Essay: IN DEFENSE OF WASTE

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VISITORS are invariably shocked. They see Americans cheerfully discarding cars, refrigerators or washing machines from which a French peasant, say, or a Greek shopkeeper would still get years of use. They are amazed at the serviceable suits that an American sends off to the Salvation Army the minute an elbow gives way or a knee frays. Tin cans that would roof a million Caribbean cottages are tossed onto scrap heaps. Perfectly good buildings are torn down and replaced by new ones with an economic life expectancy of only 50 years. Waste, outrageous waste, cry the critics—and by no means only foreign critics. U.S. social commentators loudly deplore the "waste makers," as do politicians and poets. "In America everything goes to waste," complains Poet Karl Shapiro. "Waste in the States is the national industry." "I regard waste as the continuing enemy of our society," Lyndon Johnson has warned.

Different critics mean different things by waste. The most obvious definitions are heedless opulence, which, as it were, drops too much from the table, and the readiness to discard the only slightly old. A secondary target is the artificial stimulation of the consumer to buy in vast quantities things he never wanted until he was told. Often such complaints sound highly plausible, particularly when reinforced by a wrecking ball hitting an old landmark or an infuriating commercial peddling a clearly needless "improvement" in some trivial product. Yet waste is not what it seems to be. The term implies a moral as well as an economic judgment, and its meaning varies with both setting and purpose.

Taking a shower may be a waste in the desert but not in a city. Blowing up a $16 million rocket to get to the moon may seem wasteful to some—but it scarcely is, in view of what space exploration contributes to science and the economy, not to say the human spirit. War is undoubtedly wasteful, not only in matériel but also in the irretrievable waste of lost lives. Yet even here, it is a question of values—most American wars have been fought for human causes and values that its citizens considered no waste, whether it was abolition of slavery at home or freedom in the world at large.

Time v. Trouble

The concept of waste still held by most of the world grows out of scarcity, a situation in which materials are short and labor is the cheapest thing around—a situation that in many cases socialism has helped to perpetuate. In the U.S., the notion of waste also grows from the Puritan belief that negligent use of material things is sinful. "Waste not, want not," saith the preacher, and the phrase still echoes in the minds of older Americans not too far removed from the time when wax drippings were conserved to recast into new candles, or when boys made pocket money by straightening out bent nails.