By Robert Dean
Guest Columnist
It’s been a long few days in a long year that’s only three months in. The mass shooting in Austin, the bombing of Iran, the endless argument about whose AI is going to save or destroy us. I want to tap dance on all of it with jokes about how Trump is an infected elephant stomach in a miraculous human body, but I’m not here for that this week.
I’m here to talk about waste.
My Irish grandmother used to say wasting is a sin. She grew up with nothing, so she meant it the way people mean things when they’ve had to. I think about that a lot. I think about it every time I finish a bottle of bodywash and pitch it in the trash, knowing that bottle will be in a landfill long after everyone I love is dead.
My girlfriend’s Converse are falling apart. She was about to throw them away when a tube of superglue would do the trick. Why is it always our first instinct to discard instead of repair? Maybe because that instinct has been engineered into us.
In 1932, real estate broker Bernard London wrote, “We must induce people to buy more and more.” Nearly a century later, the logic hasn’t changed. It’s just been lawyered up. When pressed on right-to-repair legislation, Apple has said that repairs are best left to trained technicians using genuine Apple parts. Safety. Reliability. Innovation. All very clean words that somehow always end with you buying another sealed box instead of fixing the one you already own.
I have a guy named Dave who works on old analog equipment, record players, cigarette machines, jukeboxes. I own a 1954 Rockola I inherited and when it needs a tune-up, I have to haul the thing across town because Dave is in his seventies and doesn’t make house calls. He is, as far as I can tell, one of the last people in town who knows how to do what he does. When Dave’s gone, that knowledge goes with him. What happened to the culture of the working class repairman? We traded it for the culture of the upgrade.
This MacBook Pro I’m writing on costs $3,500. It’s a 2019. Guess who’s getting a new battery instead of a new computer? I’m not replacing this machine until it’s as dead as John Dillinger.
Recycling at scale is largely a myth. We rarely turn old stuff into new stuff in any meaningful way. A significant portion of what Americans dutifully sort into blue bins ends up shipped to India, Africa, or China, because that’s how the economics of guilt work. Out of sight, out of conscience.
The food waste numbers are staggering. The USDA estimates 30 to 40 percent of the American food supply gets thrown away. Meanwhile fast food joints, grocery chains, and big box stores pitch perfectly edible food because liability lawyers said so, or because the date on the package turned, or because the season changed and nobody wants last fall’s lipstick shade. My grandmother would have called that a sin. She would have been correct.
We’ve constructed this villainous economy that depends on disposal. The product isn’t the thing you buy. The product is the need to keep buying, to keep consuming, to devour and line the pockets of those who make at scale. And we’ve accepted it so completely that repair feels like eccentricity, like something only stubborn old men and broke college kids do.
Maybe we should all be a little more stubborn. Maybe we should pick up the superglue.
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