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How long can we shop like there is no tomorrow?
November 20, 2007

Continuing with “where the consumption starts”, we want to find out how long this level of consumption can last – 100 years? 200 years? 500 years? Even as we are overshooting (defined as: a population uses up resources faster than they can be replaced), we still have a long time to change our behavior. Right?

Marketplace asked Jared Diamond, a professor at UCLA who is renowned for his landmark ecology work – Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse amongst others. Diamond’s answer: “If we carried on as we are now, then I would expect that we will not have a First World lifestyle anywhere sometime between 30 and 50 years from now.” Wait, that is within my life time. Will we be the first generation to watch our lifestyle slip downhill rather than up? Will our kids be resentful because we have robbed their future?

We have utilized 70% of the fresh water in the world, we have lost 50% of rich topsoil, we are running out of oil, we are taxing the forest resource, we are exhausting the fish population. What the heck, I might as well throw this in too: we are maxing out trash landfills.

In Los Angeles County, half of the landfills are slated to close in the next 15 years. While the number of landfills has actually decreased in the United States and Canada, the rate of landfilling has drastically gone up in the last 10 years. Now we have megasize landfills (mega stores and mega landfills, coincidence?). Pennsylvania, Virginia and Michigan are the big 3 trash importers. Carleton Farms and Pine Tree Acres(Michigan) receive 20 trailer trucks of trash every hour. These two landfills alone will cover an equivalent area of 730 football fields under a 300-foot mountain of garbage by 2025. I did a little math. If you flatten the trash to 3 feet tall, you’d have to drive 60 miles to circle around the trash pile.

When we run out of landfill space, what do we do? As civilized people, we certainly do not want to have the smelly mess in our backyard. Right, let’s export our trash to poorer countries in Africa and Asia. At a port outside Shanghai, China, Marketplace reporter opened a big orange shipping crate and “feasted” his eyes on 2,000 cubic feet of paper trash, i.e. slimy old boxes. And then, there was cat food, Bud Light, Huggies diapers, Coca-Cola, fabric softener, Diet Coke, antibacterial multi-surface cleaner - all this trash traveled 7000 miles from America.

Now I get how it works – container ships stream into American ports and dump loads and loads and loads of consumer goods. We buy them and play with them for 12 days, then we throw them into the trash. Weeks later, they are shipped back to where they came from and get dumped there. Seriously, is this how global economy supposed to work? I went to business school a few years back, no one ever mentioned that. Hello, professor, how come you forgot to teach that economic cycle?

Electronic gadgets are always staple holiday gifts. Who doesn’t want a new cell phone every year? An iPhone this year? How about a top of the line laptop? All good, except the 130 million cell phones and 50 million computers we toss away each year are not really resting in peace. A global non-profit organization Basel Action Network endorses an international agreement called the Basel Ban, which prohibits the export of any hazardous waste from the rich counties to the poor country. The United States is the only developed country, the only rich country, that has refused to sign this treaty.

Marketplace reports that every hour, folks across the globe toss out about 9 million pounds of e-waste. “Even if you’re a good citizen and hand your old computer to a recycler, there’s a good chance he sells it to a broker, who puts it on a ship that smuggles it to Africa, or the Middle East, or China”.

(courtesy of Basel Action Network)

It’s time to go back to China again. In a small, poor village - the Chinese port city of Taizhou - workers disassemble old circuit boards in primitive ways. Some bang off the valuable parts -for instance, computer chips with gold inside. Others dip electronics in chemicals then dump the old chemical stew, which includes heavy metals like lead, into the soil.

Maybe you think, well that’s just too bad. But it really does not affect me. Or does it? Remember the non-stop recalls of lead-contaminated children’s jewelries, trinkets, toys? They are all made in China, many in factories that are not far from those dumping grounds. Just a part of the global trade, I suppose.

Seems to me this is a good time to ask ourselves some difficult questions. How long can we go on shopping like there is no tomorrow? Do we milk it as much as we can for the next 30 years? Is this becoming an ethical issue?

Related entries:
Where did my laptop really go?
Your trash and my trash in our world

CindyW at Organicpicks

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