Why American Business nurtures a culture of Waste

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I think I have bitten off a little more than I can chew, here, but someone has to ask the hard questions, so that we can all think about this issue in easy stages.

[Why is it so important to focus on this issue?]
It seems obvious to me that waste is a problem.  The first word that springs to the lips is Landfill.  But waste is of many kinds: waste of time, waste of energy, waste of resources, and I suppose there are others: waste of energy, waste of talent, and so on.  We're finally getting to see that, though nobody likes waste in government, it has been assumed that in business, because profit is the principal motive in private enterprise, that waste control is built-in.  But it is not so; the culture of waste is actually driven by business.

A family may be able to afford to buy a new car every five years or so.  (The wealthier sector of the population can probably recycle cars more frequently.)  The same goes with a lot of things: computers, televisions, furniture, homes, buildings.  Everything is being built more cheaply, and unlike a half century ago, a used car simply does not have the quality in it to provide a used-car buyer with a reliable vehicle for a couple more years.  It used to be that the Japanese made cars that would last longer, but they've learned the lessons of planned obsolescence very well.  With advanced technology, it is actually possible to ration out the advancements slowly, so that a few months after you make a purchase, there's a new release of technological advancements all round.  (Manufacturers will not sell a new line until a competitor is about to release something comparable.)

Recycling buildings is sadder still.  All around us we see badly built buildings being torn down increasingly frequently (and sometimes we're glad, because the thing was such an eyesore).  But can the community afford to have buildings put up and torn down so frequently?  It provides jobs.  But can we afford to have waste being the engine of employment?
 
[What evidence is there to support this claim?]
There is little evidence I can produce to the reader except that I have seen waste in every place of business that I have visited, and have heard evidence in thousands of conversations with friends and acquaintances, especially those who have grown up in cultures that abhor waste, and who have come up against ridicule of the "Hey, this is America!" sort, and some of them have gone on to see embracing waste as a part of their assimilation into US culture, which is the saddest thing that has happened to them, among many other sad things.

I first encountered the phenomenon from the point of view of recycling and the environment.  In the school where I work, I had taken to picking out flat white paper from out of the trash can and placing it in the blue recycling bins, in a rather mechanical way.  I spend a lot of time (time I could better spend thinking about what I'm actually paid to do) just going about with my eyes on the ground, looking for trash that is in the wrong place.  But I began to see the cultural implications of what I was seeing: everyone is working so hard and is so short of time that they cannot spare the extra thought or the extra energy or the extra time to place the waste paper in the recycling bin.  On a Friday, when I am feeling particularly annoyed at my co-workers, I sometimes make the rounds of the floors, finding literally pounds of white paper in the trash.

At one time, I told my students to fish the paper out of the recycle bins, and do their homework on the clean reverse sides of the paper.  (In principle this is a practice that will be officially deprecated, since there are problems with anyone reading a print-out that was rejected for one reason or another.)  But a couple of students gave me the evil eye for making that suggestion, and that was enough to turn me off that particular habit.  (And then the school invested in two-sided printing in the student computer labs --a good thing-- which put an end to that idea.)

Bear in mind that what I say about small-scale, small-time waste, such as that of flat white paper, also applies to major waste, such as putting up an entire warehouse in the wrong place at the wrong time, then tearing it down, and rebuilding it.  Someone might be demoted or be fired for that mistake, but the more interesting --and more important-- question is: why was it done in the first place?  What can be done to prevent this sort of thing happening so often?

[What are the causes of this habit of waste?]
I can only make an educated guess as to the causes of this habit of waste.

The glory of America (and the downfall of modern global society, in my humble opinion) is this idea of competition.  In the competition of the marketplace, one thing that helps one business get an edge over its competitors is to have their product ready sooner, and get it to the right place faster.  This principle trumps a whole lot of other considerations.  Time is money.  The handout has to be ready quickly, and it is better to just throw a bad batch of photocopies in the trash than to screw around recycling them.

It is better to hire someone quickly for a vacancy (never mind that you didn't vet the applicant carefully) and fire him or her if he doesn't deliver the goods and rehire another poor sucker, than to make sure that the person fits the job.  Of course this means that the person concerned has his plans destroyed.  In the academic world, if a bad hire is made simply because the institution cannot afford to work harder to find the perfect match to their vacant position, either the school must endure the thrashing around of the poor fish out of water, or the poor fish must be let go, causing more trouble to the person than if he or she had not been hired in the first place.  After being mis-hired several times, a young professor becomes practically unhirable.

Another interesting fact is that the free market is inherently wasteful.  Companies competing to be suppliers of widgets must prove that they can supply an enormous number of widgets for a client --presumably another company-- in order to win a tender.  The losing competitors, of course, are stuck with a warehousefull of widgets that it could not get rid of.  That's waste.  If the widgets are generally useful things, the companies can sell them for cheap.  If the widgets are a niche market, we have a problem.

Of course the losing bidders suffer losses.  But the larger community also pays a price, in terms of wasted resources.  Manufacturers of any product are doomed to sell only a portion of what they manufacture, and that waste is built into the system.  But the culture of waste, the assumption that it is better to waste a certain amount than to fall behind, extends into every nook and cranny of society.  The puritan ethic of abhorring waste that was a founding principle of the first pioneers has gradually died.

[If it is is true, can we identify movements and strategies to help the situation?]
As I see it, this is a matter of education.  If every most teachers everywhere recall their old teachers who taught that haste makes waste, and waste is bad, and if negative consequences of waste at every level is pointed out, I'm almost positive that in many instances the mental adjustments that businesses have to impose on their new employees will fail, and waste will be gradually recognized to be the evil that it is.

Of course it is easier for an individual who is unburdened with the abhorrence of waste to make a show of being "efficient".  There are actually places where the productivity of a department is measured by how much paper they use up in the photocopier or printer, or both.  One hopes that, in more technologically advanced businesses where they have the know-how to measure productivity in meaningful ways, this is done.  A good worker must learn to be efficient despite being unwasteful.  Any idiot can be "efficient" in some superficial measure of the word, by squandering company resources.

I am obviously speaking to people of above average imagination and intelligence.  Business has long been friendly to those of mediocre ability, provided they have the so-called killer instinct, the willingness to be unscrupulous on behalf their beloved business.  A duffer who embraces corporate greed is often presented as the ideal employee, at least in parodies of business workplaces.  So it is left to the rest of us to grind away at the big problems of waste.  Perhaps someone will coin the phrase commodity pollution, to describe the phenomenon of overproduction of a commodity, thus eventually placing a burden on the Landfill, and costing society a terrible price in terms of energy, pollution, manpower, money, materials, and time.