I found it in the dumpsters behind the colorful houses. It’s a small glass jar. I liked its shape. I’m going to use it to hold bobby pins. 

I felt like a bird hunting. I think that might sound crazy, but that’s what I felt like. And it was fun. But I also didn’t want anyone to see me. I didn’t want anyone to catch me rummaging through the dumpsters. So I moved quickly. And I didn’t want to leave but I was scared someone would walk by at any moment so I left before I could look through everything. 

A line from Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America by Alex V. Barnard reads, “These corporations promote disposable goods over reusable ones, design rapidly obsolete products, and ensure that repair is more expensive than replacement.” I think this glass container was treated as waste because it was produced to be waste. Waste is necessary for capitalism to function, as Barnard explains, “waste is thus not an ‘externality’ or ‘failure’ of the market but a source of value and driver of production in a capitalist system”. Capitalists profit off of disposable products. Although this glass jar is reusable, it is more profitable when thought of and treated as disposable. So we as consumers have been trained to view it as such.