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black friday waste
It’s too early to tell what economic impact the shopping spree will have. Looking back at last year’s numbers, it’s estimated that one in two Americans shopped during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend – that’s more than 170 million people. Shopping and consumerism have been very good to America. But is it, by itself, enough to resurrect a failing economy? Black Friday 2008 really never ended. The holiday weekend was a positive boost to retailers, but price slashing and deep discounts were required through 2009 in the hopes of finding an end to their overwhelming red ink. 2009 was an exceptionally bad year for many big name US brands – General Motors, Chrysler, Circuit City, Lehman Brothers, and many others all filed for bankruptcy.
It’s estimated that sixty-eight percent of all US economic output is tied to consumerism. It would be easy to assume that extending or even increasing consumption would pull us through. Government bailouts, stimulus, tax incentives, and other programs are a pretty clear indication of what congress believes. Is a continued reliance on consumer activity just another way to say that we’ve become deeply dependent on affordable products, cheap energy, abundant resources, and inexpensive labor? The median wage in the US is the same as it was thirty years ago. The real income of the bottom ninety percent of American taxpayers has declined steadily. They earned $27,060 in real dollars in 1979 and $25,646 in 2005. At the same time, a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania found that counties with a Walmart store grow poorer than surrounding counties, and the more Walmart stores a county has, the faster it grows poor. How can we consume our way out with a heavily leveraged economy where the vast majority of consumers are experiencing declining incomes, and the world’s largest retailer may actually be contributing to the decline?
But the most worrisome aspect of Black Friday, and what it represents, is how much waste will be produced to consume temporary products that will inevitably end up in a landfill. Statistics show that the majority of all plastic does not get recycled. Of all seven types, only category 1 (polyethylene terephthalate, or PET) and category 2 (high density polyethylene, or HDPE) are the only ones that get recycled in any quantity – approx. seventeen percent of type 1 and ten percent of type 2. Only one percent of each of the other seven typically get recycled. How many televisions or household appliances, even if they are energy star rated, will be sold this weekend? And all of them will be wrapped in plastic and the contents will be protected by expanded polystyrene. How many unnecessary objects that have come to symbolize what it means to be part of an affluent society will be purchased, used once, and discarded?
A disposable society needs a Black Friday, but what price do we all pay to perpetuate a system based on conditions that no longer exist or which are trending toward decline? There’s an expression that goes – there will be no economy on a dead planet. This means that ecology cannot forever be dismissed in favor of economy. But I think the reverse can also be said – we cannot protect our place on the planet with a dead economy. A balance must be struck for both to grow. I don’t think we’ll buy our way to sustainability, nor will we conserve our way there. But how and what we buy makes a difference. Just because we can buy anything doesn’t mean we should buy everything.
Let me know what you think. Did you go shopping today?
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