Consumerism+and+waste!!

Have you ever thought about how much trash we as Americans produce each day? Have you ever wondered why this is? Consumerism and waste is one of the biggest topics i can think about that we as a people over look. We as American's live in the biggest free market in the world which means we seemingly have a never ending variety of products always in our face. This also means we have an enormous amount of product waste each day in this country. This is because we either by a product with planned obsolescence or perceived obsolescence and we also buy food product's wrapped in plastic bags that we end up throwing out. **All of this contributes to the fact that the average American produces roughly 1 ton of waste/year....that's 1600 pounds/person!** All in all as a whole we tend to waste alot of resources as Americans and this is because of the society we live in. We live in a throw away society. By this i mean we throw away almost every product we will buy in a lifetime. From The phone in our pocket to the food in our fridge. This is because of ingenious packaging ideas an example of this is water bottles. We buy plain water that we could other wise get from a tap and add mass amounts of unneeded plastics in the environment. **Another problem is planned obsolecence and percieved obsolecence. planned obsolecence is when a company creates a product with the intent of the product breaking or becoming obsolete in only a few years.** The other percieved obsolecence just means whats in fasion i have to have the new iphone because every one else has it and its in fasion. The other factor peole often overlook is what these products are often made of. They are usually petroleum based or have other dangenourous chemicals which man does not fully understand yet. We have no idea if these chemicals can react with one another and cause even more damage. Eventually the decisions we as humans have made for years will catch up to us and we will feel the full impact of our decisions.