The delight of waste

Every adult knows how to balance their checkbook.  Not always a happy result, the reality of balancing income with expenses must be faced continually.  The challenge to “live within your means” is ubiquitous and so any surplus is welcome.  Upon those occasions, instead of living paycheck to paycheck, that surplus elevates existence to a level beyond mere survival.  If saved, the surplus provides a means to manage an unexpected future need; if spent, the surplus enables an activity or acquisition that is more wanted than needed.  Can we say that spending, maybe even wasting this surplus supports what we desire and advances culture?

Today there is no distinction between the words waste and trash.  Both are used for what is flushed or thrown away as unwanted and useless.  New sustainable practices advocate for graywater systems that take laundry, kitchen and bath washwater, and air conditioning condenser drips, and treat, filter and then use water mostly to irrigate gardens that are huge consumers of potable water.  (Blackwater from toilets and garbage disposals is still to be piped to treatment plants although there have been societies – Paris in the 19th century for instance – that put the fertile “night soil” to good account in urban vegetable gardens.)  Waste, I would like to define, is biotic; trash is not.

Waste has associations with the barren desert, the uncultivated, loss, and decay; to waste is to devastate.  An intoxicated person may declare they are wasted, but no one likes to consider themselves trash.  Trash, a word with unknown etymological roots, implies worthlessness.  But, we know that no desert is a barren wasteland and that its ecology is subtle although usually hostile to humans.  We also know that uncultured is another word for natural, and that loss and decay are part of endless regenerative life cycles. 

Sustainable design may have been spurred into social consciousness with concerns about global warming and the impact of climate change, but as one analysis of President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address observed, the tag is now clean energy.  This implies the target is developing non-polluting fuel from renewable sources that reduce the impact of energy generation and use, but do not require altering behavior.  Recycling and repurposing what we already have into what we want is recommended as a way to avoid adding to landfills.  With this attitude, our appetite for material consumption is not to change, just to depend on resources that are not finite, such as oil.  If designers thought of waste as surplus to expend, not by necessity but by choice, then the waste itself becomes something of value.  Of course this requires designers to be mindful of what is destined to be trash, whether this is non-biodegradable packaging, cheap products that break easily and are impractical to repair, or shoddy construction.  Design is sempiternal; that is, the made object endures.  Whether its lasting existence is of delightful use or in a landfill depends of the quality of the design, and the insistence of consumer-driven markets.