The Liminality of Waste more Generally

Waste is a socially and culturally constructed idea shaped by human perceptions of value.

• It is defined by what we no longer want or find useful, such as outdated electronics or food scraps.

• This perception is influenced by consumer culture, convenience, and a desire for novelty.

• Factors like the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality allow us to feel detached from the consequences of what we discard.

There is no concept of waste in nature; instead, there is a continuous cycle of decomposition and regeneration.

• What humans call waste, like organic matter, is food or resources for other organisms.

• Organisms like decomposers break down materials into benign, usable nutrients.

Even though the concept of waste is mental, the physical discarded material has a real-world existence and effect.

• In the world, waste exists as overflowing landfills, plastics polluting the oceans, and greenhouse gases contributing to climate change.

• It physically contaminates land and water, harms wildlife, and contributes to air pollution.

• Unlike in nature, many human-made materials, like certain plastics, do not easily decompose and persist in the environment.

The physical world itself follows the law of conservation of mass, meaning matter is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed.

• In nature, a rotting log is not "waste," but part of a new life cycle, providing nutrients for insects, fungi, and new plant growth.

• Atoms themselves have a history of cycling through the biosphere as they are neither created nor destroyed.

Waste exists as a paradox: a conceptual frame of mind creates a physical phenomenon with real-world consequences

Without a human to determine that an object no longer has value, it wouldn't be "waste." A discarded plastic bottle only becomes "trash" when a human classifies it as such, despite its material presence in the world

Once that mental label is applied, the physical object is discarded. It is then that the material reality of waste—the pollution, the overflowing landfills, the harm to ecosystems—manifests in the physical world. The material existence of our waste challenges the human notion that once we've thrown something away, it's truly "gone".

The problem of waste isn't that things disappear; it's that we have created a human-centric system that disrupts nature's closed-loop cycle. We define objects as useless and expect them to simply go away, but the physical reality is that they remain in some form, impacting the world around us

On the Shortness of Life (Penguin Great Ideas)

On the Shortness of Life