Throw it all Away
We live in a throw it out society. The average American throws away seven and a half pounds of garbage which totals 2 billion pounds of garbage headed to the landfill each day. How is it possible to send that much garbage to the landfill each day? Obviously we could do a better job of reducing, reusing, recycling, and composting. But the problem is much deeper. The problem is that our society expects it. We buy crap at big box retailers that we know is going to break. Wal-Mart has done an amazing job of teaching us to expect poor quality and then bring us back to replace the broken item with another.
We have to think more long term and see that buying a high quality products that will last for many years is actually a better use of our money than to buy a cheap product now that we will have to replace 6 months from now when it wears out. But most people don’t think long term. They are thinking about today and the amount of money that they have today to buy that particular product.
The other thing that the big box stores have done is to make products so cheap that we don’t even have to fix them. Recently a friend of mine was telling me about his son who learned how to ride a bike last summer. The kid loved riding his bike and happened to get a lot of flat tires. My friend took the bike into a bike store to have the tires repaired. He paid $18 per tire for parts and labor to get them repaired. Fixing both flat tires costs $36. But the same bike brand new at Wal-Mart is $40. It’s almost cheaper to just throw the whole bike away if both tires go flat than to have them repaired.
What about the inexpensive clothing available at discount retailers. You can buy a brand new shirt for only a few dollars. Sure it may be made by a child, has a low thread count, and won’t last but when you look at the cost of dry cleaning, you can almost buy a new shirt for the same cost as cleaning a dirty one.
Now I’m all for capitalism and low prices, but I am shocked that people can’t see what this problem means for future generations. We can’t just throw it all away.
We all vote with our dollars. Please join me in buying high quality products from American businesses that will last. It will save you money in the long run plus it will lessen the waste you toss in the landfills.