Many times, while I attempt to conceptualize waste, I limit my understanding to throwing away the parts no longer useful to me anymore, whether it’s a food item that’s expired or the useless packaging it’s come in. However, I’ve come to continually realize that waste should be evaluated from more than one angle, as sometimes it is what we don’t do that produces waste. As an example on a small scale, if there are berries that grow in a forest that go unconsumed, is it not a waste of calories, especially to a starving person halfway across the world? If so, how do we conceptualize the ‘right’ amount of waste as we try to assign value to lives, or future environmental sustainability?
Reading early modern theories such as John Locke was an interesting exploration of this ‘pre-emptive’ idea. My understanding of how some figures such as Locke understood the world was that unused land and resources were best utilized to reduce human suffering by creating production, wealth, and value for the individual. A few hundred years later, we can identify an almost opposite problem: too much wealth has subtracted the value of these resources to almost minuscule amounts for the average first-world individual, which then creates more waste as we almost swim in the number of products and feel more inclined to throw out what isn’t ‘valuable’.
Therefore, there is an interesting relationship between waste that is being generated by the lack of utilizing available resources, and the waste that is generated by using too much. How do we assign value to these two contrasting ideas? Is human and environmental suffering more morally justified stemming from one way than the other? What economic or cultural systems may result in finding the ‘goldilocks’ zone where supply meets demand perfectly while reducing ecological and humanitarian concerns? These questions almost seem impossible to answer, but organizing the concept of waste in these two categories has given me an interesting insight into how we might approach ‘balancing’ the system.