Hello, waste compacting comrades!
I’m back to answer the last question I posed here…. About six months ago…
I know I’ve pardoned myself in the past for delays in posting, but I think this latest interim is a bit inexcusable. Since the last posting in June 2018, I have been learning Hebrew through a public Ulpan, hosting and taking part in several trash cleanups, and continuing my efforts to reduce waste (both in my personal life and in the public sector).
I have also taken up a new set of studies focused in business administration for sustainability, known at Haifa University as the Global Green MBA. It is an intensive, one-year academic program focused in quickly and efficiently preparing people in development and management of sustainable business ventures. It is unlike anything I studied in undergrad (which included animation, film, & writing), but I’m confident that it can be helpful in gaining some traceable ground in the fight against waste and encouraging sustainable behavior.
Anyway, enough about me. Before I took a lengthy hiatus from posting, I was positing open-ended questions to invoke some thought into different aspects of waste. The last post was about what it means to live waste free. My final thought on the matter was that while it certainly should not be impossible to accomplish this, it’s a difficult undertaking and mainly we should focus on minimizing our impact on the planet. Reusable containers, buying in bulk/loose ingredients, and refusing plastic are all great ways to eliminate the need for waste in our day to day lives.
Now, let’s think about the next “W” in this series: Who. That is, who do we impact by being more conscious of the waste we create?
The answer to this might seem obvious. Ultimately, we are looking at the anthropocentric perspective to answer this. Obviously when humans pollute or waste, it has a negative externality on the rest of the living world. If one considers that everything that they do affects the rest of the world, then perhaps if each of us is more conscious of our waste, everyone will be impacted in a beneficial way.
In a more specific instance, statistics estimate that 2.4 billion people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water. To put that number into perspective, there are over 7.5 billion people on the planet, meaning that almost a third of the world’s population relies on external sources to receive clean water.
Why isn’t there clean drinking water? Human activity is constantly causing this, from mass industrialization to the trash and waste that we allow to fill up repositories where clean water could be. A greater issue is that in dealing with just this example alone, we are reliant on importing clean drinking water from other parts of the world, effectively burning more fossil fuels. Oh, I didn’t even mention that due to this problem, we have to create more single-use plastic daily just in order to allow people to have their water be free of harmful bacteria.
When we choose to use refillable bottles, reusable containers for dry goods, and our own reusable bags at the supermarket, we contribute significantly less harm to the world that we live in. The problems with air, water, and land pollution can all be diminished if we make the effort to respond favorably to actions that lessen waste.
I can confidently say that I do not mind being the person in a store that puts out all of their produce on the counter, exposed and bag-less, so that I can stuff my groceries into my reusable cloth or canvas bag. I will tell the clerk to please not give me a plastic bag, even if they are giving it to me freely and possibly think that I’m struggling to fit everything into the few large bags that I brought from home. To me, it is important that other people see the efforts that I go to in order to waste less, and consider that in the end, it is a better way of living to accumulate less unusable products.
Currently, I’m holding on to all of the single use trash that I’ve accumulated in my apartment. It could be a piece of plastic from a wrapper or a price tag that came attached to something that I found. They aren’t necessarily items that I accumulated intentionally, but ended up with them in order to waste less.
Realizing that our trash does not just disappear when we finish using it is integral in creating a sustainable future. Food waste is a bad enough epidemic in the world, but when we consider the energy used to produce, export, and eventually carry away all of the trash (including that which was never utilized) … well, it’s only going to hurt us more in the end.
Just an example of some of the very few food items that would’ve gone to waste if not for my intervention:
Next time, I’ll discuss the “why” of waste. This is the question I posed originally in my “Creating A World Without Waste…” post:
- Why is each and every effort that we make important, individually or otherwise?
Until next time, waste warriors! Be on the lookout for a video version of my blog coming to you soon. Take care!
Some interesting reads:
Human Impact on the Environment
https://interestingengineering.com/10-ways-humans-impact-the-environment
Less Plastic Use by Marks Spencer Grocer
Wasted Potential 