Waste
Advanced industrial societies produce enormous quantities of waste. People know it when they see it, yet waste does not admit of any strictly physical definition. Moreover what is at one point waste can at another point easily be resource. Examples include archaeological digs in archaic trash dumps, artistic creations of objets trouvés co-generation plants, and recycling centers.
However waste is defined and measured, it is safe to say that never before have humans produced and thrown away as much as they do in the early twenty-first century. Mass production through industrialization, extensive packaging (to facilitate both shipping and sales), and rapid obsolescence (whether planned or as an accidental effect of technological progress) in a free market economy, driving the compulsion to make things and consume them, have formed a world in which artifacts are produced, consumed, and discarded to an historically unprecedented extent.
Indeed there is a tendency for the lifetime of durable products to be shortened to that of consumables, and for non-renewable natural resource stocks to be consumed in the same way as renewable production flows, which some critics ascribe to the inability of free market forces to distinguish between them. Given the size of the phenomenon and its potential damaging effects on public health, the environment, and future generations, waste is one of the fundamental problems facing the technoscientific and consumer society.
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