A Week of Trash

            We live in a world of convenience, long gone are the days when we made things for ourselves. Whether it is fast food or disposable contacts, there are few items that aren’t available in some convenient form. Water bottles, pens, wrapped candies, toothbrushes and TV dinners. Consumers love such convenience and big corporations add fuel this fire with planned obsolescence. Why would I possibly take my precious time to dinner when I can get it at Wendy’s for cheap? Why would I lug around a heavy metal water bottle when I can bring one of these “fun-sized” plastic ones? These are the questions I have asked myself, trying to see the other side of things. The truth is, people are lazy. Laziness turns to convenience, which turns to trash and more profit for big corporations.

During this last week I have noticed nearly all of my trash has been related to food. I’ve used napkins cleaning up messes and forks eating fast food held within plastic containers. Once my roommate started putting his trash with mine is when I made this connection. I came home Sunday and found the byproducts of 3 fast food meals lying in my trash, nothing else. No waste from hanging out, doing homework, or surfing the web, just food trash. Convenient food trash; this is the problem. Like I stated before, people are lazy. No modern teenager living in the suburbs would go out to the countryside and grow his own food for breakfast. He is going to go to the supermarket, get some Captain Crunch and some milk, eat it and throw the plastic and cardboard in the trash. It is irrational for our generation to get up and abandon this convenience we have born with. Why? Because most of us have no conception of the toll of convenient products on the environment. I’m sure Captain Crunch sales would drop if on the back it showed a picture of it lying for eternity in the DADS landfill. The problem here is our awareness and acknowledgement of trash.

Everyday this week my roommate has made Easy Mac after getting home from class. He pops that sucker in the microwave and doesn’t even think twice. He doesn’t think about the healthiness of it or where it’s going once the little plastic container has served its use. Same thing with the popcorn: one use then gone into the trash bin. He doesn’t ponder landfills or the thousands of years it will take his plastic to deteriorate. It was never thrust upon the importance of the trash, the awareness of one’s waste. But why is it that there has never been this awareness? Because big corporations frown upon it, Hostess and Frito Lay would lose money if their convenient products stopped selling. Workers would lose jobs and business would suffer. In Strasser’s Waste and Want he states the attraction of convenience is, “brief ‘vacations,’ easier work, and freedom from attention, care, and responsibility” (16). Convenience has become a crutch to the modern consumer. We have been raised to rely on it, not to challenge it, and in turn multi-billion dollar businesses thrive on it. From the Easy Mac to the chips to the popcorn to my pistachio bag, my trash was filled with these items! It is very hard not to give in!

At the root of this convenience tree are the big corporations, eager to eat every last dollar in our wallets. They thrive off of our busy lives and our perceived inability to avoid plastics and insta-trash. They create these pre-packaged products eager to be bought by the convenience-seeking consumer, like my roommates’ Easy Mac. The plastic and cheese-y sauce containers serve no purpose but to be tossed out at the end of the meal. Once again I put myself in the roommates’ shoes and ask myself why wouldn’t I purchase this? It’s infeasible for me to make it on my own in this tiny dorm because I don’t have the energy and drive. Voila, falling right into the hands of the big corporations selling Easy Mac by the millions week after week after week.

Sometimes there is no option but to give in to convenience. If I’m out with some buddies and we are starving, rather than sit there and be hungry of course we are going to get something convenient. The lives we live can interfere with our choices and limit them to the point where we have to get packaged products. All this last week I’ve tried my best to avoid plastic and insta-trash but there have been three or four instances where I was too hungry to not. It wasn’t completely unavoidable; I just didn’t think far enough ahead to pack a lunch or dinner. Convenience feeds off of people with too little time as well as those too lazy to care. Here’s another example: monthly or disposable contacts. I could invest in monthly contacts rather than disposable daily ones but that would mean I would have to be very careful with them, clean them and make sure not to damage them. It is a lot of responsibility to bear so I chose the disposable path. It is more convenient for me but means more plastic ending up in DADS.

As my week of research ending I found myself pondering convenience as fad. What if everyone gained enough awareness to care and alternatives were enacted, getting rid of plastic much how plastic rid of its predecessors. Wouldn’t that be something? But first, people need to be exposed to the effects of the convenient products we rely on. It should be a national requirement for everybody to serve one day a year at a landfill. Seeing where my stuff is “thrown away” really open my eyes to the horror of it all. Perhaps if my roommate had been there then less convenient trash would be appearing in my wastebasket. Our society needs exposure. Exposure creates conscience and conscience is what has been driving me to produce less trash. If everyone had this guilty conscience our world would be a much different place. But alas, many do not. Only when this awareness is spread is when our widespread reliance on convenience can be stopped.

-Cooper Leith