The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [132]
It’s a brilliant idea. It has huge environmental and economic advantages. This is the kind of change that moves from the realm of tinkering to transformation. But it hasn’t caught on (yet). It turns out that there’s a whole slew of accounting procedures and tax laws, institutional barriers, and subsides for virgin material (especially oil) that make it really hard to apply the leasing model. But Anderson isn’t giving up on the idea. He is confident that its time will come, as the price of oil and other virgin materials increases.20
Imagine if Wal-Mart owned the DVD player that you leased from them. After all, we don’t need to actually own a DVD player; we just want to be able to watch DVDs. When the player broke, Wal-Mart would take it back to repair it. They would have a financial incentive to design products to be modular, repairable, and upgradable rather than 100 percent disposable. Imagine how this shift would impact the contents of the trash that we set out on the curb every week.
Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)
In today’s world, especially in the United States, we throw a ton of Stuff away. Out it goes—when we don’t know how to repair it, when we want to make room for new Stuff, or because we’re sick of the old Stuff. Sometimes we throw something out thinking it will be easier to replace later than to store it until we need it again. Sometimes we even consider throwing things away a cathartic activity and congratulate ourselves on a productive day of getting Stuff out of the house.
Everything we commonly think of as garbage—from packaging and yard waste to broken Stuff, rotten food, or recyclables; everything we put in the bins that we set out on the curb—collectively makes up what’s known as the municipal solid waste stream, or MSW. All those nasty ingredients we examined in chapter 2 on production that end up in consumer goods, from mercury and lead to flame retardants and pesticides, and more than eighty thousand other chemicals—they’re in this stream now, too.
Some people in the recycling and reuse industry point out that “municipal solid waste” is a term that has outlived its usefulness and is actually an obstacle to getting people to think differently about the valuable materials they throw away. Dan Knapp, co-founder of Urban Ore, the premier reuse center in Berkeley, California, has long advocated using an alternative concept: “MSD,” or “municipal supply of discards.” Knapp explains that MSD “doesn’t carry the negative connotation of worthless crap that ‘waste’ does.”21 I like Knapp’s idea; just because someone has discarded something doesn’t mean it has no value. Nonetheless, I have used “MSW” here, since I draw largely on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and industry data, which still uses that term.
In 1960, we made 88 million tons of MSW in the United States— that’s 2.68 pounds per person, per day. In 1980, it had risen to 3.66 pounds each. By 1999, at which time recycling was a household word, we were at 4.55 pounds, just below our current rates.22 According to the EPA, Americans made 254 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2007. That comes out to 4.6 pounds per person per day!23 Compare that to your average Canadian (1.79 pounds per day), Norwegian (2.30), Japanese (2.58), or Australian (2.70). In China, the number is just 0.70 pounds per day.24
Source: Based on data from The UN Statistics Division, Statistics Canada, and Index Mundi. See note 24 for this chapter.
So what exactly is in our municipal waste? In the United States, here’s what the breakdown looks like:
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2007.
According to the EPA, nearly three-quarters of the