Our economy is the most dynamic and productive in history. It is also the most wasteful and destructive. These two facts suggest a disconcerting yet seemingly unavoidable relationship: Just as new products and tools replace the old, so productivity leaves behind a trail of disrepair. But it is worth pondering whether this apparently iron law of waste necessarily governs an advanced economy such as ours. As historians have observed, the desideratum of economic growth drove many industrial leaders to make waste a key feature of their business strategies. Hence, as early as the 1920s, around the same time that advertisers began describing products as “new and improved,” General Motors President Alfred P. Sloan introduced the annual model change in the automobile industry, setting the standard in the broader industrial economy for what eventually became called “planned obsolescence.”11xGiles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 34. In his 1960 book, The Waste Makers, journalist Vance Packard cataloged how such business strategies had transformed the economy by guaranteeing that everything from washing machines to refrigerators would eventually end up in landfills.22xVance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York, NY: David McKay Company Inc., 1960).
These trends have only accelerated in the decades since the rise of a globalized and increasingly digital economy. The constant churn of new electronic devices generates about seven million tons of waste in the United States every year.33xStephen Leahy, “Each US Family Trashes 400 iPhones’ Worth of E-Waste a Year,” National Geographic, December 13, 2017; https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/e-waste-monitor-report-glut. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the number of people employed to repair appliances will decline 6.9 percent by 2029, which amounts to a loss of about 3,000 jobs.44xSoo Youn, “Ovens, Dishwashers and Washing Machines Are Breaking Down Like Never Before. But There’s Nobody to Fix Them,” Washington Post, October 22, 2020; https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/2020/10/22/appliance-repair-services-pandemic/. The waste of so-called fast fashion has been widely reported on: According to some estimates, the average American purchases sixty-eight clothing items each year, and the US produces 11.3 million tons of textile waste annually.55xAlexandra Schwartz, “Rent the Runway Wants to Lend You Your Look,” The New Yorker, October 15, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/rent-the-runway-wants-to-lend-you-your-look; Rachael Dottle and Jackie Gu, “The Real Environmental Impact of the Fashion Industry,” Bloomberg.com, February 23, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-fashion-industry-environmental-impact/. Meanwhile, fast furniture produced by companies such as Ikea and Wayfair adds 12 million tons to landfills and incinerators every year.66xDebra Kamin, “‘Fast Furniture’ Is Cheap. And Americans Are Throwing It in the Trash,” The New York Times, October 31, 2022; https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/realestate/fast-furniture-clogged-landfills.html. While further statistics could be rehearsed here, they would only fill out the picture of a world that is increasingly shaped by what Pope Francis called in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ a “throwaway culture.”77xPope Francis I, Laudato si’ [Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home], Holy See, May 24, 2015; https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.
Pope Francis’s phrase is suggestive, indicating the possibility that this global trail of litter and disrepair is avoidable—and not necessarily the product of an iron law of economic growth. In recent years, scholars and practitioners have been considering how to reimagine an economy that is premised not on waste but on care.