William Barker and William Nance are two good ol' boys I met down at the
Henrico
County
municipal landfill. They were unloading construction
scrap from a pickup truck and dumping it into
enormous metal bins. Both men are plumbers by trade;
Barker works on home improvement projects on his
days off, and Nance was helping him.
I told them why I was visiting the landfill that day: I was
trying to fathom the phenomenal amount of waste in
our society today. Not economic waste -- the United
States
is incredibly efficient when it comes to
transforming raw materials into consumer products in
ever-increasing volumes at ever-decreasing costs.
No, I was talking about wasteful choices in what we
buy and
how we live. So much of the stuff we think
we want, I observed, winds up in the landfill.
The two men responded animatedly. "A friend of
mine found a painting in that too-good-to-throw-away
area," Barker said, pointing to a shed where
people had dropped off some furniture, children's
bicycles and two barbecue grills. "She sold it
on the Internet for $800. ... Look, there's a Nordic
Track in really good shape! ... It's unreal
what people come here and trash."
Nance picked up the theme. Rich people aren't the only ones
who are wasteful, he said. Just go see what people
buy at Dollar Tree. "I asked my wife, 'Show me
something you bought from Dollar Tree six months ago
that you still have now.' It's all junk!"
Personally, I'm a big fan of material prosperity. I love my
PC, my cell phone and my big-screen TV. I enjoy living in a large, comfortable house, taking nice
vacations and driving a sporty (albeit second hand)
Mercedes convertible. I'm a big believer in consumer
sovereignty, the idea that consumers should be able
to exercise their free right to spend their money on
what they want, and not have their choices limited
by a nanny state. I'm a huge admirer of the
capitalist system and its ability to cater to
peoples' every conceivable material desire.
But I sense that something has gone seriously awry in our
society. We buy too much useless stuff. We get bored
with it, banish it to the attic or garage and,
eventually, throw it away. We purchase much of this
useless stuff with consumer credit, undercutting our
financial integrity and relying upon faceless
foreigners to keep lending us money. Worse, the
manufacture, transport and storage of all this stuff
consumes energy, which generates pollution and
distresses the environment on a planetary scale.
The bottom line: In exchange for the momentary pleasure we
derive from the acquisition of material possessions,
we are putting in hock our long-term financial and
environmental future.
Stony
Point
Fashion
Center
is one of the newer malls in the
Richmond region. Storefronts line a pleasant pedestrian mall
with ornamental trees, flowers and wrought-iron
benches. I spent a couple of hours the other day
ambling up and down the mall, popping into stores
that I would never frequent otherwise and inspecting
the wares they sell to the Richmond populace.
My first stop: Mikasa, a chain that specializes in dining,
entertainment and home accents. An illuminated
display of "stemware" deemed
essential for entertaining today immediately
caught my eye. The shelves sparkled with all manner of glass and crystal vessels: some
for drinking wine, some for beer, some for martinis
and some for bubbly. Certain pieces were designed to
capture the taste and aromas of red wines, others of white. There were
even pieces of stemless stemware that served
obscure functions I cannot fathom. No longer,
evidently, is the versatile, multi-functional glass
-- as in a "glass" of milk -- adequate to
carry out the full range of tasks required by the
modern-day hostess.
A similar phenomenon applies to china. In days past, young
couples started out with a set of everyday plates
and dishes, and, if their friends were affluent,
wedding presents of porcelain china. No longer.
Today's trendy household might have complete sets of
everyday plates, plus a set of semi-formal
stoneware and a set of china. Some hostesses break
out special sets for Christmas or other occasions.
"One lady came in and said she has literally
six sets of china,"
volunteered one helpful young store clerk in response to
queries.
"She came back in [to buy another] because her
husband didn't like cups in one set."
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Next, I strolled through Dillards, a department store that is
dedicated to the care and nurturing of the
female of the species. The entire upper floor
was reserved for women's clothing, and much |
of the ground floor was turned over to women's
shoes, cosmetics, more shoes, handbags, more shoes,
oils, fragrances, and more shoes. Imelda Marcos
could have binged for days.
If the allocation of floor space is any indication, modern
women also spend an inordinate portion of their
paychecks on bras. Women survived without bras for
millennia before the modern brassiere was invented
in 1913. Since then, for reasons that elude men
entirely, women feel compelled to fill entire
wardrobe drawers with a profusion of bras varying by
style, color and function.
A nearby store, Claire's, caters to the pre-teen/
adolescent girl demographic. It's a shopper's Little
League that trains girls to become the kind
of hyper-consumer heavy hitters who patronize
Dillards. The entire store is devoted to beads,
necklaces, earrings, hair bands, sunglasses, floppy
hats and bracelets and other tween accessories --
all cheap, all superfluous and all disposable.
It takes less to satiate the consumer impulses of youthful
males of the species: t-shirts, video games and
athletic shoes will do nicely. But within those
narrow parameters, men are as prone to excess as
women. Jonathan Knowles, manager of Champs Sports,
confessed to me that he personally owns 40 pairs of
Air Jordans. Each one is different. "I buy too
much -- my wife can tell you that," he grinned.
"I buy shoes and hide them in the car so she
won't see them."
A few stores down from Champ's you'll find Brookstone,
which peddles some of the most intriguing but
utterly useless and landfillable stuff I
encountered. My favorite: The Motorized BBQ Grill
Brush. "With powerful rotating brass
bristles," the sale literature touts,
"this motorized bbq grill brush quickly removes
cooked-on food grill residue." Why buy a $1.50
grill scrubber from Wal-Mart when you can pay $25 for a brush that works only as long as the
batteries last?
Here's another classic: a travel clock. "Pick up this
travel clock and it becomes a flashlight!" Just
what I need for the one-in-a-million chance that,
when I'm staying at the Hilton, the power grid fails
and the hotel's back-up generator fails to
kick in.
Brookstone also sells this classic to the germ-phobic:
Automatic soap dispensers for the kitchen counter.
"Keep your hands germ free with this
motion-activated soap dispenser!" It is so
reassuring to know that I won't infect myself with
germs by actually touching the dispenser an instant before I wash my hands with
biocidal soap!
Around the corner from Brookstone stands Yankee Candle,
which sells candles not for the purpose of providing
illumination but for dispensing aromas. For a mere
$23 you can purchase a large candle that provides
150 "burn-hours" of scents ranging from
"black raspberry" to "clean
cotton." This store also sells a plethora of
candle accessories: carved soapstone candle holders,
illuma-lid tops that reduce soot output, zippo
lighters, wick snips, wax scrapers and, in the
ultimate product extension, "car jars" to
fill your automobile with honeydew melon fragrance.
I could go on and on about the radio-controlled cyber shark
"that mimics all the natural motions of a real
shark"... the floating pool thermometer... the
digital alcohol breathalyzer. But I shall conclude
this portion of my screed against the excesses of
affluence with a visit to Sur La Table, where every
conceivable kitchen implement known to man appears
to be stocked for sale.
Modern American kitchen stores are especially insidious
because they drive the relentless expansion in the
size of American kitchens, hence the size of
American houses. The modern yuppy family cannot
survive today with only an oven, refrigerator and
microwave. Families are loading up specialized
appliances --- espresso machines, bread makers,
fondue fountains, crepe makers, panini presses,
blenders, juicers, ice cream makers, slicers, dicers
and blenders -- even as they eat out more and cook
at home less frequently than ever before!
Lest you think that I am some class warrior who mocks only
the materialism of the affluent, let me state for
the record that Americans of all classes are
addicted to the accumulation of material
possessions. The main difference between the rich
and the poor is that the wealthy can afford
possessions that last a while before they turn into
trash. At the Dollar Tree, let me assure you,
Americans of modest means squander their money on an
incredible array of cheap and cheesy products that are destined for the landfill.
The first thing that struck me upon stepping foot inside
the Dollar Tree on Patterson Avenue was the
extraordinary diversity of products emblazoned with
the image of Shrek, the affable ogre of movie fame.
There were Shrek figurines, Shrek bubble wands,
Shrek frisbees, Shrek swimming goggles, Shrek sand
molds, Shrek coloring books and Shrek lip gloss. The
other inescapable
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conclusion was that virtually every object in the store was
made of plastic: flowers and flip-flops,
flimsy toy golf clubs and breakable toy pirate
guns; luau masks, fake flower leis and pink
flamingo |
stirring sticks; glo-sticks of all colors and toy mobile
phones so cheap that the hucksters at Chuckie Cheese
wouldn't even give them away as a prize.
Our society is awash in this junk. And it costs us in ways that most people never think
of.
Americans have devised a number of mechanisms to cope with all the
"stuff" they accumulate. One option, as
famously lampooned by comedian George Carlin, is to
buy a bigger house.
Creating more room for their stuff is only one reason, of
course, that
people buy bigger houses. Children lobby
for their own private bedrooms. Families crave family rooms for adults and playrooms
for children. People want offices and guest rooms,
laundry rooms and sunrooms -- all examples of
hyper-consumption in their own way. But a compelling motive
for many a housing upgrade is to create more space
to store more stuff. Stand-up attics. Three-car
garages. Master bedrooms with his-and-her walk-in
closets.
This reality has a huge impact on the economy. In 1970, the
median new single-family house was 1,385 square
feet, according to the National Association of Home
Builders. By 2005, the median size had reached 2,227
square feet -- even though the average household
size in the United
States
had gotten
smaller.
The number of new houses with four bedrooms increased from
24 percent in 1970 to 39 percent in 2005. Please
note: More bedrooms per house means more closet
space per family member. Meanwhile, garages have
gotten bigger, too. In 1970, 39 percent of new
houses were built with two- or three-car garages. By
2005, that number had reached 84 percent. One out of
every five new houses had a three-car garage.
If my own garage is any indication, most Americans
store a lot more than cars in them.
Incredibly, for all their bigger garages, closets, attics
and basements, today's bigger houses are not
capacious enough to hold the accumulated flotsam of American families. People are carting excess
belongings to off-site depositories in such
numbers that the self-storage industry now claims to
be the fastest- growing segment of the commercial
real estate sector over the past 30 years.
Among the amazing facts reported by the industry's trade
association: As of the first quarter of 2007, there
were 51,223 primary self-storage facilities in the
U.S.,
generating approximately $22.7 billion in 2006
revenues. Think about that. American businesses and
households were spending $22.7 billion a year to
store stuff they could not cram into their houses
and offices! And make no mistake about it,
households account for a big chunk of that business:
Nearly one in ten U.S. households rent a
self-storage unit.
To grasp the magnitude of the self-storage business,
consider this: Total self-storage space in the U.S.
amounts to 2.2 billion square feet -- about 78
square miles, an area three times the size of Manhattan.
Put another way, that's 6.86 square feet of space
for every man, woman and child in the nation, or
about 18.7 square feet per household.
Americans need all that storage space despite the fact that
they give away enormous quantities of clothes, toys,
books, electronics, small appliances and furniture
to Goodwill and other charities. To get a sense of
the perfectly good stuff that people give away, I
visited a Goodwill store on Broad
Street
outside Richmond.
Inside the store, I wandered through racks upon
racks of clothes -- many of them so new they might
never have been worn, only a handful showing
traces of wear. Strolling around back, I poked my
nose into a shipping container filling up with
clothes, cardboard boxes and furniture. The trailer
there fills up every two or three days, said the
strapping fellow working there. A truck hauls it to
the Goodwill sorting plant in
Midlothian.
Last year, the Goodwill organization of Central
Virginia
recorded 486,996 donations and processed 30
million pounds (150,000 tons) of peoples'
cast-offs, according to Aimée P. Walters, director
of marketing & communications. Goodwill culls
enough quality merchandise from these donations to
support 13 retail outlets, a warehouse outlet and
three merchandise auctions per week.
Stuff that's too worthless to give away winds up in the
landfill. At the public dump in western Henrico
County,
a steady stream of cars and pickup trucks pulls up
to a ledge where people can toss their household
possessions into one of four huge metal bins.
Between the household waste, the garbage trucks and
the construction debris, the landfill absorbs
roughly 100,000 tons per year, says Steve Yob,
Henrico's solid waste division director.
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The generation of junk increases with each passing year. In
1960, Americans buried 2.68 pounds per person
per day of solid waste in landfills. That
number rose relentlessly for three
decades, |
until it leveled off around 4.5 pounds per person per day.
That plateau doesn't mean, however, that Americans suddenly discovered the
virtues of asceticism and self denial. That's when
the recycling movement started making serious
inroads into the waste stream. Americans are
throwing away more than ever -- but we're recycling
some of it.
Virginia,
you might be glad to know, does a better-than-
average job of recycling, cutting its
waste stream by 29.1 percent through recycling in
2004, according to the National Solid Wastes
Management Association. While recycling may slow the rate at which we fill our
landfills, it only obscures the fact that Americans
continue to generate waste on a prodigious
scale.
We
pay a price for this extravagance -- far more than
appears on our credit card statements. As one might
surmise from the fact that we throw away so much
of the stuff we buy, we don't even enjoy it that
much.
According
to the World
Database of Happiness, which tracks surveys of
happiness around the world, all that stuff does not
buy the U.S. much satisfaction. Among the countries
of the world, we rank only 17th in happiness. That
puts us ahead of war zones like Iraq, dictatorships
like Zimbabwe and economic basket cases like Ghana,
and the ennui-sufferers of France, but behind less
wealthy countries such as Austria, Finland and, the
most felicitous of nations, Denmark.
Happiness
theorists suggest that a certain level of wealth is
helpful in optimizing happiness. But once that level
is reached, each incremental gain in wealth yields a
lower rate of return. One possible reason, they
theorize, is that when wealth is distributed
unequally, so is social status. Unequal social
status leads to discontent, whatever the absolute
level of wealth or poverty. Poor Americans may live
like kings compared to the inhabitants of
Bangladesh, but they don't know anyone in
Bangladesh, so they don't derive much satisfaction
from the fact. But they can see, on television if
nowhere else, that they live wretchedly compared to
wealthy Americans.
Thus,
in
the quest for social standing, there is no finish
line. Americans are trapped in a treadmill, devoting
higher incomes to spending more money on more stuff that
enables them to engage in the reciprocal gift-giving
and hospitality -- key drivers of
hyper-consumption -- that are integral to the way in
Americans bequeath status to one another.
But
there is a dark side to the accumulation of material
possessions, and that is debt. Excessive debt leads
to financial insecurity and emotional anxiety,
neither of which are conducive to happiness.
The
Federal Reserve Board tracks a statistical series
known as the household debt service ratio (DSR): an
estimate of the ratio of debt payments to disposable
personal income. In the first quarter of 1980, the
debt service payments of U.S. households amounted to
11.13 percent of total disposable personal income.
By the fourth quarter of 2006, the ratio had risen
to 14.53 percent -- an increase of 30 percent. Toss
in other financial obligations such as automobile
lease payments, rent, homeowners insurance and
property taxes, and American households owed 19.4
percent of take-home pay.
Our
prosperity (and hyper-consumption) depends in large
measure upon our collective ability to borrow money.
And with the savings rates hovering around zero, we
depend upon the generosity of strangers -- foreign
strangers. How long they will remain eager to lend
to Americans is one
of the great conundrums of contemporary economic
commentary.
To many observers, the U.S. balance of payments
deficit, which reached $818 billion last year, is
unsustainable. At some point, foreigners will decide
they want to dial back their exposure to the United
States, which will result in either (a) a decline in
the value of the dollar and a loss of purchasing
power, or (b) an increase in interest rates, and a
painful increase in consumer debt service, or (c) a
combination of both.
A
central question seems to be whether the dial-back
will be slow and orderly or take the form of a
disruptive financial panic. Because so many
countries depend upon U.S. export markets for their
prosperity, they may continue lending us money
beyond all reason. But sooner or later, the terms of
trade will reach a new equilibrium, and it will
cause wrenching change.
American
hyper-consumption is unsustainable in another way:
It puts tremendous strain on the global environment.
All the stuff that American consumers purchase
requires energy to manufacture, to transport, to
store and to dispose of. The generation of that
energy requires a massive and energy
infrastructure -- giant electric-power plants and
towering high-voltage transmission lines -- that
people find obtrusive, and it
creates pollution.
You
don't have to be an apostle of global warming to be
concerned about the impact of the mining and burning
of coal -- the acid water run-off from mines, the
contribution to acid rain, the emissions of ash,
mercury and other noxious substances. And that's
just in
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the
United States. By exporting much of our
manufacturing to China, the world's workship, we likewise export pollution.
Unfortunately, China, which is not as |
punctilious about its
environmental standards as the U.S., is also
becoming the world's trash fire, coughing up
a brown cloud of haze that effects air quality as
far away as the United States.
While
I regard American's hyper-consumption as a baneful
influence upon the nation, indeed the entire planet,
I am less sure of what to do about it. I don't want
some Congressman enacting sumptuary laws or some
unelected bureaucrat ruling on what constitutes a
permissable consumer expenditure and what does not. People
should be free to maximize their own personal good,
no matter how misguided I may think their judgment
is.
One
option might be to shift the burden of taxation from
income to consumption -- reward work and effort,
punish consumption through a carbon tax or
something similar. But taxing everyone on the same
basis is politically
infeasible in a nation where the ruling political
party in Congress finds something reprehensible in a
tax system that extracts "only" 35 percent of the
nation's income tax from the top one percent of the
population.
Change,
I believe, must come through moral reformation. One
family at a time, one purchase at a time, Americans
must voluntarily embrace an ethic of material
restraint. We must re-define the "pursuit of
happiness" in non-material terms -- the pursuit
of knowledge, the nurturing of friendships and
family ties, a dedication to physical fitness, the
education of youth or the helping of others. That
kind of change cannot be imposed by government, it
must come from within.
--
May 28, 2007
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