How many times have we heard these three words repeated over and over again?
Yet despite repeating this mantra, our societies continue to become exponentially more wasteful. This is largely due to our culture of materialism and designed obsolescence. When a company sells us one of their products, they often can’t make the next sale until the first product either breaks or we get tired of it and demand an “upgrade.” Hence our culture of seasonal fashion and our fear of our possessions looking “dated” be they clothes, interior decorations or car designs.
As long as waste and re-selling is intergral to the profitability of businesses, it seems likely that our culture will continue to promote it and it will continue to be something that consumers find difficult to avoid.
A second reason for waste is commuting and travelling in general. When we are on the go, we travel light, eat in restaurants and take aways, buy packaged ready meals in shops, etc., sleep in hotels with small, single-use shampoo and toothpaste. Most takeaways use disposable packaging simply due to the time and effort of returning cutlery and eating utensils. While hotels provide cheap single use options due to the danger of theft. Most people don’t want to walk around the place with backpacks filled with shampoos, a toothbrush, toothpaste, china plates and knives and forks.
The final reason for waste is time depletion. Today most households consist of two working professionals. By the time both partners come back from a hard day of work, the last thing they want to do is spend their time repairing things that have broken and fixing things up. Most working professionals would rather throw the broken stuff in the bin and buy a replacement.
Socibuild’s business plan is well-positioned to promote frugality, re-use and recycling in the following ways:
- Socibuild’s business model, based on Real Estate appreciation, doesn’t depend on designed obsolescence for revenues. Thus, it will be able to invest in waste reduction (through carefully sourcing the right suppliers, making “dated” items cool, etc.,) without harming its profits
- Socibuild will promote relatively static stable communities composed of virtual workers and organic farmers. By controlling the production of fresh food (such as meat and vegetables), Socibuild communities can eliminate a lot of packaging. Furthermore, because community members won’t “always be on the go” they will be able to eat their food on China plates with metal cutlery and drink from China cups all built to last. This will eliminate the need to use anything disposable at all during the process of food consumption.
- The community income which Socibuild aims to someday pay its members will enable some to primarily engage in self-provision activities. Self-provision leaves plenty of time for repair and upkeep, looking for secondhand bargains and time to repair broken tools. Some of these people might repair tools for others in the community. Perhaps they could do deals where the other community members give them a bunch of broken objects and, in exchange for repairing half, they get to keep the other half. Socibuild could support repairers by creating archives of instructions on how to repair all manner of things so if someone wants to fix something appropriate instruction and demonstration videos are ready to hand.