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I’ve always had a lot of anxiety about trash and waste, even though I don’t always live as though I do. Throughout human history, mainstream thoughts have held that the world is infinite and the resources bestowed unto our race by God limitless. It’s been a fairly short amount of time, relatively speaking, since scientific consensus built towards divorcing our species of that notion because it is simply objectively untrue. Surely you’ve heard the phrase “a drop in the ocean” used to describe a situation where a change was so small compared to the state of things that it is statistically insignificant and cannot be noticed.
However, if billions of people put a drop of pink dye in the ocean every hour they’re awake for years and years and years, eventually the ocean will look like pink lemonade because those drops all add up. There’s no method by which it gets removed from the system, we simply live under the assumption that the ocean is so massive as to be infinite, and anything divided by infinity is zero, so that means no pink dye is in the ocean...but in reality, the volume of the ocean is calculable and knowable. There is a real and finite number associated with it.
Some stick with the comfortable assumption of the endlessness of the world, and others believe that they couldn’t possibly do enough damage to directly experience the consequences. This mindset is how so many corporate leaders were able to sleep at night with a clean conscience as they cut costs by shifting towards making products disposable, saturating marketplace with single-use versions of otherwise reusable items to train the layman consumer to be okay with throwing out huge mounts of plastic waste and not thinking about where it ended up. Disposable packaging, disposable tableware, disposable containers, disposable computers, products engineered to last the life of their warranty and no further; all these concepts stick the consumer with the burden of throwing out waste because it is more cost-effective.
As mainstream thought wakes up to the reality of a finite earth, however, some companies have dedicated themselves to ending this one-way flow of materials. Grand Rapids-based furniture company Steelcase has embraced the principle of “cradle-to-cradle design,” also known as closed loop material flow. This treats industrial materials as though they are nutrients in the ecosystem that is the manufacturing world, not to be disposed but instead circulated through the system. Groups such as Zero Waste International Alliance and Closed Loop Partners are working to popularize these ideas by investing in companies implementing them and providing certifications for these methods.
I want this to have a happy ending and I’d love to be able to play some part, however small, in writing it.
Anyway, here’s infographics!
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Anyway, yes, my whole diatribe up top was about recycling, so I gave you recycled content. It’s more because, as I occasionally do, I just blanked on it this week. So I figured I’d do what any network series looking to fill time in its fourth season would do: clip show! Many of the infographics age poorly, which is part of the joke. Not all of them do, though!
Ok, I guess that’s not completely fair, I did have one idea:
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Anyway, for an example of what I’m talking about with respect to “aging poorly,” here’s one that definitely did.
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At this point, there was TONS of hype for Frost as a head coach, but he was 1-1 with a win over a bad FCS team. It was his first season, but my point here was that lost in all the hype was the fact that he hadn’t actually done anything at UCF just yet. In hindsight though, LOL@ME.
Here’s the rest of them. See if you can find the one that aged the worst!