Throwaway and Recycle Culture

“It has enabled some of the worst behavior I have ever seen”

Kreigh Hampel – Director of Burbank Recycle Center in California

Reading the quote above, you could only guess what Mr. Hampel is talking about. Surprise, he is talking about the throwaway culture. More accurately, in this case, he is talking about recycle culture.

Throwaway Culture

Just do a quick Ctrl-F search of Laudato Si’ or search for the term on Google, and you will find many words from the Pope about throwaway culture. The idea is that we have been raised to see everything as disposable. The consequence of this is that our ideology and habits go well beyond junk in the trash bin.

We have a problem. Items come and go from our life so fast that we forget them. It is easy to see this as just a part of the capitalist economy, as nothing moral or immoral about it. That is until, as Pope Francis describes the next step by saying, “The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects…”

In capitalism gone too far, the initial push by companies to generate more revenue has led to an entire culture in America that consumes and uses: its resources, its time, and its people.

Planned Obsolecence

Planned obsolescence is a tactic used by companies to ensure that their products are good, but not that good. It is the reason, as this very well done video describes, that we can’t have nice things. In order to drive sales and profits, they have to either make their products total garbage so you buy more, or they have to make the new stuff so much better and cooler that you buy more even though you have perfectly good items in your home.

Planned obsolescence leads to two things. 1. We own a bunch of trash. 2. We want more of it.

The sad part is that we lose our ability to see the things in our life that are truly valuable and indispensable. We form a habit of always needing and wanting new things. Throwaway culture, now engrained in us, has bled into our relationships with the people in our life.

We are so used to switching to the new, that we quickly forget to keep in touch with old friends beyond seeing their life on social media. Even then, people are removed from existence at the click of a button if they hold opinions that contradict yours too much. When we meet new people, we want to impress so that they will want to see us again. Then when we are spend time with others, we are still looking to our phones at the people that we still aren’t in touch with. We are not content in place.

Recycle Culture

Recycle culture is in some ways worse than throwaway culture. It is throwaway culture masked by good intentions that lead us to continued, if not enhanced, consumption.

Last year Katie and I moved to a new city that doesn’t have recycling included in the city’s waste management program. We were feeling really guilty for not setting up recycling right away. Coming from the East Coast this was a big deal. At the same time we were a little bit wounded by past experience of seeing neighbors throw plant and animal waste into our shared recycling containers, thus contaminating our entire bin. That wound doesn’t justify the lack of attempt to recycle lately, but it does show the point that our culture has taken up recycling to make itself feel better about our consuming and throwing away culture.

The answer to these issues would not be to just recycle. Rather, it is to learn why we recycle.

Looking for an answer, I found this video by NPR titled Is Recycling Worth It. I thought that I would find my answer and go on to happily register for recycling after. Nope.

Instead what I found was that, while recycling is better than trash by its attempting not to be trash, it is not enough. The real answer would be to create less goods that are better, and finding a way to hand them on or properly lay them to rest when we are done with them. This is to take ownership of every object we use.

This is definitely not an easy task. If I drink a beer from a can, that is My can. I have responsibility for it coming into my house, for the functions it serves, and for the way it leaves. While this will definitely not change my actions immediately, maybe it can start to change my mindset. By taking care to at least think about what I am doing with my trash, maybe through that I can learn to have more delicate care for the relationships in my life.

Where are Throwaway and Recycle Culture In Your Life?

In the Home

Think about the items in our home. How many of them have been in the house as long as you have? How many items are worth passing on?

Side note – Katie and I had a great conversation with Victoria from ConsumerCatholic.com that started out about FIRE, but ended with talking about how we as Catholics can choose to use better products to invest in a better world! Here is a link to that conversation on her podcast, Treasures in Heaven.

In the World

How about the people we encounter? Family, friends, coworkers, store workers. Are we only seeing them as necessary interactions of life, or are we seeing them as people worth knowing? These are eternal souls worth caring for.

In Our Spiritual Lives

Lastly, how has this culture affected my relationship with God? God is all-forgiving. The sacrament of Confession is such an amazing gift. Yet, is it possible that I am treating confession like my trash and recycling bin? Just a portal where I send my junk? What if I could try to create less spiritual junk in the first place?