To Save a Dying Planet: A Consumer’s Case for Change

by Annan Nippita ’29

About 50 years ago, someone on my dad’s side of my family bought a pair of jeans. I found them in a drawer six months ago and now wear them two to three times a week. They have never been patched. The denim is thick, the seams are straight, and the pockets are deep enough to actually hold things. They fit like something that was made to be worn, not styled.

About a year ago, I got a pair of jeans from Uniqlo, an international clothing brand headquartered in Japan. I wore them two to three times a week as well. They got a hole in them within three months. They were patched twice. If the system worked as designed, they were incinerated sometime in September in New Jersey, reduced to ash and numbers in a quarterly report. One pair of pants survived half a century. The other barely survived a season. The difference isn’t nostalgia — it’s design.

As it became easier for goods to be produced, shipped and disposed of, they have been made with weaker quality. Jeans, which at some point were made for laborious work — think mining, farming, railroad construction — are now fashion statements. They come pre-ripped and pre-faded, broken in by machines so you don’t have to yourself. They are meant to last a season, or until the trend dies. They aren’t meant to survive. They are meant to be purchased and disposed of within the year.

Everything from vehicles to electronics to houses to clothing is now made in a way that their obsolescence is basically set. The average American house is built to last about 70 years. A plane is meant to function for thirty years. A phone, two to three models. A laptop, five years if you’re lucky. A t-shirt, a season. Yes, your grandma might have a phone with a single-digit model number or a computer with a rainbow-colored Windows logo. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask your parents.) Those objects were not built with the expectation that they would be replaced on a schedule. They were built to remain.

Stuff used to be built with permanence in mind. No one today is expecting their house to stand until 2200, yet I live in a building dating back to the 1830s. Its floors creak and its walls are uneven, but it is still here. We, as a species, have grown accustomed to new things, to top-of-the-line products, to the annual refresh. These things were designed to serve the consumer until the next big thing came around. In reality, they were engineered for the greatest possible profit margin and the fastest possible turnover, ensuring that replacement is not accidental but inevitable.

Sometimes that inevitability is built into the product itself. As with fast fashion, the item is made so poorly that it physically cannot last more than a year. Other times, the pressure is cultural rather than structural: a new thing appears on social media that “everyone MUST have!!!” Your Stanley tumbler is a good example of the latter. They were all the rage one year, and gone with the wind the next, replaced by your new and shiny Owala. I’m willing to bet that most everyone reading this who bought one still has it sitting around somewhere. No one was forced not to use it because it broke; the switch was purely just to stay on trend. The object did not fail, our attention did.

This highlights the big issue with consumer behavior: we all want to stay up to date. We want to belong. We want the algorithm to approve of us. If that means buying a whole bunch of poorly produced goods, then so be it. If that means an exponential increase in garbage, then so be it. The consequences are abstract, and abstraction is easy to ignore.

Milk used to come in reusable glass bottles, delivered and collected in a loop that cut down on waste. Now it comes in plastic jugs. Eggs in parts of the southern United States come in styrofoam. Everything from tomatoes to cucumbers comes bundled up in plastic cartons or plastic wrap, and are placed in single-use bags to carry home in. The packaging might be more “sustainable” in some places — the plastic bag replaced by paper — but this doesn’t necessarily mean less waste. The better it might seem for the environment, the more of them will be used. In 2019, 96% of all beverages sold in the United States were single use, totaling over 140 billion containers. The U.S. might only have about 4% of the world’s population, but somehow we manage to produce roughly 14% of its garbage. The scale is hard to imagine because it is designed to be.

It really isn’t about if we purchase all of these goods; it’s how they are packaged for us, how we use them afterwards, and when in their metaphorical lifetimes we dispose of them. Consuming goods is not inherently bad—it’s necessary to function in today’s society. You need clothes. You need a phone. You need a computer. The problem is the packaging that comes with it and the turnover rates of the goods we have. The problem is that we as a society have normalized disposability.

Look around for a minute. Other than the room itself, how old is everything around you? The desktops in the library are no older than a decade. The shoes on the people in your subway car are no older than a year or two. This newspaper is written on paper that is probably no older than a few months and will probably be disposed of in a few days. If you have a shelf of books in your eyeline, there might be something pushing two decades, but let’s be real here: when was the last time anything there was picked up at all, much less actually read? The age of your products has become synonymous with its irrelevance.

We have created a society where stuff can’t be old. If it is, it’s obsolete and should be removed. But how, why, and where it does get removed remains the big question. New York City alone has 58 waste transfer stations handling about 12 million tons of garbage annually. The garbage truck that picks up your trash is one of roughly 2,500. The workers that pick up your garbage are two of nearly 7,900. This system is huge, robust, and most importantly, discreet. It works so well that we never have to think about it.

Yes, it might be loud some mornings when the garbage trucks come to pick up your trash, but do you know what happens to it afterwards? It is compacted. It is shipped. It is burned. It is buried. It is exported. It becomes someone else’s problem, or no one’s problem at all. This is the issue: we know the system works, but we as a society can’t quantify it emotionally. A bag on the curb is small. A landfill is unfathomable.

And this is where the jeans come back in.

Every time I wear that 50-year-old pair instead of buying a new one, I am not just saving money. I am preventing cotton from being grown, dyed, shipped, cut, sewn, packed in plastic, boxed in cardboard, transported across oceans, trucked across highways, and eventually thrown away. I am delaying the moment when something else has to be made. It is not heroic. It is not glamorous. It is just one less thing.

Every time you choose to patch a hole instead of replacing a garment, you are extending the life of the resources already spent. Every time you decide not to buy the trending water bottle because the one in your cabinet still works, you are preventing another from being manufactured, marketed, and eventually discarded. Every time you bring a reusable bag, finish the food in your fridge, repair a cracked screen instead of upgrading the phone, you are slightly reducing the churn.

It feels insignificant because it is individual. One shirt. One bottle. One pair of jeans. But garbage is not created in landfills; it is created in increments. It is created in the decision to throw something out instead of fixing it. It is created in the decision to replace something that still functions. It is created in the belief that old equals useless.

Every piece of rubbish counts because it joins millions of others. Every piece of clothing you decide to wear for another season counts because it pushes back against a system built on speed. You may not see the landfill you avoided, the container ship you didn’t fill, the incinerator you didn’t feed. The system is too large and too efficient for that. But scale works both ways. If millions of people make millions of small decisions, the effect compounds just as surely as waste does.

The 50-year-old jeans are not special because they are old. They are special because they are still here. They prove that longevity is possible, that usefulness does not expire on a marketing schedule. We cannot redesign the entire global supply chain overnight. We cannot shut down waste transfer stations with a single word. But we can interrupt the cycle in the smallest ways.

Keep the shirt. Patch the jeans. Finish the bottle. Repair the phone. Wear the Sambas in a decade if you still like them.

The system may be massive, but so is the number of choices we make every day. And every single one of them counts.