Waste

Waste. The word brings up flashes of trash on the sidewalk, littering and landfills, vile to all our senses, but is that all it is? Waste, to consume, spend, or employ uselessly, futilely and ineffectually, is the definition given by Dictionary.com. The 21st Century industrialized world has become exceptionally good at wasting. It isn't easy or fun to be efficient or effective or completely useful with our resources. With the coming of technology, speed and profitability is valued over efficiency. Our wanton wasting isn't just towards that trash you saw right next to the trash can as you were walking home yesterday, not just to plastic toys and newspapers, but more importantly and less noticeably, to our food, our environment and our time.

Sitting in a restaurant after an excellent meal, a family of four sit talking, stuffed. The server comes up and asks them if they want a to-go box for their food. “No thank you, it would just rot in our refrigerator anyway.” The plates, still with food, are then picked up and taken to the back along with hundreds of the others through the night to be scrapped into a trashcan and then put through a washing machine. Most of us do not consider food as precious of a resource as time, money, or natural resources; however, it is certainly essential to our well-being and is just as scarce. As a society, much of the food prepared is wasted, food that could have been saved, kept raw, and sent elsewhere to actually be eaten. In restaurants, dining halls, and many homes, food is often prepared, but not eaten by the end of the meal or day, and thrown away. It can be difficult to judge how much food is going to be needed for a certain meal or serving in a restaurant or dining hall and not efficient to cook everything to order, but it is efficient to make efforts to use only what is going to be eaten and better utilize what could be saved at the end of the day. By saving food in to-go boxes, another meal, or at least part of one, could be made later from those leftovers.

Certainly businesses should be able to buy what they see fit to making their restaurant run smoothly in order to make a profit, but do restaurants need to use as much as they do? Every night a local doughnut closes shop throwing away dozens of their doughnuts, because they don't keep. Understandably, the business wants to keep enough of its product to satisfy customers, but they never come close to running out. Such a business survives because the materials used to produce the spares isn't near enough profit loss to worry about. This practice wastes a lot of cheap, affordable flour and the very same flour used in projects such as “Power Flour”, a project aimed at preventing malnutrition in the poor all over the world. Flour keeps well and the price does not fluctuate drastically, therefore it does not benefit businesses to buy so much of it and rush to use it.

In an effort to save both time and money, families will buy in bulk for their home meals by only making trips to the grocery store a week or two at a time. Bulk buying means quite a lot of food in the house at one time. With more food available, it means more prepared per meal, and just as in restaurants, much of the food is leftover and tossed out. Food left out (such as fruits and breads) due to bulk buying rots and spoils, further extended what was left unused. Rather than large stores of food in the house, much could be saved through better efforts to use what they have and buy less at a time.

Food spoiled and thrown out is dumped into landfills along with everything from worn-out bed frames to old computers. These landfills – large piles of dumped, “useless” trash – cover the land, helping waste the environment, the most consequential of the valuables this society wastes. Wasting the environment not only damages the society that wastes (as time, food and others do) but all surrounding life, from habitats to availability of food and water sources for the plants and animals our environment holds. Wasting the environment is something that has been brought to attention more recently, with the advent of higher efficiency cars, lower pollutant factories, and wind, solar and nuclear power sources, but wider society ignores the problem, preferring the easier, cheaper alternative.

Humans have been attempting to recycle for several decades, with undoubtedly good intentions: reuse old products by creating new products (or recreating the old), cutting out the need for more of the raw materials and saving the planet some unneeded wear and tear. Theoretically, it sounds great, useful. In reality, it is inefficient and wasteful. Too much time is spent sorting and categorizing the individual products before being sent to the plant. Money wasted on transporting, melting down, and preparing the materials is not cost effective. Recycled products, in general, are often more expensive to make than completely new products, and is wasteful in many other aspects.

Pollution of lakes, streams, and the oceans is increasingly becoming problematic. It isn't just ruining nature’s beauty with Burger King bags, old flat tires, and scrap metal, but also the habitats of animals’ all over the world. This is not just the abuse, misuse, or exploitation of the environment, but a waste. Born into a beautiful world of chemistry, biology, and geology all working together to create the sublime phenomenon of nature, humans, rather than safely and efficiently dividing up the resources to last as long as possible and support as much life as possible, take advantage of the scarce resources available and deteriorate what is all around. Waste is such a common theme in this century that it's not even considered out of the ordinary anymore; environmental waste is assumed to be an inevitable byproduct of the twenty-first century lifestyle. The realization of this dangerous lifestyle by the greater of society has yet to be completely achieved.

This society neglects another kind of waste, one not often recognized and most often taken for granted, time. At this point society is so fast paced and busy that time is often not considered as an important resource, however, time is extremely valuable. In the world today, it is so easy to get information and people from one place to another due to industrialization and technological advancement throughout the world. This allows for our society to much more compared to the time before the ease of access. Many have grown accustomed to short cuts in everything they attempt to accomplish; always looking for the easy way out.

Time is just one of the many things taken for granted by this lifestyle. Days go by just trying to get work finished or at least do just enough to get by, rarely making an effort to best utilize their time, or even think about it. At work or during school, time is most often spent daydreaming and looking at the clock waiting until it is time to head home. Time at home is no better spent, watching telivision for hours at a time (6 hours and 47 minutes on average), children, young and old, waste their timeon video games rather than bettering themselves by studying, or by going out and experiencing the world first hand. The time that spent on meaningless things could be used to make a better nation and even a better world. We could use this wasted time on things such as charity, or helping others who are in need. The answer in correcting our waste of time is perhaps in our own past.

In the past society valued its time strongly. People of these time periods understood that the work they were able to complete was all dependent on the time available. With less technology and more hard work necessary to get by they knew that the way to survive was in the way they used time. Farming was the primary way of life and it was important to get all work finished during the day because if you did not then the work would have to be completed on the next day. If this procrastinate society would look to this period and take notice of the way they treated time and how they used it wisely it would benefit the world and improve the way people live today.

Easy, cheap access to information, food, transportation and products people desire has caused waste to grow. From food waste that could easily be prevented to that of the environment – one which much research would be required to better solve – to time – a waste rarely mentioned but very common – this society has been growing increasingly wasteful. It is so much easier and requires no thought to just leave the sandwich on the table or throw the empty bottle on the ground. Why do more work on the school project when friends are waiting to kill more zombies in that new zombie game? We have the time, the brain power, and the resources to fix this problem, let's not waste it.