I was doing research for my blog when I stumbled across a staggering amount of evidence that an increasing number of brands are deliberately trashing their own products to create scarcity and drive prices up.
We’re talking about an incredible carbon footprint that goes into creating products that go straight to landfills.
How is this even legal?
We need to transition from a culture that implicitly believes that infinite waste is not a problem. According to a story I read in the NYT this morning, more than 10 million tons of office furniture in the United States end up in a landfill every year. Ten million tons! And it’s all just handled by people doing their jobs, nobody able to stop the cogs and ask if we’ve lost our minds.
The guy who invented Keurig, with its disposable plastic pods, later said that he regretted it after seeing how much waste it created. I think if we had a healthy culture, Keurig couldn’t have been invented as it was because the inventor would’ve foreseen the waste and found it totally a nonstarter.
Bingo.
When you stop treating negative externalities as though they don’t exist, you can start to properly account for their cost in economic models. A lot of industries exist that wouldn’t if they were to have to actually pay to remediate the problems they cause rather than getting to offload the problem onto the greater community.