What will the consumer regime of civilization lead to?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Even in ancient times, people understood that no life is possible without preserving the natural environment in which it develops, reflecting on the needs of future generations. Mark Cato the Elder (ancient Roman politician and writer. - Ed.) In his treatise "Agriculture" wrote about the need to plant trees, thinking about the needs of descendants.

“We plant a tree for another generation,” says Caecilius Statius (Roman comedian. - Ed. Note) in Sinephebah.

Cicero (an ancient Roman politician, orator and philosopher. - Ed.) In his treatise On Old Age writes: “The farmer, no matter how old he is, when asked for whom he plants, he will answer without hesitation:“For the immortal gods, who commanded me not only to accept this from my ancestors, but also to pass it on to descendants."

Representatives of state authorities thought the same way. Jean-Baptiste Colbert (the actual head of government under Louis XIV. - Ed.) Allowed deforestation only on condition of their mandatory restoration, ordering to plant oaks that could be used for ship masts only after 300 years.

Today's people act in relation to the environment and the interests of future generations exactly the opposite. As if deliberately aiming to make their life unbearable, hastily squandered and ruined everything that could be used by their descendants. The reason for this is the thirst for consumption, driven by another passion, attributed by the Church to mortal sins - the passion of profit.

Both of them are strengthened by the not so long ago belief of a part of humanity, especially in the West, that the natural reserves of nature are inexhaustible, multiplied by extreme selfishness, expressed in the extreme formula of the times of Roman decline - "after us, even a flood." Even Adam Smith (Scottish economist and ethical philosopher. - Ed.), Despite being a theorist of market relations, complained about excessive waste, defining it as a form of concession to "making enjoy at the moment." The classical bourgeoisie has always considered moderation in consumption among the most important values leading to the preservation of capital.

Demand and consumption are the keys to depletion and pollution

The current period of the so-called "modern" (modern) mankind has seen the peak of consumption and desecration of the environment, and the further, the more the speed of the devastation of the planet, the exhaustion of everything that will be no less necessary for our descendants, grows. And no matter how much we show concern about the state of the environment, our deeds fundamentally diverge from words, demonstrating incredible waste, leading to incredible pollution of the surrounding space.

The more the modern world consumes, the more the volume of waste it produces grows. And this happens under the ever louder appeals to "maintain demand" and "increase consumption", because in this, striving for profit and consumption, modern man, contrary to all logic and common sense, sees a guarantee of growth and development. As if the planet does not represent a closed, limited space, but is an unrestricted environment of consumption, directed to infinity.

Not only unrestrained consumption is based on this belief, but also deliberate waste of resources, the quintessence of which was the pre-planned obsolescence of goods, and the peak is their artificial physical aging, embedded in the design itself, especially when it comes to household appliances, electronics or transport. According to scientists, over a century that will span the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, mankind will destroy the reserves, the creation of which took nature 300 million years. And this increase in extermination, today called "high demand" and "development", only continues to gain momentum.

If you take an enlarged view, as a result of unrestrained consumption, today's humanity is faced with two main problems. The first is the degradation of the living environment that occurs under the influence of many types of pollution. This is reflected both in the life of the person himself, who managed to dirtiest the planet in less than a hundred years so that many spheres of the surrounding world have already become irreplaceable, but also in the life of the animal world, which is losing entire species as a result of the increasingly unsuitable habitat.

The second problem is the depletion of natural resources, which calls into question not only the dynamics of the so-called "economic growth", but also the possibility of maintaining the existing level of consumption at the current level. Overlapping, these two problems lead to degradation not even of the economy, but of the environment itself, bringing humanity closer and closer to the very brink of survival as such.

Garbage on the way to collapse

The consequences are quite obvious to the naked eye and, by and large, no longer require proof. In addition, so many studies have been created on this topic in recent years that it is not difficult to find any numbers and indicators in open sources. It is also worth mentioning here as an example that the annual production of waste in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development alone exceeded 4 billion tons. In Europe alone, the volume of industrial waste alone is 100 million tons per year.

For example, the French produce 26 million tons of waste per year, that is, every day - 1 kg per person. And this is not to mention the United States of America, which is the world champion in the production of garbage and all kinds of garbage per capita and in general. Given the current pace, the amount of household waste by 2020 will double in relation to the current indicators (Benoit A. Forward, to the cessation of growth! Ecological and philosophical treatise // IOI, Moscow: 2013. - Ed. Note). And this is taking into account the fact that some of the garbage in some countries is still recycled.

In Russia, the volume of garbage over the past 10 years has grown by a third. At the same time, the leader in the production of waste is Moscow, which produces one tenth of all waste in the country. According to Rosstat, Russia produces 280 million cubic meters. m (56 million tons with an average density of 0, 20 tons per cubic meter) of solid municipal waste, of which only Moscow - more than 25 million (about 5 million tons). However, all this becomes garbage only in the case of mixing. As, indeed, everything else. Whatever you mix, taking from dissimilar environments, you get garbage. But one has only to arrange any components, substances or phenomena, as all this takes on harmonious, creative forms.

Burning waste is not an option, as it has a short-term effect, only postponing the disaster for a while. In addition, burning exacerbates the already deplorable state of the atmosphere. Suffice it to say that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has doubled every 20 years since 1860. At the moment, mankind emits 6.3 billion tons of carbon per year, which is almost twice the total planetary absorption capacity, which directly depends on the surface area of forests, which are rapidly decreasing.

You can, of course, think of carbon filters that reduce emissions, but economic inexpediency in the age of the cult of profit and expediency is killing this idea in the bud. Therefore, burning is like a delayed death, like pain relief at the terminal stage.

Turnkey solutions from the past and the future

The logical and most reasonable way out of this situation is processing - this is a reduction in mining, that is, a decrease in the rate of depletion of resources in order to leave at least something for the next generations, and practically free raw materials from which it is possible to produce new products. But before we get down to recycling, there is a much more important problem to be addressed.

It will not be possible to extract any raw materials from the garbage without preliminary sorting - and, no less important, without building up the logistics of collecting and delivering the sorted waste to the place of their processing. Affects the age-old habit of most of us, consumeristically careless, both to the waste of our life, and to nature itself, which is still frivolously perceived as something infinite and inexhaustible.

A slightly higher degree of resource and environmental awareness is the recycling of containers. First of all, this concerns glass containers, the collection and processing of which, for example, in the Soviet period, were brought to almost perfection. Not only bottles of drinks were taken into reuse, but also bottles of medicines, as well as waste paper, rags (old used things and fabrics), not to mention scrap metal and some other substances. All this was provided with the appropriate infrastructure - the reception points were within walking distance, and also logistically organized.

Speaking about the Soviet waste collection system, it is worth noting the separate collection of organic waste, which is extremely important, because it is their presence in the total mass of waste that turns the latter into an unpleasant and ultimately unsuitable substance either for sorting or for processing. Since if you remove its organic part (food and other organic waste) from household waste, then in a significant mass it will be solid, dry, whole objects without a special smell, moisture and unpleasant secretions.

During the Soviet period, this problem was solved by placing separate buckets at sites and at garbage chutes designed specifically for food and organic waste. The cleaning woman daily loaded the contents of the buckets into a separate container, which was taken out by a machine with a crane-manipulator, and an empty one was placed in its place.

If we remove the organic part from the total mass of waste, subtract glass containers, waste paper and rags, everything else is easily sorted - plastic, which makes up the largest volume, metal and unformatted or broken glass. By and large, this is an almost perfect scheme that turns thousands of tons of waste into sorted raw materials for further processing.

Slightly more nuanced, plastic is sorted into several more types, with digital markings inside the triangle icon - 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, as well as occasionally other types of plastic. Such sorting can be done either at home or at additional sorting points.

It also has a solution to the problem of old overall things - furniture and other household items. For example, in Europe, special sheds are created in microdistricts, under which residents demolish used items of this kind. From there they are either taken away by the poor or, for example, as we put it, by summer residents. The rest will be dismantled by specially trained people and sorted into appropriate containers. The presence of the latter and regular removal is the most important condition for separate collection.

Demolished buildings, old cars, household appliances, and much more - all this is a whole separate area for private or public-private business partnerships - require systematic parsing with subsequent sorting. But all this will not have any effect without the corresponding industrial capacities for the processing of the waste collected in this way. Already now there are lines for the processing of car tires, batteries, as well as mini-production of paving slabs from plastic. But this is a drop in the bucket compared to the available volumes.

The highest degree of responsibility

The construction of processing plants should be done on a national scale. And they can be built either by the state or by private investors, in respect of which full tax holidays must be introduced for the first 10 years. Establishing separate collection, sorting, transportation and processing of waste into new products is not only a highly profitable business, which it certainly should become, given the practically free raw materials and necessary tax incentives, but also a social mission, serving the interests of its people and high awareness of to nature.

And yet, the highest degree of environmental awareness is a personal reduction in consumption, a more responsible attitude towards the things used: to repair, not throw away, reuse, use as long as possible. A different attitude is a consequence of the colossal media pressure from, first of all, corporations, including transnational ones, which artificially accelerate consumption and stimulate consumer instincts, while mercilessly exploiting natural resources and polluting the environment for the sake of momentary gain.

In this sense, artificial moral aging and mechanical shortening of the service life incorporated in the product should be equated with a crime and punished within the framework of criminal law. But even all of the above will be in vain as long as consumerism remains in fact a religious cult for a significant part of the population of our planet, and profit is the main motivation for any life activity.

It is still possible to save the Earth from exhaustion and slow dying for the sake of future generations, but this must start with increasing personal responsibility, with reducing personal consumption, with limiting oneself.