Part of why it is hard for business to really embrace deep-green environmental practice is that making profit has always been associated with high material and energy throughput. If they make products that are meant to last, they sell less, and their profits go down. Reduced material throughput, for them, means reduced income–even if it […]
Disposability
Throwaway science
Apropos of our recent discussion on disposability (see here and here), the Guardian, in its green living column no less, trotted out that old tired question about whether a reusable ceramic cup is really better than disposable cups. They use that ancient statistic that says you have to use a thousand polystyrene cups before you equal […]
Our problem, you see, is insufficient materialism
On Saturday, I had coffee with Boston College Professor Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture and co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream. We were talking about throwaway products and the disposable culture which fuel our economy and trash our resources (and which I […]