Plastic: Two Paradigms Enter, One Paradigm Leaves — The Philosophy Of Mad Max: ”In preindustrial society, most people spend most of their time simply generating power with human muscles. Energy was expensive, labor was cheap. The five pound sack of rice or potatoes that sells for about $2 at the grocery store (minimum wage for about 20 minutes of work in a modern industrial society) is an excellent day’s pay in preindustrial society. It makes no economic sense to keep a compost heap and grow potatoes in your back yard in an industrial society, but all kinds of sense in a preindustrial one.
The reason we do not recycle most garbage is simply that it’s not worth our time. The time required to create any given item out of scraps (or even repair the item) is far longer than it would take to earn enough to buy the item, even working at minimum wage. Where this equation doesn’t hold true, people are already repairing and recycling.
I do not want to agree, but a friend of mine just discovered that it is cheaper to buy a new inkjet printer when the ink runs out on your existing one than to replace the cartridges in the existing one. He did just that, took it home, and threw the old one away. A perfectly functional, nearly new, inkjet printer now sitting in a landfill because it is cheaper to buy a printer <strong>with ink cartridges</strong> than to buy ink cartridges alone. <em>Go figure.</em>
Then there is this from the same thread:
I watched a blacksmith demonstrate how they used to make nails by hand. [If I recall correctly] he said that a skilled blacksmith could make about 100 an hour. If he worked ten hours doing nothing but make nails, he would have 1000 nails at the end of the day. Go down to Home Depot and look at all the nails they have in stock and think about how many days it would take to hand make those nails. The blacksmith said when they needed to demolish a building, they would burn it down so that they could retrieve the nails.
Definitely a different mindset.
Lest we get to thinking to much of ourselves, there is this (to be read with tongue firmly planted in cheek):
Oh, for those glorious days when someone — someone else, that is — would live from the scraps and castoffs of higher society! How wonderful for them — not me — to wear constantly-mended clothing, to eat thin soup made from scavenged bones, to heat their roadside shacks with dried horse dung! Oh, woe that those halcyon days are lost to this age of machines and degeneracy!