The Waste Debate: A Reaction

The other day Melissa and I posted a blog, The Waste Debate: Garbage or Money, in which we asked the question:

Is it better to save money and leave more garbage, or better to produce less garbage but spend more money?

By Mark Harris

First off, why are you concerned about throwing away extra?  There are 2 major reasons that I can think of.

If it is because of environmental concerns:
Then it is simply a tradeoff: economy/environment.  The moral issue sounds simple until you consider that a large amount of the world still lives in terrible conditions.  As the world economy improves more wealth is generated that can go toward improving the world.  The environmental tradeoff doesn’t just exist at the personal level.  It also goes for factories.  Factories produce waste, and (plenty of other abuses of the environment), but they do it because it is cheaper for them to.  Cheaper means more efficient, which means more world wealth.

I would say that every ounce of smoke put into the atmosphere has a price.  How much is some smoke in the environment worth to you.  (An environmentalist would put a higher price on it.) Make sure you balance the worth of this money towards what it can do (put food on the plate of a starving kid).

So for the 2-liter Coke example you have 2 choices:
1) If you buy the 2-liter: The world has a little extra waste to process, but you have 30 cents that can be used to help the world.
2) If you buy the 20oz: The world does not have the extra waste, nor do you have 30 cents.

30 cents might not seem like it can do a lot, but in another country it certainly can.  Christian Children’s Fund can make sure a child is fed, educated, and given basic medical attention for less than $1 a day.  Also 1 or 2 billion people in the world live on less than a dollar a day.  (I don’t remember which one it is… it’s from a Rage Against the Machine song… which is where I get all my political opinions.)

Unfortunately I think that people can easily overlook one side of a tradeoff.

If it is because it depresses you to throw away food when much of the world is starving:
I’m not going to lie, I tend to be an economics person, so I am much more confident on my conclusions for the first section.  None the less, here are my thoughts as it relates to this.

I would say that it is bad to take extra and throw it away, when that extra would have gone to someone who needs it, if you hadn’t taken it.  I do not see a problem in your case though, because there is no way the extra Coke (that was thrown out) would have gone to a better cause.  Not to mention that by taking the cheaper Coke you now have 30c that could go to something good, as discussed before.

From a more economics standpoint, always buying the cheapest/best product is what encourages economic efficiency, and economic efficiency is what gives the world a better quality of life.  There is virtually no debate that a free market (where everyone is trying to get the best deal), leads to the largest sum of world wealth.  The distribution of wealth is a much more complicated issue.

Instead of encouraging Americans to make decisions that lead to a less efficient world economy, a better solution would be to encourage Americans to be more charitable with their wealth.

Please leave your comments and thoughts below.

Comments

1. i love mark
2. i read this quickly (i should actually be checking on one of my patients right now, haha), but i think i agree with mark’s economic standpoint and final conclusion