Waste

Actually, it is possible to philosophise about everything; about what is lofty till about what is banal. Take Montaigne. He wrote about the education of children and about friendship but also about thumbs. Here I have written about Montaigne (of course), about the philosophy of Descartes (and criticized him) and about such an everyday event like passing a square (is it really a banal action?) or even about banality. Often, things appear to be not so banal and unimportant as they are at first sight. Take waste, trash, or garbage, or how you would like to call it. What could be more banal? For ultimately, we throw it away. But also in this case, the banality of waste (to use this word in this blog) is only superficial. Isn’t there a saying that “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? As for this, Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher, who founded the philosophy of everyday life in the francophone world, wrote: “A social group is characterized as much by what it rejects as by what it consumes and assimilates. The more economically developed a country is, the more it throws away and the faster it throws things away. We waste. In New York, the garbage cans are huge and all the more visible since public services, in the homeland of election and free enterprise, function poorly. In the underdeveloped countries, nothing is thrown away. Every scrap of paper or string, every box is used, and even the excrements are collected.” (p. 338) Lefebvre wrote this in 1961, and although since then the world has changed a lot, and although it has been recognized that we waste too much and that waste is a problem and a threat to the world, in essence the tenor is true: What you throw away says who you are. The difference with 1961 is that in New York and everywhere else we still waste a lot but we throw things away in a different way: We recycle. Or at least, we pay lip service to recycling, for here in the Netherlands, for instance, plastic refuse is collected for recycling, but in fact it is only about a third of the collected plastic refuse that is really re-used; the rest is allegedly impossible to recycle for several reasons, and as yet it is burnt in the incinerators (as if a need for recycling doesn’t exist). This use of plastic waste says something about the Dutch, though I wonder whether it is different in the countries around the Netherlands. Anyway, really recycling plastic waste is apparently not important for the Dutch, for otherwise a solution would have been found.
Waste is the mirror of the soul, in the way we as a society deal with waste, but also what we see as waste. If you don’t live in a big town, at least you have been there, I assume, and probably you’ll have seen there people, usually drifters, hunting around for something in the litter bins along the streets. A good chance that they’ll find something useful, for people throw away a lot that is still useful for others, and maybe for themselves, too. They don’t take the effort to have it repaired, or they don’t like it any longer, because it has become old-fashioned, even if the object thrown away is still almost new. This says something about society (“we are that kind of people: consumerists”) and even more about the individual, both the one who throws away and the one who collects what is thrown away (“that person is like that”). Waste as the mirror of the soul.
These two examples show both sides of the waste problem: The social side – society doesn’t handle its waste well; it still throws away what could be recycled – and the individual side – individuals who throw away things that are still usable (and others sometimes collect this “waste”). A problem it is, for waste contributes to the global warming. In order to solve the waste problem, recycling is seen as a kind of solution, and in a sense it is: It makes that waste products are used anew, with the consequence that less waste is produced. However, for a part recycling is also a kind of waste; at least it is waste supporting, for so long as we recycle what actually was already waste (i.e. a not useful product) when it was produced, it helps to continue our waste economy. It functions as a fig leap for the bad conscience. The only solution is to stop producing what is not necessary (I know, the word “necessary” raises many questions, but we have made already a step forward when we start to raise these questions). And we must simply stop throwing away, what is still useful. Only after this step has been made, recycling will be a partial solution and no longer contribute to the problem. Should we ever come that far? In older blogs, my answer was “no”. I am pessimistic about stopping the global warming, let alone about undoing the global warming. But that’s another problem. If we would stop wasting what must not be wasted, we would have taken a leap forward. Can we? The quantity of waste we’ll continue producing will tell us.

Source
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne. Édition intégrale. Montreuil: L’Arche, 2024.