the invention of trash
reduce then reuse then recycle
before there was trash, there was just earth. just things that came from the soil and returned to it.
indigenous peoples across Turtle Island knew this circle. the Lakota call it "mitakuye oyasin" — we are all related. nothing was "garbage" because nothing could be. a broken clay pot became garden borders. animal bones became tools. old clothing became quilts. fallen leaves became new soil.
in Japan, they practiced "mottainai" — the deep sense that wasting anything is shameful. broken pottery was mended with gold in kintsugi, making the cracks the most beautiful part.
in Ghana, wooden objects were never thrown away, but allowed to weather naturally back into the earth that birthed them, completing their cycle.
in the Philippines, banana leaves wrapped food instead of plastic, dissolving back into soil after use. in India, steel tiffins carried lunch for generations, never breaking, never thrown away. in Mexico, the Aztec floating gardens of chinampas turned "waste" into fertilizer, growing food in perfect cycles.
then came the industrial revolution. suddenly, we could make things faster than they could decay. we could extract faster than nature could replenish. we could produce at a scale that overwhelmed ancient systems of reuse.
and after world war II, corporations faced a question: how to keep growing when people already had what they needed?
thus came the shift.
we started being taught how to throw something "away."
away where?
there is no "away."
in the 1950s, companies realized: if we make things disposable, people will buy more. but first, we must teach them to dispose.
they created ads showing families how to scrape plates into garbage bags. they branded people who didn't participate as "litterbugs." they invented shame.
imagine a soda company pointing at you for tossing their bottle on the ground, while they produce millions more each day.
they hired an Italian man to pretend to be native american, to cry a glycerin tear over your litter, so you wouldn't notice their factories pumping smoke behind him.
people start pollution, they said. but people didn't invent single-use packaging.
did you know that in 1953, Vermont passed a law banning disposable bottles?
the response was swift. coca-cola and other packaging giants formed "keep america beautiful" – not to reduce packaging, but to fight laws that would.
for decades, they lobbied against bottle deposit laws. against producer responsibility laws. against any regulation that would stem the rising tide of disposables. they spent millions convincing us that litter was an individual moral failing, not a design problem.
when Oregon passed the first bottle bill in 1971, the industry fought it in court. when other states tried to follow, they faced armies of corporate lawyers. when New York City tried to ban styrofoam in the 1990s, the industry funded studies claiming it was eco-friendly.
all while their profits depended on us throwing away more and more and more.
"away" is not empty space. "away" is someone's backyard.
"away" is Accra, Ghana, where children as young as six wade through the Agbogbloshie electronic waste dump, burning plastic off copper wires, breathing toxic fumes to extract metals from our discarded phones, computers, televisions. they call it "sodom and gomorrah" because it feels like the end of the world.
"away" is the neighborhoods of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where women and girls sort through mountains of shredded clothing from fast fashion brands, the dust filling their lungs as they salvage buttons and zippers from garments worn once by someone across the ocean.
"away" is Jakarta, Indonesia, where families live atop Bantar Gebang, a trash mountain so vast it has its own economy, its own social hierarchy. children born there may never leave, their bodies absorbing the methane and mercury that seeps from what we couldn't be bothered to repair.
"away" is Delhi, India, where the "untouchable" caste still performs the labor of handling what others discard, pushed to the margins by the very act of touching what we call trash.
"away" is Payatas in the Philippines, where 200 people died in a garbage landslide, buried under the weight of a city's excess.
"away" is the Pacific Ocean, where The Great Pacific Garbage Patch swirls, a plastic soup six times the size of France.
a few months ago, my mother and i stood in a photography exhibit, faces illuminated by the harsh gallery lights. we froze before a striking image — a young girl and her mother sorting through mountains of plastic bottles.
we didn't speak for a long moment. goosebumps rose on both our arms simultaneously.
i could feel her thinking what i was thinking: us, in another life. us, if circumstances were different. us, separated from this reality by nothing but the lottery of birth.
i watched white visitors move past the photo, their expressions shifting briefly — pity, perhaps, or momentary sadness — before they continued to the next image. i wondered: do they see themselves reflected in those faces? do they imagine their children sorting through the castoffs of strangers? or is this just another tragedy happening to "others" in a faraway place?
what separates empathy that transforms from empathy that merely observes? what makes some see only difference where others see connection?
perhaps it's the same distance that allows us to believe in "away" — that comfortable fiction that lets us discard without witnessing.
what is this strange alchemy by which something becomes "trash"? a banana peel on your kitchen counter: not trash. a banana peel in your trash can: trash. a banana peel in a landfill: pollution. a banana peel in a compost: food for worms.
the difference is not in the peel, but in our seeing.
when we throw something "away," we are really just moving it from a place where we have to see it to a place where someone else must live with it.
what do we throw "away"?
plastic that will outlive our great-grandchildren. chemicals that leach into groundwater. food still wrapped in packaging, enough to feed every hungry person. electronics with rare minerals mined by children in congo. medicines that could save lives elsewhere. clothing worn once, maybe never. furniture that could be fixed with a single screw.
think about the psychology of "disposable."
what makes us feel good about throwing something away?
the illusion of cleanliness. the performance of wealth. the freedom from maintenance. the high of the new. the release from responsibility.
we've been trained to feel disgust toward used things. to see repair as poverty. to experience convenience as care. to equate new purchases with success. to value pristine over patched. to abandon what isn't perfect.
we say "i need retail therapy" when we crave the dopamine hit of buying. we say "treat yourself" to justify consuming what we don't need. we say "i deserve this" as if the earth's resources were prizes for our hard work.
for centuries, status meant owning things that lasted generations. now status means buying new versions before the old ones break.
what other constructs have we been taught to accept?
that working 40+ hours weekly in boxes under artificial light is normal. that food comes naturally in plastic. that success means accumulating rather than circulating. that time is money, not life. that convenience is worth more than clean water. that some places and bodies are disposable. that profit matters more than the planet.
before the age of disposability, we understood mending. darning socks. patching jeans. fixing what broke. reusing what remained. passing down what lasted!
in Puerto Rico, they say "hay que inventar" — we must invent solutions with what we have.
in India, "jugaad" embraces improvisational problem-solving with whatever is at hand.
in Cuba, they keep 1950s cars running for decades with handmade parts when embargo prevents new ones.
listen to how our words shape our thinking:
we don't call it "materials" — we call it "waste," from the latin vastus, meaning empty, desolate. we don't say "discarded" — we say "trashed," as if transformation into worthlessness has occurred. we don't say "excess" — we say "garbage," from old french garbe, meaning "that which is worthless."
language makes invisible the value of what we discard. language erases our responsibility. language turns objects into abstractions. language creates "trash" out of things.
what if we renamed it all?
Einstein warned us “you cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.”
so perhaps we need to unlearn trash.
to remember there are no disposable things in a finite world! to see waste not as inevitable but invented. to recognize the violence of "away."
to understand that what we discard, someone must gather. to relearn the circle that was broken.
to recall that before corporations taught us to throw things "away," we knew that away was just somewhere else on our
one
small
earth.
yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. yes. i feel insane when i talk about this with other people because this is the one thing nobody seems to fully understand the scale of. trash and our current relationship with it is so embedded into our culture and our way of living that it seems impossible to rethink it. it happened to me when i first encountered these "new" propositions during an environmental studies class. at first i didn't understand and moreover i didn't care!! it wasn't until now that my job requires me to think about what we call waste every single day that i am able to realize just how pervasive this way of thinking is. and exactly as you say, that is what it is! a way of thinking, a way of living, a way of speaking!!! trash doesn't exist, waste doesn't exist, everything is something! everything is a material! nothing simply disappears when we throw it away.
and this brings me to the second part of your text that i feel is so so so important we understand. it's not only that the materials itself don't disappear, it's that they become someone else's problem. someone in global south most likely. it makes me think about the countries that IMPORT waste from other countries! it makes me think about how "progress" and convenience and happiness and ease for the people in the global north comes at the cost of those of us on the other side. their claim to reduce waste is only possible because they've shipped their trash elsewhere. into someone's backyard.
(thank you for this text! really enjoyed it despite what my pessimistic rant may communicate)
Nicely put! And when you rightly pointed out how our language matters, I cannot ignore how disproportionately greater emphasis is placed on "recycle" in our daily language. The other two R-words are right there and they barely find place in our discourse. That's because recycling, for most of us, is a job of someone else. Offloading the responsibility, and thus the weight of the moral burden of the trash we generate. But "reduce" and "reuse" demand an action that emerges from within. They force us to make a choice. To choose not to buy the third pair of jeans this month. To choose not to throw away a broken phone but repair. To choose to see the consequences, however removed they could be, of our actions.