The Unstoppable Age of Consumption

A few years ago a post on Facebook began to make it’s rounds showcasing a pallet of water at Costco. It would illustrate the fact that one of these pallets can hold roughly 72 cases of water, equalling more than 1,500 bottles per pallet. The main horror of this post wasn’t in how many bottles are on each pallet, but rather how many of these pallets they sell within a day at just that one Costco alone. I don’t know the exact number, but it was a staggering amount. While I haven’t been able to track down the original post, the truth behind it remains a horrifying reality. According to PlasticOceans.org, Americans consumed 100 billion plastic bottles in 2014 alone, with 50 billion of those being plastic water bottles. 50 billion, with a B! That’s a lot of landfill space, especially from something that is easily remedied by using a reusable bottle. 

Now, the point of this post isn’t (entirely) to point out how much we consume and then waste as a society. That topic has been shoved down people’s throats quite a bit, although apparently not enough it seems. The point of this is my concern regarding just how unstoppable human consumption/waste is at this point due to how baked into our culture it is. I’m sorry to be a negative nelly here, but I am less than optimistic about us being able to change our consumption destruction course anytime soon. Let me explain through a small thought exercise: 

Pick any large department store of your choosing. Let’s just pick one Walmart in a medium-sized city. Look around at every single item in that store that isn’t consumable food. Nearly every single one of those items will end up in a landfill at some point. Whether that’s in a week after it has been consumed and thrown away, or in 30 years for larger items (i.e furniture and appliances) that have stopped serving their purpose. I’m being somewhat optimistic, hoping that at least some of those are recyclable and will be treated as such, but based on the clientele that frequent these stores, I highly doubt those choices will be made. Not only will all of those items currently in that store end up in a landfill, but the store will be restocked and replenished on a regular basis to have new items to be consumed and then thrown away. And that’s just that particular Walmart in that particular city. Not only are there more Walmarts within that city, there are hundreds and hundreds of other stores varying in size (just within that one city alone). Then take into consideration the amount of gas needed to regularly ship all of these items to the store, the gas needed to transport all of the employees to the store daily, and the energy needed to run a store that large. 

But what are you going to do about it? Are you going to stop shopping at that store? To do what, shop at a different store that operates the same way, but just has a different paint job? And even if you do shop at a different store there is an endless conveyer belt of people who will continue to shop there who don’t give a fuck about their consumption habits. 

Let’s add another thought exercise into this equation. You’ve read/shared a post about how Global Warming is coming and we need to do our part to cut down on carbon emissions. Maybe you’ve even shamed others (or been shamed) on how they need to take the environment seriously. So you decide to do the noble thing and stop driving your car to work. You’d rather ride your bike instead to cut down on carbon emissions. Just how realistic is that though? For myself, someone who works in video production, it’s not. I am regularly required to drive all over the place for video shoots across the Reno/Tahoe area, something that would be impossible on a bike. And while that is just my own personal anecdote, I guarantee that several people are in the same boat I’m in. We have built a live/work society that is not only dependent on automobiles, but regularly needs a new one every few years (another sector that requires vast resources to continue and flourish). Now, I recognize that I’m biased here, being someone who lives in Nevada, an area where a public transportation infrastructure is severely lacking. Places like the Bay Area and New York have a much better system to cut down on the need for personalized transportation. But until that is available in places other than densely packed cities, this is an issue that will continue to grow. In 2019 nearly 17 million cars were sold in that year alone. 

It isn’t all doom and gloom, though. There are companies out there who are making an effort to fix and change our consumption-to-waste impact. The company Blue Land (a business my wife discovered that primarily makes cleaning products) is aiming to change how much packaging we consume. Rather than giving you a giant plastic bottle full of toxic ingredients, they instead ship you an envelope of concentrated tablets to be placed in reusable glass bottles. This has significantly cut down on our need to constantly buy an entirely new bottle of cleaner (whether that be laundry soap, dishwasher soap, multi-surface cleaners, etc…) every time we need to restock. 

Companies like TenTree and Noble Oak have partnered with nonprofits to shift a portion of their proceeds to planting trees in an effort to be carbon neutral. You also have much larger businesses like Tesla looking to completely shift our mindset on how we obtain and consume energy by aiming to obtain more of our energy from natural resources like solar power. While companies like Blue Land and Tesla are actively making an effort to make a difference, until these are easily accessible to everyone and adopted by more large organizations, their difference will be a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of consumption taking place across our planet. 

At the end of the day, this issue is incredibly complicated, with the issue of the matter being baked directly into our culture. Every single holiday has become a celebration of consumption. Overpopulation has made the ability to be self-sufficient nearly impossible and insanely expensive. And the endless rat race of planned obsolescence with products means that we will constantly be mining this earth for everything it’s got. The solution here lies in a massive cultural mindset shift. That shift has to come from new government policies, businesses starting to look at responsible consumption, and a change in our own personal habits. If we just continue to hope and rely on governments and businesses to make a change, then nothing ever will. I hate to echo the most repeated cliche of 2020, but we are literally all in this together. Unless we all get on board with taking this shit seriously, then we will never move the needle. But until people start thinking of this as a personal responsibility, things will never change, especially when people can’t even commit to something as simple as using a reusable bottle, which in my opinion is the bare minimum.