“Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”
Benjamin Franklin
We need a 20th century update to the infamous quote to include pollution.
Consumerism, and profit drives the world.
Every now and then, there’s a simple and delightful change in technology that propels us to the next stage of our lives; the industrial revolution changed commerce and consequently polluted many cities, transistorization and invention of microchips allowed almost every household to own a computer, but it wasn’t until the introduction of smartphones that really introduced the world to internet and connectivity. This accelerated everything else – fast fashion, commerce, which ultimately pumped the nitrous oxide into the engines of consumerism.
With Amazon, Alibaba, Lazada, Taobao, Apple, Samsung, Google providing simple means of online purchase, anyone can buy anything at anytime within 5 minutes. Need diapers? Sure, there’s a sale on Amazon if you know how to use Google to find the best prices. Facebook, Instagram and social envy fuels the desire for the best for superficial reasons, catching up with the Jones is now a marathon. New fashion trend every week motivates, or baits us to buy newer and cooler things, where people have gone broke just to appear cool on social media, kids selling their kidneys for iPhones (not drugs!!!) Beyond that, simple status symbols like paper coffee cups for the office yuppies, or rich colleges kids with their brightly colored cocktail straws, coupled with the shopping bags from those weekend retail therapies, ends up in landfills with the rest of other plastic cast-off, or sometimes into the great pacific floating islands.
This is all good if you’re rooting for consumerism, but what about things that changed for the better of improved for the environment over the past decades? I’ll give you the answer once I’m through with Hans Rosling’s Factfullness.
Now, all we need is simply change our behaviors and the way we live, while the advancement of recycling technology play catch up here. In the grander scheme of things commerce must go on and so does life – I’m not suggesting that we stop buying but change our behaviours, some indicated in an earlier post before. Any activities that we do that contributes to waste should be checked and re-planned. The simplest of gestures can help mitigate and decelerate the massing of garbage landfills. Controlled consumption would provide the needed breathing room for technology and policies to catch-up to resolve the great race between recycling and consumerism.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it is a start and all it takes a small effort which will go far. Given time, companies like Recycling Technologies and The Ocean Cleanup and companies alike would be able to cleanup and with the rest of the world – undo the damage we have done to the environment of the past decades.