IN DEFENSE OF WASTE

VISITORS are invariably shocked. They see Americans cheerfully discarding cars, refrigerators or washing machines from which a French peasant, say, or a Greek shopkeeper would still get years of use. They are amazed at the serviceable suits that an American sends off to the Salvation Army the minute an elbow gives way or a knee frays. Tin cans that would roof a million Caribbean cottages are tossed onto scrap heaps. Perfectly good buildings are torn down and replaced by new ones with an economic life expectancy of only 50 years. Waste, outrageous waste, cry the critics--and by no means only foreign critics. U.S. social commentators loudly deplore the "waste makers," as do politicians and poets. "In America everything goes to waste," complains Poet Karl Shapiro. "Waste in the States is the national industry." "I regard waste as the continuing enemy of our society," Lyndon Johnson has warned.

Different critics mean different things by waste. The most obvious definitions are heedless opulence, which, as it were, drops too much from the table, and the readiness to discard the only slightly old. A secondary target is the artificial stimulation of the consumer to buy in vast quantities things he never wanted until he was told. Often such complaints sound highly plausible, particularly when reinforced by a wrecking ball hitting an old landmark or an infuriating commercial peddling a clearly needless "improvement" in some trivial product. Yet waste is not what it seems to be. The term implies a moral as well as an economic judgment, and its meaning varies with both setting and purpose.

Taking a shower may be a waste in the desert but not in a city. Blowing up a $16 million rocket to get to the moon may seem wasteful to some--but it scarcely is, in view of what space exploration contributes to science and the economy, not to say the human spirit. War is undoubtedly wasteful, not only in materiel but also in the irretrievable waste of lost lives. Yet even here, it is a question of values--most American wars have been fought for human causes and values that its citizens considered no waste, whether it was abolition of slavery at home or freedom in the world at large.

Time v. Trouble

The concept of waste still held by most of the world grows out of scarcity, a situation in which materials are short and labor is the cheapest thing around--a situation that in many cases socialism has helped to perpetuate. In the U.S., the notion of waste also grows from the Puritan belief that negligent use of material things is sinful. "Waste not, want not," saith the preacher, and the phrase still echoes in the minds of older Americans not too far removed from the time when wax drippings were conserved to recast into new candles, or when boys made pocket money by straightening out bent nails.

Today people who save string or old clothes in attics are likely to run into psychologists who tell them that such hoarding is neurotic, or economists who prove it uneconomical, or architects who simply do not provide enough storage space for it. The new American maxim, Columbia University's John Kouwenhoven has suggested, should be: "Waste not, have not." This does not signify that waste has become accepted in the U.S.--on the contrary. It is only that its meaning has changed. Neither Cotton Mather nor Malthus nor Marx anticipated a society in which only 15% of the population would produce all the food and goods that the whole nation could reasonably need or, for that matter, a society so productive that it could afford, for the first time in history, to have more people in services than in production.

The result is that the modern American is not bothered by the waste of materials. What concerns him is time--his time. In the abundant U.S. economy, materials are relatively cheaper than labor. If something he can buy and throw away can save an American time, he does not feel it is a real waste.

Viewed in this light, much that appears materially wasteful becomes economically unwasteful. The American businessman, whose profits may depend on his avoidance of waste, has known this for a long time. The consumer is now learning it on a broad scale, and the evidence can be found in any American kitchen. Take the case of the housewife who reels out a yard or so of expensive aluminum foil to catch the drippings from her Sunday chicken. Her husband may argue that this is waste. The wife will contend that it saves her the work of scrubbing the oven. Worth it? In a peasant economy, the wife's time would be worth very little, the aluminum a lot. But in the U.S., the husband can afford the aluminum, and his wife sets a high value on her time.

Throwing out bottles may seem wasteful; but considering the total cost of the time and trouble it takes to return, store, ship back and resterilize a bottle, it is often cheaper to use a new one. In the case of appliances, a dishwasher might cost $150; after some years, it may cost $100 to repair it, since a highly paid repairman's individual labor is immensely less efficient than the assembly-line labor that produces the machine. In this instance, it would clearly be wasteful not to buy a new washer. Says Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset: "The day may come when it is more expensive to launder a shirt than to buy a new one. Which is more wasteful then--to clean the shirt or throw it away?"

Best v. Latest

Americans are buying not only time but use. Social Security, unemployment insurance and now Medicare relieve them of the once-imperative necessity of squirreling away savings for times of trouble. Installment buying has contributed to the notion of having the good things of life while you are living it, not waiting until you are too old to enjoy it. The curious result is that the modern American is in one sense much less "materialistic" than his father or his father's father. He is more interested in the use of things to give him the good life than in the possession of perdurable objects that will reassure him. U.S. culture is based far more on achievement and productivity than on possessions. Says Buckminster Fuller: "Man used to feel secure when he owned things. Now he may feel insecure when he owns something like a house because it makes him feel encumbered."

A dramatic illustration is the proliferation of disposable materials from cutlery to paper dresses that last for a couple of enchanted evenings (and how many times can any single dress enchant?). One of the latest manufacturers to enter the field cheerfully labels his new line Waste Basket Boutique. Some economists argue enthusiastically that disposable togs may become great waste and money savers, particularly as once-only dresses for a graduation or wedding--thus casually dismissing an older generation's tradition of laying away wedding dresses as semisacred household lares. This may be the outer limit (there are still girls who like the idea of walking to the altar in grandma's wedding dress), but the principle of use rather than possession is evident all over, particularly in the fact that people rent everything from skis to dance floors, at great savings of space and trouble.

There is undoubtedly too much buying for show, status and the sheer pleasure of expensive gadgetry. Perhaps the audio addict spent ridiculous amounts of money on massive monaural hi-fi rigs. But he later switched to stereo and small speakers not out of mere faddism but because they were better. Basically, the American wants what is best, not what will last forever. What upwardly mobile American really wants a car that will last 30 years, as he watches newer models go by, with power steering and brakes, pushbutton windows, et al. Or the refrigerator without automatic defrosting? The stove without a self-cleaning oven?

If it seems outrageous to tear down a handsome masonry building dating from Victorian times, one must consider the waste of energy and efficiency that would result from having people work in its non-air-conditioned rooms--or alternatively, the expense of air-conditioning them. Today, one in every four Americans changes houses each year, and a majority of them move within the same community or market area--they have simply traded in the old house for a better one. The same is true in all other fields. Less-developed countries may welcome a hand-me-down DC-3, even in the time of the jet. But the U.S. expects the best and can produce it. The price may seem like waste to some, but it can also be construed as "research" cost from which the whole world may ultimately profit.

Luxury v. Necessity

What spoils this picture of constant improvement is the sneaking suspicion that the improvement is not always real--in other words, the old bogy of planned obsolescence. Advertising, so goes the argument, not only exaggerates the improvements in many products but also relentlessly creates demands that never existed before. Obviously this is true; yet there is a limit to the process. Detroit may be able to get away with a mere face lifting on its cars for a season or two, but sooner or later there has to be genuine innovation, or else the consumer will simply not respond. Similarly, Madison Avenue may create less-than-essential needs, from deodorants to wigs, but somehow, somewhere, products must appeal to genuine human wants. Yesterday's luxury is today's necessity, and tastes are real even if they are acquired tastes. "The biggest waste in our society is feeding grain to animals," says Harvard Economist Thomas Schelling. "We lose nine-tenths of the calories in the grain. As for the proteins, we could easily get all we need out of soybeans. But we like the taste of meat, and we can afford to produce it. Is this waste?"

A new car every three years may not be necessary, but if a consumer wants it and has the money, it is his choice--and his demand for a new car keeps many a Detroit factory worker busy and gives him enough money to buy a new car himself. "Buy now--the job you save may be your own" is only a slogan, but one that today's economists recognize as sound doctrine. "So we're making something that we only half need, but we've got people busy making, and people selling it," observes University of Southern California Economist E. Bryant Phillips. Fancy packaging may not be vital, but it can be useful, and housewives like it--enough to pour nearly $11 billion into American workers' pockets.

Many economists feel that artificially stimulated demand is preferable to a slack economy and unemployment. Not that capitalism would collapse without it, as is often charged. But if this constant stimulation were removed, it would have to be replaced by something else--public works, massive government spending, a shortened week. To some, America's hyped-up consumption seems vaguely immoral as well as untenable in the long run. John Kenneth Galbraith has likened it to the squirrel on a treadwheel. Yet he and other economists agree that there is really nothing wrong with the process, provided that a sufficient share of a growing economy goes into social improvement.

Even taking waste in its narrowest terms, the U.S. is not so profligate as it seems. Every U.S. citizen throws away some 41 pounds of solid waste every day: garbage, tin cans, bottles, paper. It is estimated that it costs the economy $3 billion a year to do away with all this. One Rand Corp. scientist figures that it costs more to dispose of the New York Sunday Times than it does a subscriber to buy it.

But considerable ingenuity goes into the recovery and reuse of waste materials. Some industrial waste is saved and reprocessed at the plant itself; the rest comes through the scrap and salvage industry, which buys up wastes from plants, offices and homes. The copper in a skillet, for instance, may have an indefinite series of incarnations over a cycle of many years, moving from smelter to refinery to brass mill to the factory to housewife's kitchen to junk collector to a secondary refinery where it is smelted into ingots and sold back to the factory. Overall, only an estimated 15% of all the copper ever mined has been lost.

That most conspicuous waste--paper--is less serious than it looks. Paper that starts as office stationery may be reprocessed several times to reappear as wrapping or wallboard. Some 25% of all paper now derives from this "secondary forest," and there is so much reforestation that 60% more timber is maturing every year than is cut. A new process breaks up old cars into tiny bits and magnetically extracts the steel to produce a 97%-pure scrap, offering a hope that most of the nation's automobile graveyards can eventually be eliminated. Fly ash is converted to make lightweight bricks, panels and construction blocks. Celotex is using blast-furnace slag to make mineral wool.

The slaughtering industry has long boasted that it used up everything but the squeal. Together with the utilization of other wastes--such as corncobs and tobacco shreddings to produce face powder and insecticides--the agriculture-waste industry is a $5.9 billion business. The squeezings from soybean oil are used for oral contraceptives. Hiram Walker says, only half in jest, that it recovers "the hangover from whisky" --fusel oil, usually blamed for hangovers, can now be largely removed from whisky and sold to paint and perfume makers. Poultry processors, confronted with smothering stockpiles of chicken feathers that would not burn, came up with a new process that breaks down the feathers into a mealy, protein-rich substance. Today, many chickens are growing fat faster on the feathers of their predecessors.

Even in the lowliest problem, the disposal of municipal and industrial wastes that pollute the air and the streams of the U.S., there has been some progress. In a process now being established in Houston and three other cities, tin cans and other ferrous-metal objects are separated magnetically from other wastes. Rags, paper, plastics and aluminum, wood and rubber are hand-picked from the conveyer belt, each for assignment to reprocessing and recovery. The remaining organic material is "cooked" and deodorized to produce fertilizer. The object in view is that each city will become a closed loop--like a space capsule--and completely reuse all the water and solids that pass through the system.

The ultimate concern is that waste will end in consuming basic resources. It is an insistent theme of conservationists, but it does not presently worry serious economists. Herbert Schiller of the University of Illinois speaks for most of his colleagues when he says flatly: "We won't be overwhelmed by the disaster aspects of waste." Not only is the U.S. constantly developing substitutes (aluminum for iron, oil for coal, synthetic fabrics for wool), but detection and discovery techniques have so greatly improved that the reserves known to be available are actually larger than before.

Material v. Human

The only real waste that bothers Americans is not of material but of human resources. Lack of education for gifted children, the 24.9% of draftees rejected for "functional illiteracy" or other educational deficiencies, the victims of all kinds of diseases that could be cured or alleviated --these represent human waste. On a different level, there is immeasurable wasted energy in bureaucracy, both in Government and in private business. There is waste of time, if nothing else, in the innumerable non-books published and in countless empty entertainments. Some modern puritans see shocking waste in the fees paid to chic hairdressers or in the salaries handed to television comedians, which includes paying them not to perform for somebody else. But it would take an intolerable regime of tyrannical bookkeepers to determine which activities, which pleasures, are wasteful and which are useful.

No society has ever solved the problem of waste--as archaeologists from Iraq to Denmark can testify, as they rummage through ziggurats and kitchen middens. The crucial thing is to keep alive a sense of freedom, possibility and enterprise--and in that sense the U.S. is the least-wasteful society in history. Essentially, nothing is wasted that helps fulfill a legitimate purpose. With their wild-wheeling economy, a phenomenon so extraordinary that they cannot quite believe it themselves, Americans can do anything they choose. All they have to do is make their choices.

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