“When who you are is thoroughly caught up with what you own- with the things you display on your body or in your home- conspicuous consumption becomes central to the cultivation of a self and to structures of social value and distinction.” (Hawkins, viii) Almost everyone in society uses products that are wasteful and unnecessary that add to this conspicuous consumption. Items such as acne wipes, air fresheners, disposable toilet cleaners, and disposable coffee cups from your favourite café or coffee shop are all part of this wasteful society in which we live. However, the questions we need to be asking ourselves are what does this really do to our environment and what can we do to stop it?
When looking at the amount of garbage our society produces, what we don’t see is the waste that comes from producing those products. This phenomenon is called the “wasteberg”. This term, coined by Arthur H. Purcell helps the human brain visualize the amount of waste that consumers see versus the amount of production waste that they do not. Production waste is like an iceberg; consumers see 1:19 of its total amount. If we were to take a Canadian Tim Hortons medium sized disposable cup for example, the weight of the cup is 12.2 grams (4.3 ounces). By the ratio of the wasteberg, one can conclude there are another approximately 19 times (if you round to a percentage of 5%) that one does not see. By doing the math you can find that there are approximately 231.8grams (8.17ounces) of waste that is not seen by the consumer. That is one quarter of a kilogram or half a pound of waste for one Canadian Tim Hortons medium sized cup! This doesn’t even account for people who ask for their coffee to be double cupped, or those who drink tea which is automatically double cupped.
The effect on the natural world for our disposable society is significant as well. Due to all the plastics and sludge that have made their way into the ocean, we now have the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Wikipedia). This patch, although not visible from satellite, is an area of plastics and sludge in the North Pacific Gyre. It is categorized by particulate within the upper water column of the ocean. These plastics are affecting the marine wildlife such as the albatross and jellyfish as they are mistaking these items for food. In some cases, chicks die from being fed plastics by their parents (Wikipedia). These plastics end up in the sea is because of us. By reducing the amount of disposable products that we use, and reducing the amount of conspicuous consumption we participate in, we can reduce the garbage that has to be dealt with by our regions, and lower the increase to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
In order to reduce our disposable ways we have to think about what we are purchasing. We must take a look at our everyday life and determine what disposable products we use the most. For some people it is coffee cups, for some it is tea bags, for others it is cigarettes or paper towels. Each of the disposable items have non-wasteful alternatives such as using cloths instead of paper towels and reusable coffee filters instead of paper ones. In order to learn how to reduce the disposable items in our lives, our best resources are our elders. They were around before we had all of these disposable items. They can tell you how things used to be done, and how we can go forward with using more reusable alternatives. By doing these simple things we can reduce our waste, reduce our conspicuous consumption and reduce the strain on our planet.
“Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Apr. 2013. Web. 1 May 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch>.
Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How we relate to rubbish. N.p.: Rowman &Littlefield, 2006.
