I think that most of the food products that I eat are probably not really part of a circular economy, seeing as our current model of agriculture involves mass production of isolated types of crops, which end up taking more nutrients from the environment than we are able to give back. I don’t know much about this, but I’ve heard that things like food forests, and farming with a healthy variety of crops, could help to close in this gap of nutrient expenditure. Also, farming locally and in line with the seasonal cycles of when certain crops are meant to grow might help (crop rotation?). I’ve also heard that mixing livestock with crops could help- because the livestock’s feed source would be right there, and it is less energy intensive to feed the livestock, and they can also help fertilize the soil. In any case, desire for profits and convenience is getting in the way of us enacting these things on a societal level at the moment, and we are degrading the environment with unsustainable agriculture- not in line with the circular economy 🙁 I think that things like capitalism’s inherent need for increased profits and production is definitely getting in the way of enacting a CE, as well as people’s desire for products and consumption (which is a result of capitalism- we are being subtly manipulated into believing this, but I do think that a lot of people still do). In order to be content with keeping the same amount of resources and products in circulation, our economic system would have to change. Maybe people’s desire for products and consumerist tendencies would die out naturally as a result of that.
Author Archives: Elise Poelker-McKee
Disruptive Waste
I think, in general, the waste generated by our out-of-control consumption practices in western society is hidden from us (consumers) because it would function as a disruption of our worldview. The realities of the landfills and dumps that our trash is ending up in would serve as a wake up call to a lot of people regarding the casual nature of our purchasing habits and the negative impacts that they are having on the world. I know that a lot of our (US) waste is actually being exported to foreign countries, with the US paying other countries, such as India, in exchange for us sending out large amounts of our trash to be disposed of in their own landfills. It is sort of an out of sight, out of mind thing for many Americans, I think- including myself to a large extent- where if we can’t see the impacts of our actions, even if we technically know about them, we will not be motivated enough to change our habits. There is a sort of “myth” that we live under in the US, where we don’t see the backgrounds behind the products that we are buying in any way. It appears to a large part of the population as if the life cycle of products begin with the product, in its shiny packaging, in a store or on an online platform, and end the minute we decide to throw it out. The lives and the treatment of the workers who are producing the products, their environmental impacts, and the waste left behind after we are done with them go unnoticed. And I do believe that this is intentional on the parts of the corporations that are producing these things, so that we can continue to go about our lives unbothered by the impacts of consumerism.
Pollution- Cars!!
I think a very common daily activity for most people, including myself, that produces a lot of pollution, is driving. Vehicles that run on fossil fuels obviously produce carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change. There have been a lot of recent efforts to move towards electric cars, but I see multiple issues with this, too. First of all, those cars are pretty unaffordable for most people, and are something that, at the moment, is only accessible to the elite class in the US. Also, except under the circumstance that a person with an electric car has solar panels or another form of green energy to charge their car off of (also only available to the elite), electric cars are powered by the grid, which is powered, at least in large part, by coal. This, although maybe less wasteful than gas or diesel, still has a significant environmental impact. I don’t know a whole lot about cars and the pollution they produce, but what I’ve gathered is that the only real way to eliminate pollution entirely from the practice of driving is to have exclusively electric cars powered by solar panels. Most of America struggles to afford to get our basic needs met, and, on top of that, all of our cities are designed to only be accessible by car, and are not walkable at all. People have to drive to work, to the grocery store, to bring their kids to school. We are a long ways away from being able to achieve this vision of pollution-less driving, and it is entirely unfair to expect most individual people to take responsibility for enacting it. What we need to do first is eliminate economic inequality, switch over on a country-wide scale to more sustainable energy practices, make our cities more accessible, place stricter regulations (at the very least) on the practices of large corporations, and put our money and resources, as a country, towards the people and the environment rather than whatever the hell we are putting them towards right now- all of these things will then set us up to be able to make lasting changes in our rates of pollution and c02 emissions. Making more Teslas is not going to cut it.
Disposability
The main type of “disposable” item that I use on a day to day basis is probably food with plastic/disposable packaging. This type of product is designed to only serve a purpose until the food has been eaten, at which point is is considered useless, and moves into the category of waste. Most of the time, in my experience, food packaging is made of plastic, I would assume that the materials used are pretty cheap and can be mass produced. It doesn’t tend to be recyclable, and after its short lifespan where it is considered to be of use, it will end up in landfills (where it will probably take much, much longer to decompose). Food packaging is a type of item that people don’t tend to think twice about, at least in American culture. It almost never has any deeper meaning attached to it, and it can easily be thrown out without hesitation. Our culture of convenience makes premade food with disposable packaging a highly tempting option for a lot of people, including myself. At times, it can also be cheaper than healthier, more sustainable food options- another reason why so many people tend to buy these products.
Conceptualizing Waste (condemned house)
The house next to my parent’s house is in the process of being demolished and rebuilt, and when they knocked down the old house, there was a huge pile of rubble that was then hauled away. I think that in the case of the house-rubble, viewing that waste as archive makes a lot of sense. That house, and the people who lived there, had a history. The people were part of our community, the house was part of our neighborhood, and I grew up with those things as a given, along with the other kids in my neighborhood. From an outsider’s perspective, viewing the scraps of wood and concrete, they wouldn’t know where the house had been or who had lived there, but it still has that history nonetheless. It could also easily be viewed as hazard, since most of the houses in my neighborhood were built during a time when asbestos was being used in construction, as well as the simple fact that there were pokey shards of wood and other potentially unknown hazards in the pile of debris. The construction and waste workers who were dealing with this debris wore PPE and took lots of precautionary measures to protect themselves from harm due to the nature of this waste, which seemed like a good call and made a lot of sense. This waste was also, in a lot of ways, a governable object, in that the house had been condemned by the government (deemed waste by the government even when it was still standing) and ordered to be demolished. It was under government supervision and following government regulations that the house was destroyed, the materials disposed of, and that the plans for the new house have started to be executed. The state had deemed the house either an eyesore or a hazard or both in its prior condition, and took steps to come in and change that. I think all three of these designations make a lot of sense when thinking about this house, but apply to different aspects of its existence and demolition process.
Distancing Infrastructures (Dining Commons)
I think the dining commons are a good example of a place on campus where waste is ushered out of site and concealed. The work of both the cooks and the dishwashers is hidden from view, and the experience of the students eating there is that they get their plate of food, and then drop their plate off with all the others when they leave. I know from experience working in restaurants that a lot of food ends up getting thrown out before it is even served. If, at the end of the meal, some food was left unserved, they may not serve it at another meal but instead throw it out. I don’t know if this happens at Hampshire (because it is usually done discreetly), but I assume that it might. In my experiences working in food service, uneaten food would be stored in a walk in fridge for a couple of days, and, after a certain amount of time passes, would be thrown in the trash, which is taken to the dumpster at the end of the night. This process is not visible to anyone but the food service workers, and is not openly talked about because of the negative associations with wasted food. Also, the food waste and messes left by students after they have eaten are the responsibility of the dishwashers, who do their work in a private room out of view of the students who are eating there. We don’t have to think about the nastiness of their job or make an effort to streamline their process by cleaning our plates as best we can ourselves, or even, in some cases, categorizing our eating utensils when we drop them off to be washed. The extent of the wasted food is unknown to students (myself included), because it is disposed of discreetly and picked up by waste workers later on.
Responsibility and waste workers
When sorting through trash and recycling at home, I feel a responsibility to identify recyclable and non recyclable items and categorize them accordingly. In reality, I don’t know much about what happens to these waste items after they are picked up, and I don’t know how effective recycling even is at mitigating environmental damage. I guess I assume that once the trash and recycling is picked up, the trash will find its way to a landfill and the recycling will be repurposed and “recycled” into new products. I’ve heard that in some places, even entire states, recycling may not be recycled at all. When I lived in AZ, my apartment had recycling bins, which I used, but I heard from multiple people that it all ended up being funneled into the same landfills. I never bothered to fact check this, but I guess I thought that the second the trash was picked up, the matter was out of my hands and it was no longer my responsibility. I couldn’t control where it went, so I didn’t bother thinking about it that much. It’s odd, because I guess I sort of assume- and I think a lot of other people do too- that doing a good job of sorting and categorizing household waste is a decent stand-in for reducing the amount of waste produced in the first place, and that by doing that, I am doing my part. I know logically that this is not the case.
I have never really thought twice about the nature of the work of the people who deal with our trash. Stating it like that, it doesn’t sound good, but I have hardly ever seen or interacted with the waste workers who have picked up my trash. I put the trash out, and then, at some point, it is picked up. The next week I do it again. It’s just a routine that is sort of second nature and I’ve never thought deeply about it. I imagine that it is difficult work, physically hard, smelly, potentially pretty draining. When I was a little kid I did a tour of an incinerator- I honestly can’t remember the circumstance- but I do remember it was very very loud. Working in a place like that, I’d imagine you’d need good ear protection in order to not do permanent damage to your hearing. It doesn’t seem like glamourous work, although it is very important in our modern world, and these workers are part of the backbone of society. If nobody was doing these jobs, our world would probably be a complete mess. Even so, we need to focus as a society a lot more on reduction of waste, and that is all of our responsibility, along with companies and corporations that are producing our products and marketing them to us.
Painting from the middle of nowhere
last summer I found a really cool painting out by the side of the rode it VT. I’d just finished a backpacking trip and was hiking along a forest service rode to get back to a town where I could be picked up, and someone had dumped this landscape painting of what I assume were the Green Mountains off on the side of the road. I was miles from civilization and the only vehicles on that road at all were forest service trucks, so I have no idea how the painting ended up there. It was really well done, and still in pretty good shape even though it was raining at the time and it had definitely gotten wet. I picked it up and walked with it the rest of the way, and put it up in my room at home when I got back. It’s still there, although I don’t have any photos of it on hand. I don’t know why the painting would have been seen as waste- I guess someone was trying to get rid of it, but it seems like there are a lot of other, more obvious ways to dispose of something like that than to throw it in the middle of the woods. I definitely would not consider it to be waste, it’s beautiful and someone obviously put a lot of effort into making it, so I’m glad I found it and was able to salvage it.
Woods shitting etiquette
This past spring I spent 3 months on a conservation corps where we were camping in pretty remote areas and had no access to plumbing. We did have pit toilets at about half of our camp sites, but the other half of the time we would just go out into the woods. There was a big emphasis across all of our day to day activities on “leave no trace”, so as to not mess up the environment with our human impact. This really made sense when it came to food wrappers and man-made trash, but it felt a little bit different when it came to shit, and I still don’t really know where I stand on it. At the sites where we didn’t have pit toilets, we were very far from civilization- not even at any established camp site. We would be told to make sure to dig cat holes whenever we went to the bathroom, and not go in the same place twice, and go a specific number of yards from any body of water (even the ones that we were never getting drinking water from), and just to take all sorts of precautionary measures around our bathroom habits, and I didn’t quite get the point. It got pretty old when you were making sure to pay attention to all those different requirements every day for months. Of course, I understand that these measures are good rules of thumb in general for camping and hiking, because if there were too many people just shitting all over the place it would be pretty unpleasant and potentially bad for human health and the health of the ecosystem. But, in my specific scenario, there were 4 people on my crew, out in the middle of the woods, and there was this general feeling that permeated all of our shit related conversations that we would be doing something extremely unclean and bad for the health of the environment if we didn’t follow the correct shit procedures. There were deer, bears, squirrels, and all sorts of other wildlife in those woods who were going about their business without thinking about any of that. Isn’t shitting a natural part of life and of the environment? It felt to me that our learned beliefs about poop as a shameful and unclean thing were affecting the way that we were thinking about it as it pertained to “leave no trace”. At the same time, I don’t really know enough about what the potential consequences of shitting freely in the woods may be, so they might exist. I can’t really say.
Am I a hoarder??
The type of items that I own the most of are definitely clothes. There are a few reasons for this, the first of which being that I haven’t bothered giving away any of my old clothing that I’ve gone through since I was about 12. As I’ve outgrown clothes and moved through different phases with my style, I’ve simply bought more clothes and not gotten rid of the old ones. Also, I think that I do have a bit of an issue at the moment with buying clothes that I don’t really need. If I have money, one of the main things that it will go towards is clothing, and I am annoyed with myself for this because it would definitely be better if I saved the money for when I really needed it. And yet, I still buy the clothing. What this results in is an accumulation of these items, on top of my preexisting stash of old clothing from middle and high school. I guess the combination of the sheer volume of these items that I possess and also the fact that I compulsively keep buying more even when a big part of me doesn’t want to and it stresses me out, could pose a compelling argument for hoarding. However, I don’t think that that lens completely captures the essence of the issue, because I would have no problem giving away the old clothes that I don’t wear- I just haven’t worked up the initiative to sort through them and take them somewhere to be donated. I honestly think that my desire to keep buying new clothes and reworking my wardrobe is rooted in a need to continuously work towards a superficial type of “self improvement” that I substitute in for doing more difficult work on myself, and then when this doesn’t work I just try again and buy more stuff. My understanding is that this is a very common issue in capitalist America, as we are constantly bombarded with messages that buying certain products will make us happy. I don’t think that this is my “fault” or the “fault” of anyone else with this same mindset, but it is certainly a large societal issue which leads to a lot of waste, and which I myself have to actively work on. Maybe all of that is just an explanation for the underpinnings of something that could accurately be described as hoarding behavior, but the clothes that I own aren’t taking over my space or making my space messy or unlivable, which I understand to be a crucial element of hoarding. So, I do think that it is a different thing, that could possibly (hopefully not) progress into a type of hoarding if left unchecked.