September 2010

In a well done, sort of humorous way, “The Story of Stuff,” explained the true cost (and I am not talking dollars) of producing the goods we consume. It covers the effects on our environment from extraction of the resources to make the product, the health costs on those those who do the manufacturing and just starts to go into the disposal of the goods when we no linger need or want the product.

What isn’t covered is what happens to the goods after we throw them away. This is where “Following the Trail of Toxic Waste,” a CBS 60 Minutes segment that aired on November 9, 2008, picks up. They follow toxic waste, such as computer monitors, CRT TV’s, circuit boards and so on, to where they finally come to rest.

This morning, as I was thinking about the program, it reminded me of newscasts from several years ago about ships that are forever at sea because no country will allow the toxic waste into their waters or on their land. I couldn’t, and still can’t, blame them.

To summarize, through the dark hallways of back room deals that evade laws, the toxic waste that we Americans allow to be produced, in foreign lands at the expense of the people in those lands, returns to those lands to be stripped for the precious metals by people in unsafe conditions in unsafe ways at the cost of their health. What cannot be recovered just gets piled up and leeches toxins into the soil and water.

It grieves me that we Americans have taken on the attitude of “not in my backyard – out of site out of mind” with regards to post-consumer waste. If we can’t see it or smell it it isn’t a problem. Landfills moved because people didn’t like the sight and smell of them. This didn’t deal with the underlying problem – too much stuff.

The current manufacturing paradigm is cradle to grave, but there is a growing movement around the world that is now thinking cradle to cradle. This where something is designed with the forethought of when this item is no longer useful (call it dead) it becomes the input for something else. It is being heralded as something new. New to modern man’s way of thinking maybe, but not new at all. It is a Law of Nature. When a tree dies it decomposes and becomes food for other plants and insects which in turn die and decompose into food for trees. It really is a cycle as our forebears from millennia ago new and worked within.

Can we return to those days? Probably not. Can we return to that way of thinking? I believe we can.