The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [128]
For example, it’s commonly said that your car loses more of its value the day you drive it off the lot than on any other day (barring a day of catastrophic collision). In that very instant, just minutes from the moment in which you bought it, your car is worth about 10 percent less than the price you paid2—even though it’s still got that new car smell (which is often the toxic additives in the PVC off-gassing, may I remind you) and there’s not a scratch on it!
The words “prize,” “praise,” “price,” “appreciate,” and “depreciate” are all related—they come from the same Latin root word pretium, meaning “value.” So how and why exactly does a shiny new thing go from a prize that we praise, appreciate, and pay a high price for to something that suddenly and steadily depreciates in value? As comedian George Carlin put it, “Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?”3 The value or lack of value that we assign to things is really arbitrary.
Accountants use complex calculations to determine how the value of objects (or money, or business entities, or even whole countries) is reduced over time, usually related to usage, wear and tear, decay, technological obsolescence, inadequacy, or perceived inadequacy caused by shifting fashions. But I think there’s more going on here than what accountants tell us things ought to be worth—it’s the same system-wide message we looked at last chapter that influences our opinions about our Stuff. This message tells us our Stuff is no longer good enough for us and fuels our desire for more. And when our Stuff is no longer good enough, it’s like a magic wand is waved over it: Poof! Our Stuff is transformed into waste.
There’s an exercise I often do with kids when I’m speaking at a school. I take an empty soda can and I set it on a desk. “Can someone tell me what this is?” I ask them. “It’s a can!” they always yell out. Then I hold up a little trash bin. “What about this?” “That’s trash,” they say. I show them what’s inside the bin: an empty soda can. In the bin, it’s trash. I take it out and place it next to the first one. “What about now?” “It’s a can.” The point, of course, is that there’s no difference between the can on the desk and the can in the bin. Waste is defined by where something is, not what it is. It’s about context, not content.
This is the same argument made by Dr. Paul Connett, a chemistry professor at St. Lawrence University, whose fascination with waste may even surpass my own. Over the last twenty-five years, Connett has given more than 1,200 presentations on waste to students, urban planners, community residents, policy makers, and anyone else who will listen.4 In his presentations, Connett sometimes picks up a garbage can and pulls out its contents for people to consider. He holds up paper, a glass bottle, a pen out of ink, a plastic bag, maybe a banana peel, and asks that each of them be identified. “Is anything in here called waste? No—these are all resources in the wrong place. ‘Waste’ is a verb, not a noun. Waste is what we do by mixing them together... Separated, they are resources; mixed together, we waste them.”
I agree with Connett in all cases except for those items designed so poorly or made from ingredients so toxic that they should never have been produced, sold, or bought in the first place, like a PVC shower curtain or a PVC anything. Or a disposable plug-in air freshener. Or a flushable single-use toilet bowl brush. Or a Hummer private vehicle. Or those rigid plastic cases that hold new electronic gadgets hostage inside. Or just about anything in the SkyMall catalog. In my opinion