7 ms·

A woman who rifles through New York’s garbage, exposing the city’s excesses

108 points by laurex 5y ago

pxc 5y ago
> the city's excesses and yet none of these problems are unique to New York or about New York. These are transparently excesses of _capitalism_, not this city or that > Because Sacks’s videos pull back the veneer of corporate pledges to commit to sustainability, they are often shared by followers who say capitalism is the root problem. But Sacks says she finds that argument “polarizing” and that it “immediately alienates” those who equate critiques of capitalism as endorsement of socialism or communism. amazing. The name of the system we live under is unspeakable
- vnchr 5y ago
  Care to share about other social systems you have lived under and what the trash was like?
  - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    To the extent a different social system provides less material abundance, to the extent it becomes worth lots of people's time to sift through the trash or re-sell a 20-year-old toaster, I'd expect those other systems would have a ton less trash per capita.
    - vnchr 5y ago
      The trash solution is more poor people? Can’t argue with that basis. Just seems like it has some drawbacks.
  - pxc 5y ago
    Whether or not overproduction or the destruction of usable surplus goods into waste is incidental or essential to capitalism is debatable, but whether or not capitalism is in fact the system of production and distribution that has created what the videographer in the OP documents really isn't. The incentives are also very transparent. It takes no special insight or deep research to discern why grocery stores destroy edible food when they throw it out, or as happened recently in Portland, post armed guards at dumpsters. Artificial maintenance of scarcity through the destruction of overproduced goods is not a new or rare feature of the capitalism that we have. That the volume and treatment of garbage on display here is a feature of our economic order should be no more controversial than observations about parallel features of it, like planned obsolescence. Do you demand that people make recourse to personal experience with alternative economic systems every time someone mentions the business cycle, too?
kleer001 5y ago
> “It’s so gross that this is what they like to do, as a corporation, rather than help people.” It's not the corporation, it's laws, it's sanitation and accountability, it's logistics. It's far more complex than she's either researched or would like to admit.
- purephase 5y ago
  She used to be a consultant for a zero-waste company. I imagine she's very aware of these complexities. It doesn't make it any less embarrassing for these organizations though. We should be expecting them to do better than this.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    How is it "embarrassing" to comply with the law?
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      I’ve seen companies destroy their stock rather than let it be sold at a lower value or given away. It’s protect their ‘brand’. It’s not all about the law.
    - whymauri 5y ago
      There are countless historical examples where it has been embarrassing or unethical to comply with the law.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  You're right that it's complex, and maybe she doesn't appreciate it all (I don't know either way), but why is the corporation conspicuously omitted from this list? Their accountability is surely included in "accountability" in general.
- orange_joe 5y ago
purephase 5y ago
I've never understood why some of these corporations just trash so much of these materials that are just fine. Is it just that no one will buy them if they're re-packaged? I've seen a lot of re-packaged goods on shelves, it doesn't appear to be an issue for some retailers. The idea of taking in returns from customers and just throwing the product out seems absolutely insane to me. And the food waste is just depressing. When there's so many hungry people in the world. I understand that distribution is a concern here, but this has to be a workable problem somewhere in here to reduce this waste.
- luckylion 5y ago
  You can get it from the corporations, they'll even pay you to take it away. They just don't want to be liable when somebody get sick or dies after they've gifted them some product that regulations rule has to be disposed of. If you're willing to take that risk and you can convince the government to license you, you can feed a lot of people.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    I've also seen a rise in services that sell end-of-day-but-still-good leftovers from restaurants and cafes (bagels, taco meat, rice balls, etc) as cheap 'mystery bag' bundles direct to consumer.
    - akudha 5y ago
      I was once in Dunkin Donuts quite late (10 pm, I think). They gave any perishable food item left, for free. I got some doughnuts. I guess they could just give away the leftover food at the end of the day. Though the logistics of it wouldn’t be easy
- dehrmann 5y ago
  You can be sure they do that if it's cost effective and doesn't dilute the brand. That's where a lot of dollar store inventory comes from; it just has to be in big enough volumes. > And the food waste is just depressing. When there's so many hungry people in the world You hit on it, yourself. It's not like food I don't throw away is going to feed a starving orphan in a developing country. Those orphans aren't starving because the world doesn't produce enough food.
kaminar 5y ago
Another social justice loser complaining and judging others. How are we not all sick of this yet?
AirMax98 5y ago
Pretty unrelated, but reading this story reminded me of this one time I was traveling to Maine for a ski trip with a hippy girlfriend and some of her college friends. Her friends were pretty off beat people that were very into dumpster diving and really wanted to go dumpster diving at an industrial juice production facility along the way. Anyways, fast-forward to me in an actual dumpster pulling out crates of expired-ish juice. One of my girlfriend’s friends was like, “wait, don’t take this one — it has aspartame in it.” I just remember thinking like, I’m waist deep in a literal filthy dumpster right now, I am not sure I get to have any right to be choosy about what is/isn’t healthy! The juice was pretty good though.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  I'd be really careful dumpster diving for processed food at a production facility. There's a chance they found a problem with it, and that's why they're dumping it.
don-code 5y ago
The article talks about, but seems to conflate, what I see as two different problems. One problem is that retail outlets destroy and throw out unsold inventory; the other is that individuals throw out unwanted, post-used goods. The latter of these problems seems like it could be much more manageable, but if we lump it together with the former, we risk minimizing some solutions. I've gotten the lion's share of my furniture either from individuals or from Craigslist. Right now, I'm sitting in my kitchen eating lunch, on chairs that I did buy new, and looking around: my "decor" are plants, empty espresso roast cans, mason jars salvaged from sauces, and empty craft beer cans from various local breweries (we're lucky to have three or four per town, and they all have super-creative labels). This is after just getting home in a used luxury car, earlier today having woken up to a 70s Realistic clock radio, typing this post on an off-lease (but rock solid) ThinkPad, and so on. The picture I'm trying to paint there will differ depending on your own attitudes towards the "waste" stream. Most people around me have commented positively on it - the furniture is "nice", from old-money brownstones in downtown; the beer can collection is a great conversation starter. But of course, there are still some (and luckily, seemingly, a minority) who can only see it as trash, a sign that I've "opted out" of basic economics, or at worst, that I just don't care enough about my appearance.
- sologoub 5y ago
  Retail waste of unsold inventory could also be managed with proper incentives/tax benefits. We take great pains to make sure we donate whatever we don’t need that isn’t really trash. What shocked me is that a lot of time the typical places like Salvation Army and Goodwill won’t even take stuff because they get too much! We had a perfectly good fridge to give away (everything working, clean, cosmetically near perfect - just didn’t fit in the new place we moved to) and literally no one would take it. Finally was able to give it to a friend of a friend. EDIT: Also remembered that we tried to give away a commercial-grade dishwasher to Habitat for Humanity who build/rehab housing for low income folks. They politely explained that they couldn’t take it because it didn’t meet efficiency requirements. While I’m all for being efficient with power, it feels like a waste of resources in this case that could have gone towards more housing (it’s an issue of laws in CA).
  - 5y ago
fractallyte 5y ago
The link showing live animals tossed into garbage was absolutely shocking (https://www.instagram.com/p/CJzMqsXlYPb/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CJzMqsXlYPb/) It's reprehensible actions like these - total disrespect for life - that makes action against much vaster things, such as climate change, seem like Pyrrhic victories. People need to fixed just as much as climate and ecosystems.
joshuaheard 5y ago
Every time i take out the trash, I can't believe that our three-person household generates a whole trash can full of trash every week.
- theklub 5y ago
  I’ve reached the age where a trash can isn’t enough anymore. I need to actively donate and go to the dump often to keep from becoming overrun with items in my house.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
superkuh 5y ago
When you bag your trash and bring it out to the curb for pick-up and eternal storage in a landfill somewhere you normally think it's just that: eternal. But there's no reason to think that the landfills of today will be inviolate in the future. They're absolutely jam packed full of useful rare metals and materials. I think eventually garbage mining will be a common practice. In Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" they have this book scanning machine that just shreds the books then scans all the sheds super fast as they fly by and reassembled computationally the documents (like how DNA is read). Sometimes I worry about a future where this is possible with garbage and garbage mining is happening. Not only would a garbage mining company be able to sell the materials but the vast amounts of detailed very personal information stored discretely in each person or family's bag would also be invaluable. There would be economic motives to automate information retrevial from landfill garbage mining. Depending on how far in the future this happens it could either be a privacy nightmare or a cultural treasure.
- acwan93 5y ago
  It’s like that Futurama episode where Fry had to teach the future how to generate trash in order to build a garbage ball to save the planet. In the future, everything was recycled, including Bender. They thought Fry was the weird one of having the concept of “throwing things away.”
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Oxyrhynchus could happen all over even today, with things we've lost as recent as the early 1900s I'm sure. It's incredible to try and search for, say engineering practices we've lost, that happened only one or two generations ago. I'm sure there are buried textbooks that would uncover such practices that someone in academia thought, "Well it's probably time to throw this out." There are buildings today constructed with materials processes that are exceptionally difficult to find information on.
  - rendall 5y ago
    That's interesting. Are any of these buildings famous?
gswdh 5y ago
I’ve often thought it would be a good idea to charge people a tax when they buy something to pay for the disposal in the future. If they re sell it or somehow dispose of it in a responsible manner, the tax is passed on or reimbursed. I’m not sure how this would be implemented though. I think it would be awesome to make people think about how they are going to deal with the item once they’ve used it. I think just burying something is just not acceptable and will be looked back upon as abhorrent and wasteful.
code_duck 5y ago
I enjoy walking in alleys and see a lot of perfectly good items thrown away, of course. As I am nearly a sentimental hoarder, citing to myself practical, environmental and thrift reasons, it boggles my mind what some people toss out. In residential trash I’ve seen near-mint suitcases, umbrellas, notebooks, school books, art supplies, boots, shirts, jackets, large toys, entire potted plants, hats, work uniforms, and much more. Commercial trash can be even more impressively wasteful with things like 60 pounds of ground beef behind a certain bar every other week. As far as food, I have known people who regularly go to drive-they’d, get 6 tacos, eat one or two and throw the other 4 away. I’ve accompanied some friends to dinner who routinely order large meals, eat a fraction and leave it at the table. This casual waste at the consumer level is even worse when you consider the proportion of food that didn’t even make it to a plate. What I perceive is a common lack of appreciation of the total cost, in every sense, of creating any food item or consumer product. Any sort of production involves suffering for someone, whether it’s the lowest paid workers, local people and animals suffering the effects of pollution, or even the problem of roads and air congested by trucks carrying products that will eventually be 2/3s wasted. It boggles my mind that with more organization and efficiency in distribution and usage, we could grow less food, but feed more people and eat more, yet most people don’t see any need to even try to change the system.
- noobly 5y ago
  I've thrown away so much stuff that has value. Pyrex erlenmyers this week, for example. I don't regret it and it's hard to do (for me), but I've learned every item you own has a cost associated with it, e.g maintenance or even just taking up space (which can compromise aesethetics/atmosphere if nothing else). And trying to sell old junk can be too time consuming and draining compared to just tossing it wholesale. I have a nice clean shop space now and it's worth cutting the losses imo. Luckily, most of the stuff I have is used/cheap or was obtained for free, though. I try to just accumulate less now, even if free.
  - meowster 5y ago
    My dad is a horder, and I like to minimalize the amount of stuff I have, and you're right about costs being associated. What I've noticed with my dad is that most of the stuff he hoards, practically no one would want. Some of the stuff he hoards is valuable, but after a short term of hoarding, it gets damaged from neglect to a condition where no one would want it. He knows that none of his children want the stuff, and he knows that I will be renting a trailer-sized dumpster to empty his house after he dies, he even knows he can't use the things himself, but he can't stop accumulating new things or get rid of any the things he already has. I believe his stuff is what will kill him. I've witnessed him trip on piles of stuff (think of his house like an ant farm, where there is only one narrow path to walk through). The air quality conditions are extremely terrible. He didn't even notice an ongoing water leak that was damaging valuable things. I'm all for reduce/reuse/recycle, but in some instances it's a net gain just to throw things that might be perfectly good, away.
thewebcount 5y ago
Regarding this point: > Sacks repeatedly comes back to the idea that retailers could give away unsold or lightly used, returned (but still good) items to their low-wage employees, instead of tossing them, or jumping through bureaucratic hurdles to donate them. This could be an “added perk”, she says, or an additional form of compensation, to bolster employees’ wages. This perversely incentivizes the employees. I had an acquaintance who worked in retail in college. This was a large Midwestern store that sold everything from groceries to car parts to home stereos and TVs. They had a policy that if something was damaged it couldn’t be sold and the employees could take it for a significant discount. It wasn’t long before lots of items started having just enough damage to not be sold, but always on a part of the item where it wouldn’t be noticed when installed in your home. He was eventually fired for intentionally damaging stock.
savrajsingh 5y ago
There was an NYC trash collector that curated a small museum of all the stuff he found in the trash -- it's amazing, small documentary about it: https://viewing.nyc/a-garbage-story-short-film-about-a-new-york-city-trash-collector-and-connoisseur/ https://viewing.nyc/a-garbage-story-short-film-about-a-new-y... wait there's multiple: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/photos-visiting-the-dsnys-museum-of-trash-a-tribute-to-new-york-nostalgia https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/photos-visiting-the...
xyst 5y ago
I look at the waste we have produced as a society and I immediately think back to a monologue in Westworld by one of the antagonists: “I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he would’ve given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, “Why are we here?” You want to know what I think your purpose is? It’s obvious. You’re here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse” I don’t want to think of humanity as parasites on Earth, but we truly need to do better.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway83291 5y ago
Anyone reminded of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath? According to Wikipedia [0], the eponymous expression occurs in Chapter 25, "which describes the purposeful destruction of food to keep the price high:" > [A]nd in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath

108 points by laurex 5y ago

pxc 5y ago

> the city's excesses and yet none of these problems are unique to New York or about New York. These are transparently excesses of _capitalism_, not this city or that > Because Sacks’s videos pull back the veneer of corporate pledges to commit to sustainability, they are often shared by followers who say capitalism is the root problem. But Sacks says she finds that argument “polarizing” and that it “immediately alienates” those who equate critiques of capitalism as endorsement of socialism or communism. amazing. The name of the system we live under is unspeakable

vnchr 5y ago
Care to share about other social systems you have lived under and what the trash was like?
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  To the extent a different social system provides less material abundance, to the extent it becomes worth lots of people's time to sift through the trash or re-sell a 20-year-old toaster, I'd expect those other systems would have a ton less trash per capita.
  - vnchr 5y ago
    The trash solution is more poor people? Can’t argue with that basis. Just seems like it has some drawbacks.
- pxc 5y ago
  Whether or not overproduction or the destruction of usable surplus goods into waste is incidental or essential to capitalism is debatable, but whether or not capitalism is in fact the system of production and distribution that has created what the videographer in the OP documents really isn't. The incentives are also very transparent. It takes no special insight or deep research to discern why grocery stores destroy edible food when they throw it out, or as happened recently in Portland, post armed guards at dumpsters. Artificial maintenance of scarcity through the destruction of overproduced goods is not a new or rare feature of the capitalism that we have. That the volume and treatment of garbage on display here is a feature of our economic order should be no more controversial than observations about parallel features of it, like planned obsolescence. Do you demand that people make recourse to personal experience with alternative economic systems every time someone mentions the business cycle, too?

kleer001 5y ago

> “It’s so gross that this is what they like to do, as a corporation, rather than help people.” It's not the corporation, it's laws, it's sanitation and accountability, it's logistics. It's far more complex than she's either researched or would like to admit.

purephase 5y ago
She used to be a consultant for a zero-waste company. I imagine she's very aware of these complexities. It doesn't make it any less embarrassing for these organizations though. We should be expecting them to do better than this.
- luckylion 5y ago
  How is it "embarrassing" to comply with the law?
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    I’ve seen companies destroy their stock rather than let it be sold at a lower value or given away. It’s protect their ‘brand’. It’s not all about the law.
  - whymauri 5y ago
    There are countless historical examples where it has been embarrassing or unethical to comply with the law.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
happytoexplain 5y ago
You're right that it's complex, and maybe she doesn't appreciate it all (I don't know either way), but why is the corporation conspicuously omitted from this list? Their accountability is surely included in "accountability" in general.
orange_joe 5y ago

purephase 5y ago

I've never understood why some of these corporations just trash so much of these materials that are just fine. Is it just that no one will buy them if they're re-packaged? I've seen a lot of re-packaged goods on shelves, it doesn't appear to be an issue for some retailers. The idea of taking in returns from customers and just throwing the product out seems absolutely insane to me. And the food waste is just depressing. When there's so many hungry people in the world. I understand that distribution is a concern here, but this has to be a workable problem somewhere in here to reduce this waste.

luckylion 5y ago
You can get it from the corporations, they'll even pay you to take it away. They just don't want to be liable when somebody get sick or dies after they've gifted them some product that regulations rule has to be disposed of. If you're willing to take that risk and you can convince the government to license you, you can feed a lot of people.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  I've also seen a rise in services that sell end-of-day-but-still-good leftovers from restaurants and cafes (bagels, taco meat, rice balls, etc) as cheap 'mystery bag' bundles direct to consumer.
  - akudha 5y ago
    I was once in Dunkin Donuts quite late (10 pm, I think). They gave any perishable food item left, for free. I got some doughnuts. I guess they could just give away the leftover food at the end of the day. Though the logistics of it wouldn’t be easy
dehrmann 5y ago
You can be sure they do that if it's cost effective and doesn't dilute the brand. That's where a lot of dollar store inventory comes from; it just has to be in big enough volumes. > And the food waste is just depressing. When there's so many hungry people in the world You hit on it, yourself. It's not like food I don't throw away is going to feed a starving orphan in a developing country. Those orphans aren't starving because the world doesn't produce enough food.

kaminar 5y ago

Another social justice loser complaining and judging others. How are we not all sick of this yet?

AirMax98 5y ago

Pretty unrelated, but reading this story reminded me of this one time I was traveling to Maine for a ski trip with a hippy girlfriend and some of her college friends. Her friends were pretty off beat people that were very into dumpster diving and really wanted to go dumpster diving at an industrial juice production facility along the way. Anyways, fast-forward to me in an actual dumpster pulling out crates of expired-ish juice. One of my girlfriend’s friends was like, “wait, don’t take this one — it has aspartame in it.” I just remember thinking like, I’m waist deep in a literal filthy dumpster right now, I am not sure I get to have any right to be choosy about what is/isn’t healthy! The juice was pretty good though.

dehrmann 5y ago
I'd be really careful dumpster diving for processed food at a production facility. There's a chance they found a problem with it, and that's why they're dumping it.

don-code 5y ago

The article talks about, but seems to conflate, what I see as two different problems. One problem is that retail outlets destroy and throw out unsold inventory; the other is that individuals throw out unwanted, post-used goods. The latter of these problems seems like it could be much more manageable, but if we lump it together with the former, we risk minimizing some solutions. I've gotten the lion's share of my furniture either from individuals or from Craigslist. Right now, I'm sitting in my kitchen eating lunch, on chairs that I did buy new, and looking around: my "decor" are plants, empty espresso roast cans, mason jars salvaged from sauces, and empty craft beer cans from various local breweries (we're lucky to have three or four per town, and they all have super-creative labels). This is after just getting home in a used luxury car, earlier today having woken up to a 70s Realistic clock radio, typing this post on an off-lease (but rock solid) ThinkPad, and so on. The picture I'm trying to paint there will differ depending on your own attitudes towards the "waste" stream. Most people around me have commented positively on it - the furniture is "nice", from old-money brownstones in downtown; the beer can collection is a great conversation starter. But of course, there are still some (and luckily, seemingly, a minority) who can only see it as trash, a sign that I've "opted out" of basic economics, or at worst, that I just don't care enough about my appearance.

sologoub 5y ago
Retail waste of unsold inventory could also be managed with proper incentives/tax benefits. We take great pains to make sure we donate whatever we don’t need that isn’t really trash. What shocked me is that a lot of time the typical places like Salvation Army and Goodwill won’t even take stuff because they get too much! We had a perfectly good fridge to give away (everything working, clean, cosmetically near perfect - just didn’t fit in the new place we moved to) and literally no one would take it. Finally was able to give it to a friend of a friend. EDIT: Also remembered that we tried to give away a commercial-grade dishwasher to Habitat for Humanity who build/rehab housing for low income folks. They politely explained that they couldn’t take it because it didn’t meet efficiency requirements. While I’m all for being efficient with power, it feels like a waste of resources in this case that could have gone towards more housing (it’s an issue of laws in CA).
- 5y ago

fractallyte 5y ago

The link showing live animals tossed into garbage was absolutely shocking (https://www.instagram.com/p/CJzMqsXlYPb/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CJzMqsXlYPb/) It's reprehensible actions like these - total disrespect for life - that makes action against much vaster things, such as climate change, seem like Pyrrhic victories. People need to fixed just as much as climate and ecosystems.

joshuaheard 5y ago

Every time i take out the trash, I can't believe that our three-person household generates a whole trash can full of trash every week.

theklub 5y ago
I’ve reached the age where a trash can isn’t enough anymore. I need to actively donate and go to the dump often to keep from becoming overrun with items in my house.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

superkuh 5y ago

When you bag your trash and bring it out to the curb for pick-up and eternal storage in a landfill somewhere you normally think it's just that: eternal. But there's no reason to think that the landfills of today will be inviolate in the future. They're absolutely jam packed full of useful rare metals and materials. I think eventually garbage mining will be a common practice. In Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" they have this book scanning machine that just shreds the books then scans all the sheds super fast as they fly by and reassembled computationally the documents (like how DNA is read). Sometimes I worry about a future where this is possible with garbage and garbage mining is happening. Not only would a garbage mining company be able to sell the materials but the vast amounts of detailed very personal information stored discretely in each person or family's bag would also be invaluable. There would be economic motives to automate information retrevial from landfill garbage mining. Depending on how far in the future this happens it could either be a privacy nightmare or a cultural treasure.

acwan93 5y ago
It’s like that Futurama episode where Fry had to teach the future how to generate trash in order to build a garbage ball to save the planet. In the future, everything was recycled, including Bender. They thought Fry was the weird one of having the concept of “throwing things away.”
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Oxyrhynchus could happen all over even today, with things we've lost as recent as the early 1900s I'm sure. It's incredible to try and search for, say engineering practices we've lost, that happened only one or two generations ago. I'm sure there are buried textbooks that would uncover such practices that someone in academia thought, "Well it's probably time to throw this out." There are buildings today constructed with materials processes that are exceptionally difficult to find information on.
- rendall 5y ago
  That's interesting. Are any of these buildings famous?

gswdh 5y ago

I’ve often thought it would be a good idea to charge people a tax when they buy something to pay for the disposal in the future. If they re sell it or somehow dispose of it in a responsible manner, the tax is passed on or reimbursed. I’m not sure how this would be implemented though. I think it would be awesome to make people think about how they are going to deal with the item once they’ve used it. I think just burying something is just not acceptable and will be looked back upon as abhorrent and wasteful.

code_duck 5y ago

I enjoy walking in alleys and see a lot of perfectly good items thrown away, of course. As I am nearly a sentimental hoarder, citing to myself practical, environmental and thrift reasons, it boggles my mind what some people toss out. In residential trash I’ve seen near-mint suitcases, umbrellas, notebooks, school books, art supplies, boots, shirts, jackets, large toys, entire potted plants, hats, work uniforms, and much more. Commercial trash can be even more impressively wasteful with things like 60 pounds of ground beef behind a certain bar every other week. As far as food, I have known people who regularly go to drive-they’d, get 6 tacos, eat one or two and throw the other 4 away. I’ve accompanied some friends to dinner who routinely order large meals, eat a fraction and leave it at the table. This casual waste at the consumer level is even worse when you consider the proportion of food that didn’t even make it to a plate. What I perceive is a common lack of appreciation of the total cost, in every sense, of creating any food item or consumer product. Any sort of production involves suffering for someone, whether it’s the lowest paid workers, local people and animals suffering the effects of pollution, or even the problem of roads and air congested by trucks carrying products that will eventually be 2/3s wasted. It boggles my mind that with more organization and efficiency in distribution and usage, we could grow less food, but feed more people and eat more, yet most people don’t see any need to even try to change the system.

noobly 5y ago
I've thrown away so much stuff that has value. Pyrex erlenmyers this week, for example. I don't regret it and it's hard to do (for me), but I've learned every item you own has a cost associated with it, e.g maintenance or even just taking up space (which can compromise aesethetics/atmosphere if nothing else). And trying to sell old junk can be too time consuming and draining compared to just tossing it wholesale. I have a nice clean shop space now and it's worth cutting the losses imo. Luckily, most of the stuff I have is used/cheap or was obtained for free, though. I try to just accumulate less now, even if free.
- meowster 5y ago
  My dad is a horder, and I like to minimalize the amount of stuff I have, and you're right about costs being associated. What I've noticed with my dad is that most of the stuff he hoards, practically no one would want. Some of the stuff he hoards is valuable, but after a short term of hoarding, it gets damaged from neglect to a condition where no one would want it. He knows that none of his children want the stuff, and he knows that I will be renting a trailer-sized dumpster to empty his house after he dies, he even knows he can't use the things himself, but he can't stop accumulating new things or get rid of any the things he already has. I believe his stuff is what will kill him. I've witnessed him trip on piles of stuff (think of his house like an ant farm, where there is only one narrow path to walk through). The air quality conditions are extremely terrible. He didn't even notice an ongoing water leak that was damaging valuable things. I'm all for reduce/reuse/recycle, but in some instances it's a net gain just to throw things that might be perfectly good, away.

thewebcount 5y ago

Regarding this point: > Sacks repeatedly comes back to the idea that retailers could give away unsold or lightly used, returned (but still good) items to their low-wage employees, instead of tossing them, or jumping through bureaucratic hurdles to donate them. This could be an “added perk”, she says, or an additional form of compensation, to bolster employees’ wages. This perversely incentivizes the employees. I had an acquaintance who worked in retail in college. This was a large Midwestern store that sold everything from groceries to car parts to home stereos and TVs. They had a policy that if something was damaged it couldn’t be sold and the employees could take it for a significant discount. It wasn’t long before lots of items started having just enough damage to not be sold, but always on a part of the item where it wouldn’t be noticed when installed in your home. He was eventually fired for intentionally damaging stock.

savrajsingh 5y ago

There was an NYC trash collector that curated a small museum of all the stuff he found in the trash -- it's amazing, small documentary about it: https://viewing.nyc/a-garbage-story-short-film-about-a-new-york-city-trash-collector-and-connoisseur/ https://viewing.nyc/a-garbage-story-short-film-about-a-new-y... wait there's multiple: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/photos-visiting-the-dsnys-museum-of-trash-a-tribute-to-new-york-nostalgia https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/photos-visiting-the...

xyst 5y ago

I look at the waste we have produced as a society and I immediately think back to a monologue in Westworld by one of the antagonists: “I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he would’ve given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, “Why are we here?” You want to know what I think your purpose is? It’s obvious. You’re here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse” I don’t want to think of humanity as parasites on Earth, but we truly need to do better.

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throwaway83291 5y ago

Anyone reminded of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath? According to Wikipedia [0], the eponymous expression occurs in Chapter 25, "which describes the purposeful destruction of food to keep the price high:" > [A]nd in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath