Consumerism Term Analysis

His life’s work, like that of the marketing and design industries he helped create and lead, was dedicated to preventing that from happening, to erase thrift as a quintessential American virtue, and replace it with conspicuous consumption powered by a kind of magical thinking, in which the well would never go dry, the bubble would never burst, oil and all forms of energy would grow cheaper and more plentiful with time, and the landfill would never fill up.

This rise of consumerism and the new American Dream launched during television’s golden age was accompanied by another trash-boosting trend—the plasticization of America.

“Someday we might pay customers for their trash, rather than the other way around,” Steiner allows, reflecting on an everybody-wins future in which trash companies pay a bit for garbage as raw material, then make a fortune turning it into the building blocks of the consumer economy. “We’re not there yet, but it could happen. A few years ago, you’d never hear me say that.”

Plastic has gone so fast from zero to omnipresent that it’s slipped beneath conscious perception.

For all his advocacy for waste-to-energy, Nickolas Themelis believes that the most intelligent, most-likely-to-succeed, long-term solution to waste is far simpler than any giant trash-burning generator, and far less costly, yet so much more difficult to achieve: a changed culture.

That’s when Bea Johnson finally got it: There’s power in putting things down instead of putting them in your shopping cart. There’s power in saying no—the power to change a family’s life and fortune. Maybe a community’s. Maybe a whole country’s.

Johnson and her zero-waste crusade are a whole different animal. She has identified a problem not on a campus or a beach but inside everyone’s home and lifestyle. And her family has responded by transforming itself in a dramatic way, becoming happier and more prosperous by rejecting the consumer economy and lifestyle most Americans live and breathe. Is there any wonder why this angers so many people? Agreeing with the Johnsons’ views means you either have to accept living a wasteful life, or change.

When this book was conceived, I intended to write about our 64-ton lifetime trash legacy, not the 102 tons it turns out to be. This original, smaller calculation was based on the widely accepted and official data point produced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which asserts that the average American produced 4.5 pounds of trash a day. When I discovered midway through this project that these numbers were wrong, that Americans were actually churning out an average of 7.1 pounds a day and sending twice as much trash to the landfill as we were being led to believe, it did more than change the central metaphor of a book about garbage.

It meant our trash problem—our trash addiction—already the biggest on the planet, is way, way worse than we’ve been told.

Waste-cutting is the secret to sustainability, security and prosperity. That 102-ton legacy doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It’s in everyone’s power to make it the starting point instead.