the second half of this post is going to be about specific examples. They may or may not be relevant to you. But I bet you’ll be able to relate to it a few of them. Some of them are examples of where waste is already happened. Some of them are examples of where waste is inevitable. Some of them are examples of where you can choose to avoid waste through your behavior.
here’s an example of waste that’s not your fault. The world has decided that physical sets of encyclopedia are no longer necessary. If you happen to have one of these dinosaurs in your house, it’s not your fault the internet happened. Get rid of those bad Larry’s. The best you can do is rip off the covers and recycle the insides. Or you can use them for fires in the winter. But keeping them doesn’t mean they don’t have to go at some point. Eventually you will die and someone will have to clean out your house.
How about clothes? Well, I think that depends on why you’re getting rid of them. If you’ve got a box of clothes from before you had kids and it is just not physically possible that they will fit anymore, that doesn’t seem like waste. That seems like a thing that just happened. But here’s the funny part. The longer you hold on to them, the more wasteful it is. Why? Think about what you wore 20 years ago. How many people would want to buy that in a second hand store now? Probably not many. Of course, some fashions will circle back especially in the hipster population. But the most bang for your buck in terms of giving things another life and being less wasteful is to donate them to a good cause as soon as you realize they’re not for you anymore. This could be about size. It could be about style. It could be about a job change that means you don’t need to dress up anymore. It could just mean things that you bought too much of. It’s not wasteful to move those things on to someone else who can use them. Particularly if you change your behavior going forward so that you don’t over buy.
let’s talk a little bit about the behaviors that are wasteful. Buying things that just don’t quite fit and convincing yourself that they will magically stretch out or shrink in the dryer to fit you perfectly. Buying things that you might need on impulse but don’t really need. Buying duplicates things that you know you have because you can’t find the original. In that case, if you really need the thing, buy a new one. But establish a place for it to live and be disciplined enough to put it back in that place so you don’t have to buy a third one two months from now. Buying things impulsively on, for example, Amazon and losing track of the item or the date you have to return it by and simply ending up with something that you don’t really need or want. Again, that’s behavioral. I don’t think it’s the best choice to buy a bunch of things and then spend a lot of time and executive function returning them. But sometimes I have to buy a bunch of shoes to figure out which ones are going to fit. But as soon as I make the decision, all the ones that didn’t make the cut get shipped back. Then I don’t have to worry about has it been 25 or 30 days. Cuz they go back on like day three.
these are just three examples that popped into my head of different kinds of things that we need to get rid of. But we live in a consumer culture. And I’m hardly living a Spartan existence. I have a good amount of stuff. But I basically use it all. And most of the stuff facilitates activities or other needs. And it is not so much stuff that I don’t have the ability or the time to organize it all and know where everything I don’t really have a need conclusion to this post so I’m just going to stop talking…