The question at the end should be asked a lot more, preferably BEFORE buying junk.
The last time I was at Dollarama I was looking at all the plastic toys and convenience items. I can’t remember exactly what it was that made me go, “this is what we’re destroying the planet for??” But it sure applies to a lot of stuff there.
I always buy stuff used, not just because it’s cheaper, but also because I don’t want to contribute to the waste we create. I’ve only ever purchased one piece of furniture new; my bed frame because I was sick of mattress-on-the-flooring it after breaking up with an ex.
I usually grab old PCs from the loading dock before they go out for recycling. I know that they’re not refurbed, they only ever go for disposal. I usually test them out, tidy them up, and throw in any RAM or better CPUs I have lying around. If I don’t think I can make a decend PC out of it, I strip it for parts, and tear it down to steel / plastic / wires / boards and take it to the eco centre.
Your company should be paying you for all that work. That’s their waste, not yours, and it is their responsibility to recycle it properly.
But I fully understand if that’s not a fight you want to pick at work.
I mean, I at least try to fix things before throwing them out (although my success rate is probably less than 50%), but not everyone has the time, knowledge, or tools to even try. Plus, some things are just unfixable.
Then there are things like the $2 plastic tchotchke that you bought because you needed it once for a specific purpose and never needed it again. How much time and effort are you going to spend hunting down someone to give it to? The real problem here is an economic one: in cases where the item was bought for $200 and we might get $100 back, many people will make the effort, but not for $2. So maybe we should concentrate on making the cheap tchotchkes out of biodegradable materials, so that they do less harm when they’re inevitably discarded, 'cause people aren’t going to buy fewer of them.
I’d much rather see the $2 tchotchkes eliminated entirely.
Need a one-off item? Borrow it. Until COVID screwed things up, our neighbourhood had a thriving tool library. We need more things like this in the world. The “right to repair” legislation is a small step in the right direction as well.
We need to erase the idea of “disposable” from our collective consciousness. Things should be designed for extended use, and disposed of (ideally through recycling) only when they cannot be repaired or maintained.
You can’t completely eliminate the $2 tchotchkes. It can’t and won’t happen. First, because buying durable items is expensive in the short term even if it saves money in the long term (you can buy cheaper on the used market, but it has limited capacity: each item must have been purchased new by someone and then not used until it wore out). Not everyone can afford to lay out $100 to save $10 over the next five years, as an alternative to spending only $10 right now and buying a new whatzit in six months. Second, there are items you really do only need once, like favours for a kid’s birthday party (actually, kid stuff in general, if you’re only having one kid). Third, there are things that need to be strictly sterile when used (although those tend to cost more than $2), and disposable is several orders of magnitude easier to sterilize than reusable. We can push for products made of things like cast recycled paper pulp or biodegradable plastic where that’s an option, but getting rid of all disposable products would seriously impact standards of living and expected lifespans worldwide.
You need a minimum population density for something like a tool library (or a Makerspace, which will typically have tools on hand) to work well. Say, 10 000 people within an hour’s round trip? My hometown couldn’t have mustered that. It’s an effective solution in some places, but not everywhere. Likewise neighbourhood garage sales or swap meets or other places where people can swap tchotchkes they no longer need for other things they like better.
To put it another way: This isn’t an ideal world. The majority of people had rather shoot themselves in the foot than consume less, even when they can afford to. Practical solutions need to take human selfishness into account.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This First Person column is the experience of Meg Whitton, who lives in Simcoe County in southern Ontario.
My partner replaced some screws, added some glue, and that evening, by the fire pit, a glass of wine on the armrest, I didn’t think they felt spent at all.
A father and son brought cardboard boxes filled with sand to clear space for landscaping.
They paid him to throw out unsellable “donations” — bags of dirty clothing, broken toys with missing pieces and items left in the rain.
After several years on our living room floor and a dozen or so play sessions, I’ve convinced our kids, ages five and seven, that it can go to another family.
A few years ago, when professional organizer Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix was teaching us to discard items that didn’t bring us joy or when magazines and other blogs offered purging tips, I noticed no one seemed to ever ask why we bought it in the first place.
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