Chapter 4: Consumption

With so much of the world’s population and many in the United States unable to meet their basic human needs, I find it appalling how much we, Occidental College students waste. At the conclusion of every school year, numerous articles of clothing, shoes, binders, textbooks, hangers, plastic containers, pretty much anything you can think of are simply thrown out. Last year I lived in Sterns, and our entire hallway became one giant trashcan, overflowing with items from the improperly used recycling bins (not that they were usually used correctly anyway). I’m sure most other students living on campus experienced the same situation in their dorms.

In examining what people were throwing away, I found many of the items to have been never used, such as the Dr. Scholl’s shoe inserts, make-up bushes, lotions, razor blades, etc. Most of the other items in the pile were gently used and certainly the majority of the items could have gone to people in need, rather than a landfill. I understand that many people who live across the country, out of the state, or even those who have to fly home do not want to deal with the expense or hassle of having to store or pack these items, especially when they can easily be re-purchased. For many others, these items are thrown away out of sheer laziness, instead of donating or saving them. As Annie Leonard states, “consumers are not just resigned to the practically disposable nature of this Stuff; we’ve come to accept it” (162). While our RA’s decided they would collect clothing and bedding to donate to Goodwill, or another thrift store, I highly doubt anyone was going to take the time to sort through the other miscellaneous items in the hall. As other students have proposed and we’ve discussed in class, Oxy should create a secondhand/ thrift store to reduce to amount of usable goods going to landfills and enable students/ community members to reuse them. A service could even be set up with RA’s or students that are interested in implementing the store, to go to the dorms to collect and haul the items.

As clearly demonstrated through this example of overconsumption, we need to re-evaluate our spending and stop buying more than we need. Additionally, our arbitrary perceptions of waste and the social stigma associated with reusing needs to change. “Waste is defined by where something is, not what it is. It’s about context, not content” (183). While most items can be reused, those that don’t want to should at least give others the opportunity. As corny as this idiom is, “one man’s waste is another man’s treasure.”