One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Great line—but in this economy, it’s probably just trash.
We live in a time where the shelf life of everything is minimal, but its existence in our world is forever. Nothing is meant to last, and yet there’s always a place to dump it.
It’s a fascinating time to live because while our growth is measured by the number of new, innovative things we create, we forget about everything that came before. Whether it’s phones or our ecology—everything’s going to shit.
I had a great time, as you’ll hear in the episode, talking to Tarun Shesh about waste trails and the responsibility of managing waste. I suggest you make a game out of counting how many times we say “shit,” “trash,” and “waste” as a pun. It won’t be a waste of your time.
It’s wild how much easier it is for people with disposable income to use “eco-friendly” items—yet that same income often fuels a bigger carbon footprint (take any celebrity). Items made from better, longer-lasting materials usually come with a higher price tag, and not many can afford that. For people like you and me, spending a little extra and being “conscious” is doable. But many in our country are surviving on whatever they can get.
And yet, the biggest burden of trash falls on those who live far from the luxuries we do. Our consumption gets piled onto them. Whether it’s cleaning up the mess we leave behind or living next to the landfills where our waste ends up—it all goes far away from us. So we think we can close our eyes.
If we can’t see it, it isn’t there, right?
Tarun breaks down the waste trail and how the economy puts the burden on consumers to handle their shit. Can policy shift some of that load? Are the metrics we use today even equipped to track the mess we’re creating?
I went in hoping to talk about zero waste—but after this conversation, you’ll realise that’s a distant dream. Maybe in our dystopian future, the lack of choice or resources will accidentally make us zero waste. But only because we’ll have absolutely nothing left and the world will be on fire. Sweet, right?
The other terrifying truth is the waste our “new tech” generates. What happens when progress depends on making everything before it obsolete? Even Artificial Intelligence harms the climate—and yet we keep folding it into our lives. Are we keeping up with the times by sacrificing what little time we may have left?
Okay—so clean up your space and press play on this episode, where we trash talk the mess we’re in.
If you want extra reading material, check out my article on The Climate Conundrum of Condoms.
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