Enjoying Our Waste

So, I was walking down the road the other day and I saw a sign: Littering: fine $1000 dollars. And seeing all the trash at my feet, I was thinking to myself, “This place has got be worth, like, 20 million bucks! How do I get in on this action?!”

You can’t – it’s gravy for the city council. It’s designed to pad their budgets…that is, if they can ever enforce it!

[Throws litter] Wooo!

Littering. It’s easy! It’s fun! It’s free! Why wouldn’t you do it?

‘Cause it’s like living in the city dump – I mean, rent is cheap and there’s no noise from neighbours – but pretty much everything else about it stinks.

Nobody wants to live in a landfill – that’s why Waste Management is a multi-billion dollar business. The big problem is – that’s all it is: Managing.

They’re not reducing it, they’re not recycling it, they’re not really doing anything good with it. They’re just managing the waste.

I’d like to feel happy whenever I throw something away…instead of guilty.

Impossible? Not according to McDonough and Brownguard – their philosophy of ‘cradle-to-cradle-production’ is that everything that’s waste should be reused, like in nature. So all waste should be cycled into the next business or biological process. It can be summed up with the phrase “waste equals food”.

“Waste equals food”??!!

Yes, it does – because people eat plants, and plants need fertiliser, and everybody knows where that comes from. And it should work for more than just plants and people – everything from our clothes to our cars should contain materials that are biodegradable or recyclable. And when I say, recyclable, I don’t mean ‘in the little blue container where it gets transformed into an inferior product until finally it’s food for landfills.’ I mean in the sense where it’s remade into a viable, durable, useable product.

“Waste equals food…but you ARE what you eat…”

When it comes to cleaning up the world idealism is great, but the sad reality is most businesses and governments are motivated predominantly by economic forces, not by idealism. To most businesses, ‘sustainability’ is a dirty word…like ‘fertilizer’.

This is where McDonough and Brownguard’s philosophy really begins to shine. These guys help businesses find ways to eliminate waste or to make sure that the waste they produce is used by other biological or business applications. In the end, they claim to help save businesses a whole lot of money. The bottom line here is: ‘less waste means more profit’.

So is there money in litter? You’d better believe there is…just the right kind of litter. It takes 50,000 pounds of raw material to make a 3,000 pound car. Now, if you could reduce that ratio, or turn it around and use the industrial waste productively instead of paying fees to dispose of it, you’ll be swimming in it…

Profit… not waste.

So, whether you’re environmentally guilty or just flippantly lazy, start demanding ‘cradle-to-cradle’ products. That way, we can all litter together, and feel good about it.

If you want to know more about the ‘cradle-to-cradle’ philosophy, drop by the whatyououghttoknow website – we’ve got links to books, and movies, and… you can find out more there.

So, I was walking down the road the other day and I saw a sign: “Littering – one thous..fine, one thousand dollars. FINE! $1000 I’ll pay it. Littering – fine $5000, no $1000… SOLD!

Transcribed by: Ian

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