On my recent trip to India, I was struck by how in that country, almost nothing is wasted. Paper and packaging are minimized and always recycled. Food is purchased or made based on actual daily consumption. Garbage containers fill up much more slowly. (Unlike the two I drag to the curb of my home in New Jersey each week.) This is true at every level of Indian society – this consciousness is part of the culture. Given the current worldwide obsession with green, organic, and CO2, surely there is something that can be learned from this example.
It’s more about simple economics. Waste costs money and recycled materials are valuable because of lower expectations in the quality of finished product like packaging and cardboard. In the developing world, recycling happens because the level of poverty means it is worth someone’s time to sort and sell the recycled materials. Unfortunately in the developed world, the labor involved means that it is monetarily costlier to recycle than it often is to throw out.
Reply to Growth MattersImagine that–food purchased or made based on consumption. That is starting to happen in some U.S. restaurants with “just in time” ordering, but it’s a long way from being the norm. And at most homes, it’s almost a foreign concept. In the meantime, we end up throwing away almost as much food as we eat.
Reply to JonathanI agree with “Growth Matters” that most people in India find value in the smallest pieces of garbage and probably earn their living doing this - rather unfortunate but the reality! However, being a consumer in both US and India I can appreciate the value of recycling hence I go out of my way to recycle. This is not really the mentality of most middle class families, they trash most of the recyclable materials - drink cans, plastic bottles, etc. A fairly recent example of this - in Bombay grocers/hawkers were handing out plastic bags with groceries and those bags ended up in trash which landed up clogging drainage systems and thus calling for a ban on plastic bags. Frankly speaking I am concerned with the effort being spent on recycling in India or even raising awareness on recycling.
Reply to PDI am not sure how to look at this dicotomy - on one hand I find a lot recyclable materials being trashed in India (my previous comment) while on the other hand I was amazed at the way I could salvage my existing desktop.
Reply to PDHere’s the story to that. I lost the power supply on my desktop recently due to power fluctations. So I went back to Sony to replace it. They asked for $300/- to fix it. So obviously I wanted to try out other options. I found a place in the city that has a lot of shops that work with old computers and fix them. For $25 dollars they were able to replace my desktop chassis with a new one by removing all the parts and putting them in the new chassis. Ordinarily, in US I would have to discard this PC as the cost to fix would be high enough for me to consider replacing a 6 year old pc. I find this quite amazing.