Circular Economy Lessons From the Asian Mother
My Asian mother used to always save plastic grocery bags, and I thought she was just being cheap. But maybe she was onto something.
Snoop through the cabinet under my childhood home’s kitchen sink, and you’ll find a plastic bag full of plastic bags. In fact, Mom found a new use for almost everything: mesh garlic nets as loofahs, takeout sushi trays as soap holders, and pasta jars as cups.
She didn’t need to do this. I was raised comfortably in Los Angeles in a well-educated household, and I secretly hated that she acted cheap. What I didn’t realize at the time is, she was actually being radically environmental. She looped a little circular economy through our own walls. And all by asking a simple, yet criminally underappreciated question:
Why do we buy things new when we can use what we have?
Part of it is that the word “waste” shields us from seeing an item’s real functionality. You keep trash in your house? That’s weird! Words like “waste” and “trash” cloak items in stigma so that they’re frowned upon to keep, and we use the terms too generously. Disposability is a central trait of capitalism: it keeps consumers consuming, thus producers producing. In the process, 140 million tons of waste enters already-overpopulated landfills each year. Much of this might not need to exist as “waste” in the first place. Instead, Mom thought it was more wasteful to not give items the new life they deserved.
Some might call my mom’s behavior “frugal,” but in a circular economy, it’s actually pretty radical.
A circular economy envisions a closed system of production and consumption, where a product that is used doesn’t exit the system as “waste,” it loops back to the start as a new product satisfying a new use. So, developing a circular economy is vital to reducing plastic pollution because it mitigates the amount of plastic that exits as “waste,” and cuts the amount of plastic we need to produce in the first place.
We can’t talk about the circular economy without spotlighting plastic because ever since its invention, plastic has driven the culture of consumerist disposability. It started in the 1950s when plastic producers advertised a throwaway lifestyle as a goal for living conveniently, and plastic as its means. Then, planned obsolescence made it worse. Not only was plastic portrayed as an innately disposable material, it was being designed that way. Water bottles that nearly disintegrate from a couples hours in a hot car, plastic spoons that can barely lift a hunk of sticky rice – it’s not the consumer’s fault that we default to a disposal mindset.
The result?
Today, it’s rare to walk into a fast food chain and not find plastic spoons wrapped in plastic covers flowing out of trash bins. The paradox of plastic is that it’s often treated as single-use, yet it’s indestructible in the environment. There is no material quite like it.
Though my mom does keep plastic spoons wrapped in plastic covers in our kitchen drawers, I don’t think people should start replacing their grandparents’ silverware with Baskin-Robbins souvenirs. Instead, I think people — perhaps individuals but especially manufacturers and distributors – should develop a habit of seeing a product at the supposed end of its life, dangling it over the waste bin, and asking: Wait. Is this really trash?
By nurturing a culture of anti-disposability, we can begin to plan for the infrastructure, policy, and business models needed to give trash a new purpose, at scale. It’s possible, and it’s been done. Patagonia, for example, turns trash into treasure in two ways: by operating a repair service for damaged goods, and by offering a platform for reselling one’s unwanted wear to someone new. They recorded $1.5 billion in revenue last year.
My mom is radically frugal, and she’s not alone. Growing up, I found a second home at Asian friends’, where I could look under the kitchen sink and know there would be a plastic bag full of plastic bags. Yet, no one looks to the Asian mother as a model for implementing a circular-economic mindset. Asian frugality is seen as just plain frugality, and waste is seen as weird.
A number of existing terms are compatible with my mom’s consumption habits: anti-consumerism, freeganism, degrowth, etc. As the circulation of capital becomes increasingly globalized, the distribution of wealth increasingly skewed, and the environment increasingly razed, people are theorizing and acting on ways to hit the brakes. For some, this looks like conscious decisionmaking around consumption.
However, I think the beauty of my mom’s radical frugality is the fact that she doesn’t do it for the environment or for anti-capitalism. She does it because it’s a philosophy that makes sense to her. And even then, she probably has a lower waste footprint than the average Hydroflask wielder.
The difference is that she doesn’t just buy things based on how environmentalist an item is, she buys things in a fundamentally environmentalist way. Which is to say, she doesn’t buy things much at all. Though environmentalism can motivate changes in behavior, behavioral changes (especially deeply cultural behaviors, and in older generations) often require a greater connection to the question: what can this do for me? In this case, one answer is buying less and saving more. And if the overall outcome is that we contribute less waste into the environment and capital toward corporations, what’s the difference really?
