buy any used furniture for the apt. Since this is hardly fancy housing, I suspect that most people ignore it. I was fortunate - I had bought all of the used furniture I needed before this management company took over the place and put that in the leases.
I'd call that bizarre, except that I might be able to see the logic. Flawed logic, but still.... Used furniture, especially couches and beds, can bring unwanted tenants with it. I know someone who picked up head lice from a couch, and there are other nasty critters that could come along.
But I don't see how not buying used furniture solves the problem: Will the landlord next require potential tenants to buy all new furniture? To submit to "head checks"? What are you supposed to do, never let anyone else sit on your couch? Never sit on someone else's couch? Not send your children to school?
People are finally talking about the fact that certain problems, such as allergies, autism, and ADHD are so prevalent these day—but where is the acknowledgement of something equally disturbing: the explosion of creepy-crawlies like lice and bedbugs. Back when he was travelling for business, Porter found bedbugs in his fancy Minneapolis hotel! When I was in elementary school, I never knew anyone with head lice; by the time our kids were in elementary school the affliction had become common (and they still had "listening stations" where kids shared headphones!). Back then, they at least warned parents when someone in their child's classroom had lice, and the child was sent home until no longer at risk of spreading the affliction; now, I'm told, that's considered a violation of a child's privacy rights. Would they keep a child with measles in the classroom? Personally, I'd rather live in a society where measles was a common childhood disease and head lice practically unheard of.
I'm flabbergasted! A child of the Depression, I was brought up to save EVERYTHING. This attitude is beyond my imagination. Aargh!
I agree wholeheartedly, Grace. I understand that economics is a complex field, and for absolutely zero persons is life easy, but it's so hard to feel proper sympathy for all the young people (and not-so-young people) at nearly every income level who seem to be living from paycheck to paycheck. And yet they have (and do, and expect) SO VERY MUCH! Living responsibly and frugally was second nature to nearly everyone I knew. Small houses (single-story, two bedrooms for my first 10 years), one car at most, simple meals, almost never at at restaurants (and then Howard Johnson's was considered the height of luxury), packed our own lunches for work and school, my mother made most of my dresses, my father repaired almost anything around the house that needed repairing—you know the drill, I'm sure. Conservation was a given; it wasn't a movement, it was a life.
When traveling, it's unfortunately sometimes cheaper to buy equipment at the destination than to bring it on a plane. Just checking one bag round trip can cost over $200.
Unfortunately, Peter, that's all too true, and that's part of Engelhart's concern.
There's no denying that throwing everything out and buying new each year took Aslett's Christmas decoration from losing money to making a tidy profit. I wonder if this complex situation might be akin to choosing to paying more for pasture-raised meat, or for produce that has not been harvested by slave labor. We can't all do it, but we can all do better than by not being aware of the real cost of our choices.
