During the readings on disposability, I was surprised to notice a stark contrast between the article written in the plastics journal in the 1950/60s, and the ones more recently. “The future of plastics is in the trash” is indisputably a sentence we can look back on and only sense irony, but why was it said in a serious article that supported the transition to wide-scale plastic use?
I think there is a conversation to be had on how humans actually view waste. When innovation is ‘flying off the shelves’ and making life more convenient, people are only thinking about how many they can sell and how much they can buy. It’s not till much later where it starts to become a tangible problem where discussions about alternatives are necessary. This extends beyond plastic: fashion, food, electronics. I would be willing to bet that the average lifespan of any given product in someones home is significantly shorter than it was X amount of years ago.
At what point will our waste genuinely become impossible to ignore? Not just to the people working in waste management, but to the consumer? Will there be a world one day where a trash removal service doesn’t make sense, or where it is extremely expensive to properly dispose of things? The implication for society is threatening. Disposability is shifting from a scientifically exciting idea to an existentially threatening one. I wonder if the market can respond in a significant way to prevent the issue from realizing doomsday proportions.