Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Disposing the Disposable Society

The concept of the "disposable society" must be disposed of. The "new" eco-friendly lifestyle model which modern consumers could adopt for sustainable living, is simply to look to the recent past of the early 20th century. 

The era of mid 20th century attitudes, habits and industries built upon concepts of disposable goods, is over. Way over. The world's landfills, oceans, lakes, ozone layer, and greenhouse gas amounts have all been pushed to their absolute limits in many regions. This is largely due to industrial cultures making and selling consumers goods which overall have inefficient lifecycles.

While, yes, current environmentally-positive changes can begin at the individual level, industry must engender and revisit concepts of reusability and durability, and product materials which encourage recyclability.

Basically, I'm suggesting a return to using natural organic materials for producing and producing items. Materials which are renewable, recyclable and which aren't based upon petrochemicals. A return to wood, paper, glass, metals, cottons, ceramics, etc.

Ironically, the form-factors of many of novel modern "high-tech" devices are predicated upon their ability to be formed in plastics. But the raw and finished plastics will never biodegrade in open air, nor soil, nor water. Our plastic-made pieces parts will be around for generations and generations and generations to come.

Yes, many plastics can be recycled. But that gets to a couple practical points. One point being that the recycling habit needs to be better ingrained in people of all ages, let alone how and where to recycle plastic items. Beyond that, the real goal is to reduce the need for oil, and for its refining and repurposing to become used in petrochemical-based materials.

Who knows, maybe petrochemical-based plastic consumer products might very well become the next environmental pariah, coming after fossil-based fuels used for mobile transportation and energy-generation for fixed locations.

See, the real goal of the United States in the 21st century should be to reduce its overall amount of fossil-fuel based raw and finished materials, so that we're able to mainly rely upon our own domestic oil reserves and not predominately foreign sources.



1 comment:

  1. How much of our petrochemicals actually go into plastics, though? I thought most of it went to energy, and the metal, glass, and many other materials require a lot of energy to be turned into products and transported around the world to us. That is what drives the "local sources" movement. Recycling just feeds refined materials back into the stream of stuff, and some materials are more useful and require less energy to be again made into a final product than pure raw materials. That underlines the emphasis on energy saving. Some products heavily based on petrochemicals, like scents and colorants, are extremely inefficient in that they require a lot of energy and petrochemicals to make very small amounts of the products, and the waste chemicals in the process can be extremely toxic.
    Incidentally, plastics do not last forever. The long chain molecules used in polymers are by nature somewhat fragile, with weak points at which they can be broken by ultraviolet radiation and exposure to oxygen, ozone, or other substances. If you keep a plastic water bottle long enough (6 months or more) it will begin to show microscopic cracks and look faded or slightly whitish. Also, the placticizing agents (often in the pthalate family - quite toxic) slowly leach out of the plastic and it becomes less flexible and more easily cracked. Different plastics have different lifespans, but they are all finite.
    Thanks for commenting on my blog at www.timprosserfuturing.wordpress.com, and best of luck to you and yours. - Tim

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