Wednesday, June 12, 2013

What is wrong with our society?

I cannot, for the life of me, understand HOW we live in such a wasteful society. It absolutely boggles my mind!

I let my recycling build up for the last two weeks and today I finally brought it out. I live in a neighbourhood where we have many shared recycling bins and often times the bin is too full for me to be able to bring my stuff out. So it builds up.

Well, it was two full garbage bags full of stuff. This makes me wonder, why is there so much packaging for EVERYTHING? Why do we live in such a wasteful society?

There are SO MANY WAYS that packaging could be reduced. For instance, we should all have our own containers for many food items. Juice in supermarkets could be in large keg type containers and we could bring our juice container and fill up. There are many types of food that you find at Bulk Barn that could be sold in a similar fashion in grocery stores. Cereal, flour, cookies, chips, candy, nuts, spices, peanut butter, jam, dried fruit. If we all had our own reusable containers for said items then our packaging waste would be significantly less.

Bottled water should be BANNED. It is an incredibly destructive industry. Companies like Nestle suck bodies of water dry and then sell the water at a huge profit. The plastic water bottles don't get recycled most of the time and end up in the ocean killing wildlife. The bottles also leach out toxic chemicals that make the water less safe to drink than tap water. It's just unnecessary! Plain and simple. When I was growing up there probably was bottled water, but no one I knew ever bought it! Why would we? It has no flavour and tap water is free.

Then there is all the crap you buy at the dollar store. Do so many items need to be in packaging? The packaging is often at least five times bigger than the product itself!!! Think about how much transportation it takes to get all this stuff to stores. All the gas, pollution, road traffic, accidents, and money it costs to transport it all! We pay for this! We pay for the packaging, we pay for the people who design the packaging, pay for the people who assemble the packaging, ship the packaging, insurance claims from accidents. All of these things are reflected in the price. So a small 50 cent item is now costing us $1.25 plus tax. This might be small money to us, but compounded billions of times and the destruction to the environment make this a very costly practice! Not to mention that then we are left with all this excess waste that has to either be sent to landfill, burnt or recycled. Studies are now showing that recycling is actually not very profitable with the exception of metal and maybe glass. It's actually cheaper to just make something new.

Each week in my neighbourhood my street is filled with garbage on garbage day. Many people here still aren't recycling and throw out many things that aren't even supposed to go in to the garbage. There is absolutely no regulation when it comes to what you can or can't throw out. There are "rules". Like, you aren't supposed to throw out paint tins. But as we all dispose of our garbage in black plastic bags, no one knows what's in it. So you could easily throw out paint tins, computer components - anything you want.

In my opinion, nothing should be made that has to be thrown out! Clothes can be recycled or upcycled. Furniture can be donated for free to charities. Food can be composted. Why do we have garbage in the first place?

Disposable diapers are unnecessary. Throughout history people used cloth diapers and got on just fine. I for one, was raised on cloth diapers and have no negative memories of it at all! My mother would wash these cloth diapers daily and then reuse them. In the late seventies people were starting to use disposable diapers more often and my mother was ridiculed for still using cloth. I admire her, she knew it was a disgusting and wasteful industry and she didn't buy into it!

Shampoo and conditioner could easily be something we buy with reusable containers. When the shampoo and other soap bottles are empty, simply go back to the store and re-fill! Companies could have their products in giant containers with spouts that we could then pour ourselves. There are too many bottles and containers for so many things it's insane.

Then there is all the frozen food. I do not know what the answer to this is. These are very convenient (though not always healthy). Perhaps if we had to order our dinners and had to return our containers which would then be washed and reused. I volunteered for Meals on Wheels for a few months and the particular branch that I was with actually had their own metal dishes that they brought and collected to and from each house twice a week. My mother has Meals on Wheels and they deliver everything in Styrofoam and metal pie plates with round paper covers. She throws it all in the garbage when she is done. She seems to think that only newspapers can be recycled! And I'm sure she's not the only one, by far! Many people are too lazy to recycle!

We live in a world where corporations make and produce most things, make all the money, don't give back to the community, and buy out government. We wonder why our governments make decisions that don't seem to be in our best interests. They are simply the ones legally making and passing laws. Corporations can't make laws they can only conceive of them and then give government enough money to pass them. Why else does Canada have dirty oil that doesn't profit Canadians? Gas has NEVER been more expensive and yet we've never had so much oil! As a kid growing up in Canada we were taught that our main exports were trees, nickel, and other things. Not oil. There is an interview with Stephen Harper and Peter Mansbridge that you can watch on youtube. Peter asks Stephen why it is that Canadians are still buying foreign oil at high prices when we could be buying domestic oil cheaper. Stephen basically said that it's more profitable to sell our oil to foreign markets and that it is good for the country. Yeah, ok. Seven years ago gas was about $1.00 a liter. Now it's up to $1.42 a liter. That is significant. In another seven years it will probably be $1.60 or more. How exactly is this good for Canadians? We're destroying our natural resources to produce this oil and are not even reaping ANY benefits from it! Only the oil companies are seeing the profits and gains, not us! They want to build a giant pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia to facilitate the transport of oil to China! There is something like a 90% probability that the pipeline or tankers will leak oil and therefore destroy huge sections of our beautiful country. How are we really gaining by this? The premier of British Columbia has recently said no to the pipeline, but I read that the reason is not because she's concerned for the environment. No, she's more concerned about how much money it will cost to clean up the oil spills. In other words, if the oil companies give enough money to the B.C government then they will happily go along with the plan. Stephen Harper has himself said that if some people had their way, that Canada would just be a giant national park!

Please tell me what would be wrong with our country being a national park? What would be wrong with being a country that has the strictest environmental policy on the planet? One that creates organizations to help and monitor environmental policies instead of withdrawing from ones like Kyoto? One day, there really won't be any natural places left on the planet to visit. How valuable would our national parks be at that point? It would be a billion dollar industry! People from all over the planet would come and visit this beautiful country. In addition to the tourism benefits, keeping our land natural would help the planet! When you cut down all the trees on the planet and cover the land with pesticides and oil and dump toxic waste into the ocean, how exactly do you expect life to thrive on the planet? It's a slow kill process!

We already have technology to have fully electric vehicles and yet these have been so incredibly slow to hit the market. Year after year more and more gas guzzlers are being manufactured despite the fact that it is well known how bad gas is for the environment.

It's so sad. Corporations are just out to make money and only think about NOW, about TODAY. Today I can get filthy rich by destroying the environment and by the time shit hits the fan I'll be dead so it really doesn't matter. What about my grand kids and their grand kids? Why can't we as a society think ahead?

By reducing our carbon footprint TODAY maybe we will secure a better future for this planet. But as a whole, the people on this planet are doing very little far to slowly to really make enough of a difference to prevent a global environmental catastrophe in the future.

As one person, I can do the best I can. But it's not enough. I drive a car, I buy disposable items, I take planes, I paint my house, I use a dishwasher and use many other electrical devices. And so do most of the other 30 odd million people living in Canada. What about the two billion people living in China and India? What about the 300 million in the States? There are too many people on this planet living wasteful lives and I am really concerned that the environment just can't cope with it all. Something is going to give, and it will mostly likely be devastation of all life on this planet.