So I just heard about one of the stupidest pseudo-environmentalist public awareness campaigns on NPR’s marketplace. One of their reporters (Tess Vigeland) has decided to carry her trash around with her for two weeks. She is blogging about this experience here and challenging other people to take “Tess’ Trash Challenge” and do the same. Now if I was doing something as dumb and annoying as carrying my trash around with me I wouldn’t want to be doing it alone either but why the hell is she doing this in the first place?

Apparently this is part of a new American Public Media project called Consumed which plans to:

Is our consumer society sustainable? American Public Media takes on that question in a new special series, Consumed. We’ll follow consumerism from its origins to its dominance over the world’s economy and, arguably, its culture. And we’ll examine how, and if, it might be adapted to reduce its destructive consequence while keeping store shelves stocked.

Apparently they, along with groups like the Zero Waste Alliance, are advocating achieving “Zero Waste”¹. But for the love of god why? The answer Tess gives is distinctly unsatisfying.

Garbage critics say we’re going to run out of places to put it, and that even if we had enough space, all we’re doing is encouraging consumption. Others argue the landfill issue has been greatly improved because of technology — it’s not the old city dump anymore.

Now it may be that we have an infrastructure problem and need to spend more money building new, deeper landfills. I don’t know. But we sure as hell aren’t running out of literal space to bury trash. Tess quotes the EPA as saying we generated 245.7 million tons of municipal waste in 2005. Now it seems reasonable to suppose that after compactification this waste will have at least the density of water. That means the total amount of trash created in one year fits inside 0.26 cubic miles. Now admittedly filling a square pit that deep with trash probably poses some technical challenges but given the huge empty spaces in the american west we hardly are running out of literal space to store our waste. We aren’t even running out of literal space to store our waste without significant environmental impact. Hell all the shit we make came from somewhere so it could never be more than a problem of recompactification and containment.

In other words the trash issue is a purely economic problem. It might start to cost more to build landfills but that’s it. We just need appropriate regulations to make sure trash is disposed of in a safe fashion and we can sit back and let the price of garbage disposal take care of the problem for us. There is absolutely no reason at all to turn this into a moral crusade and the idea of the Zero Waste Alliance that this is a way to save money is absurd. Of course some increase in the amount of recycling is probably money saving but to the extent it’s economically efficient it will be incentivized by garbage fees. The fact that companies aren’t doing this for profit is strong evidence that it would cost more money than it would save. Garbage collection does not have large externalities.

So what explains the fuss? It’s yet another example of the substitution of our emotional reactions to what seems like waste for our rational judgment about consequences. This is why I hate the word sustainability so much. This word invites us to make these errors by conflating our emotional idea of leaving things the same as they were when we started and it’s supposed definition in terms of being able to continue behaving as we are now. Even the definition itself is problematic because no particular state of affairs is sustainable or unsustainable only rules for future behavior. Thus talking about whether our consumerism is unsustainable tricks people into thinking “why yes if we keep creating trash at an (exponentially) increasing rate we will run out of places to put it so it’s unsustainable and we better stop.” The problem is that this isn’t even a plausible model for our societies future behavior. The right question to ask is, “If we continue to price garbage disposal at or above the cost of creating creating landfills we will be able to continue.” The answer here is a resounding yes.

This sort of thing is why I despise most of the environmental movement (though there are many reasonable people who are part of it). There are very real environmental concerns that we need to deal with like global warming but they are economic and engineering challenges not moral judgments about our waste or consumer culture. Not only do stupid pseudo-environmental worries like this one do great harm by distracting from real issues like global warming they also help cement the idea in many people’s minds that environmentalism is just that stupid moralizing concern about wasting shit. Part of the reason so much of the right is still hostile to global warming is because the environmental movement managed to push most environmental questions out of the practical realm and into a moral one. Maybe in the past that was necessary to get results on important issues. I don’t know but this sort of shit with trash and sustainability is just garbage.

I expect this sort of thing from the BBC. I’m disappointed to see it on NPR’s marketplace of all things.