A favourite place to visit is our city’s museum, and it’s not just because it’s free (okay, okay, it’s “admission by donation”). Every time I go there, I wonder what archaeologists will be digging up a thousand years from now. Will they find anything interesting?
I'm starting to wonder if there’s anything worthy of our era to put in a museum.... The remnants of an iPhone, perhaps? A piece of fibreglass from a Toyota RAV-4?
The technological creations that compose our modern era are incredibly advanced yet so... uninteresting. Dig up a pot that was made 500 years ago and we put it in a museum. This has unique attributes! But a petrified laptop? Not so compelling.
The value in old artifacts is their rarity. As soon as you find a hundred thousand flat-screen TVs, interest wanes. Like shopping bags, they become a nuisance (and a health hazard).
Archaeologists surely won't waste their time digging up old landfills as they'll know exactly what they’ll find: a whole lot of garbage. An appropriate name for our era might be the Age of Junk.
We simply have too much of it. I think about this every time I venture into our laundry room, where a hoarder’s dream of boxes are stacked against the walls, crammed full of good, useful things that, well, are no longer so useful. I’m not sure why we need a box full of 15-year old candles or a bag of old VCR cables. Why in the world do we still have two VCRs? I don’t even know how to hook them up to our new TVs.
We’ve got books, baby toys, tapes and old clothes... many of which we plan to donate. Most stuff we do donate, but there are always those things you want to hang on to. Like the old suits in my closet. I tried one on the other day, thinking I’d wear it to a function.... then quickly realized I’d look like that guy in our church who wore what looked like his wedding suit every Sunday. The suit hung over my shoulders, about a half size too big. And the pants, wide and wavy, drooped Trump-like, to the bottom of my shoes. How would I show off my snazzy socks?
Fashion styles wane quickly – so quickly that we are constantly forced to recycle our wardrobe. It’s gotten to the point where less developed countries don’t want our used clothing anymore.
And now China won’t even take our recyclables – or at least not the “contaminated” stuff. And who could blame them? We’re constantly sending them cardboard boxes with pizza stains. It’s the hardliners who cause the problems with recyclables, by the way. They’re the ones trying to push the limits every chance they get, like the woman who stopped me from putting cellophane into the garbage, claiming it was a paper product. This is what China’s upset about: over-zealous recyclers, ruining it for everyone! [End rant]
Soon we’ll have to recycle everything ourselves. But do we even know how? China makes all the plastic products these days.
They churn it out in reams. It forms our dollar stores. It fills our landfills. It floats in our oceans, slowly degrading over thousands of years, steadily making its way up the food chain.
Our junk will be with us (and in us) forever.
