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.
Conceptualizing Waste
Something I chose to conceptualize waste are magazines, since there are multiple perspectives about it. The disposability is one of the first conceptualizations I think of related to magazines. This is most likely due to the fact that it’s not like a book where you can read and re-experience the story over again, it’s information/news. After you become aware of news, one can say that it’s not something to re-read, so it no longer has a purpose. Secondly, there’s resourceability because they can be repurposed in different unique methods. Just to name a few: jewelry, buttons, paper mache, and other crafty things. I think seeing the potential in items generally deemed disposable requires a different type of consciousness that I find interesting. Thirdly, hoardability comes to mind due to the large quantity of it amongst hoarders. Items in the paper family are easy to accumulate and often more accessible. It becomes tough considering that some hoarders feel guilty of throwing things out, so in their mind they’re combatting wasteful practices. I think the disposable conceptualization makes the most sense as to why they’re considered to be waste. As technology advances, so should access to media news services so there isn’t this bearing amount of magazines in your home.
Pollution
One of my hobbies is jewelry making, because of this I have a large collection of beads and charms. When I get new beads they always either come in plastic bags or they come strung onto a piece of plastic string. I am always aware of this in the back of my mind yet I continue to buy beads. Whenever I visit my old town, I end up going to the local bead store. When I get back and go to put the beads into my bead box, I end up creating a pile of trash from the packaging. The spring that most beads are strung on when I buy them is not reusable and I end up having to throw it away. When I get beads in a plastic bag, they are often sealed in a way that I cannot reuse the packaging. These problems come with how the beads are packaged, but this is the most convenient way to package beads so that they do not spill everywhere. I try and bring my small containers when I go to the local bead shop, but it is impossible to do the same with general craft stores.
Circular Economy
This prompt made me think of phones, specifically how most phones are more easily replaced than they are to fix. Products like phones are always being upgraded and new products are always coming out. This fuels our consumerist society. I think that in a circular economy, products like phones would only have one model and there would be more accessible ways to fix them. I also think that people could customize the functions of their phones based on what they would use them for. This way each phone would be able to be unique to each person and there would be less of a need for endless amounts of add-on products that are marketed to us presently. The phones could also be sent to the companies if someone changes how they use their phone, and if there is new software. I also think that the parts could be used to make other products if the phone is no longer being used. The parts could be recycled and used for other purposes. While this is just brainstorming an idea, I think that ideas like these can help us distance ourselves from the consumerist habits that we hold when it comes to products like these.
Disruption
When thinking about waste disruption, I think of how cities treat homeless people. The dynamic between large cities and their homeless populations is very hostile. The people are treated as waste and are seen as a nuisance to the authorities and the general public. Homeless people “disrupt” the cities in the eyes of city officials. Their presence and relativity to waste and trash make people feel like it is okay to treat them as such. I think of hostile infrastructure and how homelessness is often used as a talking point for city officials. I have often seen politicians say that they will lower homeless rates and “clean up the city”. They claim these things to gain support from people yet they often do nothing about it, or somehow, make the problem worse. This connects to how impactful forms of waste can drastically change an area and shift political movements.
Circle Economy
From my personal collection of items I own, my books are not in a circular economy. I buy them and I keep them forever, I hardly share them, and I don’t give them away. One thing I do try and do is buy used books, so that I can participate in some sort of circular economy that way, and if I really trust a person like one of my best friends or like my mom I will let them be borrowed. I have never given a book to be kept that I bought for myself, I do buy books as presents and give those away often. I’m not sure what physical components would need to change about a book for me to be more circular in nature with them but I do know that a lot of social things would need to change. I don’t trust people with books because a lot of people in my life don’t respect them and treat them the same way I do. I often used to receive the books back damaged and I even had a person steal some from me. I would need to see a change in treatments of other people’s belongings and books as a whole from the people I am closest to.
Waste in the way of normal
To be honest I am not sure what exactly this blog post is referring to. I think however, the time that waste got in my way of “normal” was probably during covid. For me I got really depressed and didn’t leave the floor of my room unless it was to go to the bathroom and that was it. I felt like I had lost everything good and trash started to get really bad in my room. It wasn’t for a while that I had a friend come over and like help me feel any sense of normal that I realized the trash in my room was a problem. Now that I was feeling okish, I couldn’t get better because my room was a mess and it made me feel worse. It was a horrible cycle of me trying to clean my room, getting depressed and then giving up. It was just some random day when I did finally clean my entire room, and I don’t know what happened but a switch was hit or something because that really helped me get more normal.
Circular Economy
The other day a friend knocked on my door asking if I had a stapler. I immediately grabbed a mini teal one from my desk drawer. Upon handing it to them, I realized how infrequently I use the stapler myself. I have had the stapler since my 7th birthday and have never needed to refill it with staples. I am not sure how many staples came in it, but 11 years is certainly a long time to have something and not need to refill or replace it. I find it amusing that besides this time, I have no recollection of when I used it last, yet I still felt the urge to bring it here. One product that I use quite frequently and have been shared with others is scissors. Reflecting on my feelings during that time in comparison to the time of sharing the stapler is interesting. When the scissors were in the possession of another person, my anxiety surrounding the object rose. Even though I trusted the person and knew they would only have them for a short time, it was a drastic difference in how I felt about the situation in comparison to someone having my stapler. Another aspect that is interesting to examine within these circumstances is that the person who used the stapler had put too much paper in it, and it ended up getting stuck for 10 minutes, and it took 4 people to resolve the issue. However, even with this instance, I felt less anxious over that happening, than I did from just knowing that my scissors were not in my room, even with me having no need to be using them anytime soon. Therefore, this has helped me understand that trust in material exchange goes both ways. Trust is needed to believe and seek someone else who has the thing you need, and trust and belief in yourself to serve others’ needs even in small material ways. Recognizing this can help people work towards communal sharing of products and reduce the production and ownership of goods that one does not need regularly. In Monday’s class, we discussed the short life span of a hammer being used and yet the common ownership of one. Based on the obvious fact that everyone is a different person, some people’s most commonly used objects are maybe not the same as the people around them. I do think that is an incredibly beautiful thing and is a great way to encourage sharing of resources. However, the desire to possess things is very common in the U.S. I imagine this stems from this country’s colonial practices centering on the taking of resources and lands from Indigenous people. These ideas have also formed American Dream ideas of success such as owning a house to raise a family being considered a worthy milestone. Breaking down and unpacking these concepts can help us work towards a world of having innate value through one’s personhood rather than value being based on our possessions. Overall, this week’s readings have helped me unpack my relationship to my things, form a desire to live in a circular economy, and therefore consider how my internalized ideas of possessing things effects my personal steps needed to help share ideas of a circular economy.
Circular economy – prompt
Choose a kind of material object you regularly interact with that is not part a circular economic system. (Which is probably almost anything!) Speculate on how this kind of object could redesigned to be part of a circular economy, by changing its composition and connected infrastructures. In addition to the material components, what other social aspects that we’ve discussed throughout the course would need to change as well for this to be a desirable future?
Readings from this week:
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. “Waste Equals Food.” In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. 1st ed. New York: North Point Press, 2002, 92-117.
Visual Capitalist. “Visualized: The Circular Economy 101,” January 13, 2022. https://metals.visualcapitalist.com/sp/visualized-the-circular-economy-101/.
Genovese, Andrea, and Mario Pansera. “The Circular Economy at a Crossroads: Technocratic Eco-Modernism or Convivial Technology for Social Revolution?” Capitalism Nature Socialism 32, no. 2 (April 3, 2021): 95–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2020.1763414.
(Also feel free to include the utopian readings from last week, or any others that are relevant!)
Pollution
Something I chose was writing in notebooks, during K-12 education, and even higher education. This isn’t much of a regular activity anymore for me, since I use my laptop for everything now, but it’s still relevant. It’s a normalized contribution to the waste that is barely talked about. Multiple notebooks for each subject per kid, then multiplying by the majority of our youth population it becomes a lot. I think it would be very unfair to just prohibit this due to the accessibility of notebooks. An alternative to notebooks would mean something related to technology, which is expensive and requires an alteration to the K-12 education curriculum.