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Isn't it cheaper to throw old stuff away than sell it on eBay/garage sale/etc.?

• TeMPOraL 14y ago
  Unfortunately yes, and that is rapidly making our world a worse place to live. We keep throwing away stuff and making more, instead of reusing the old, thus wasting resources and unnecessarily polluting.
  • lmm 14y ago
    Waste of resources is self-correcting. If we were ever to run short of e.g. aluminium, scrap prices would go up and it would become worth selling old things rather than throwing them away.
    • TeMPOraL 14y ago
      Yes, but entropy is not self-correcting. We're wasting (as in, destroying, foerver) easily extractable material and energy. It's much easier to drive 10 000 tons of aluminium out of the mountain with trucks than to collect and melt enough scrap to get the same amount of metal for your factory from junk. Economy is a leaky abstraction, it is ultimately subject to physics and it will break down if we push it too far hoping that market will correct all side effects of bad decisions.