It’s much more motivating to have a concrete image in your head of how much garbage is being produced in just one tiny corner of the world by actually watching it happen for a few hours, and then start working through multiplying this amount out as far as your brain will let you go until you realize that the real amount is infinitely more than the most you can imagine. You know a lot of waste is being produced but this knowledge is more theoretical than practical. I believe one of the main causes for the apathy that most of us feel in the face of one of the greatest threats to our survival, and the survival of all other life forms, is that the problem is so big that it’s difficult to even conceptualize. A consumer economy only functions if people keep consuming, and this means constantly replacing the old with the new. The byproduct of a consumer economy is waste. Philosophical arguments against a consumer economy aside, arguments like the vacuousness and greed it reinforces or the fact that it turns people into commodities too who must try to fetch the best price for themselves on the labor market, we have a much more practical and pressing problem. Then I thought about how all of them combined represented only the tiniest fraction of the total amount of waste being produced. ![]() Then I started factoring in all of the other fast food chains. Then I thought about its multiple other locations in almost every city. First I thought of just that chain restaurant in airports all over the world. She was delayed by traffic so I occupied myself by observing how much garbage all of the coming and going passengers produced over the short period of time I was there.Īn employee came around emptying several garbage cans, each with its own large plastic bag filled to the brim with garbage, so regularly that my mind began to swim as it feebly attempted to calculate the actual amount of garbage being produced all over the world at that moment. I found a spot that happened to be right next to a global fast food restaurant. ![]() A few years ago I was waiting for someone to pick me up at the airport in Buenos Aires and decided to sit by the main entrance so that we could make contact easier.
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