Imagine 10 years from now, every single place you love visiting right now turns into looking like landfills. Horrifying right?
A recent World Bank report projected that the amount of solid waste generated globally will nearly double by the year 2025, going from 3.5 million tons to more than 6 million tons per day. But the truly concerning part is that these figures will only keep growing for the foreseeable future.
The findings point out that generally waste generation increases as the income of the people rise and with that increases the wasteful, un-necessary consumption as the income rises most of the individuals instead of investing in quality products which will serve them for good long years and which will further benefit the environment, they rather choose quantity and here comes all the difference.
When an individual demand the quantity he is not only demanding clutter for his life but he is sending his best to the landfills which further degrades the entire mother earth and for a fact, an individual doesn’t need too much consumption to be happy, I am pretty sure there are better ways to raise the level of dopamine in our brains.
So, instead of all this clutter, when the income of an individual rises he or she should support slow fashion, buy in bulk, build that emergency fund, save for an asset, go for package-free groceries, and look for other ways through which you can raise the standard of your life to not just show-off to the society but to genuinely feel more ethical and happy inside-out.
I am pretty sure a lot of think it’s just me a single person in the population of 7.6 billion people, I am not alone responsible for all the clutter in the world and it wouldn’t matter if I change my lifestyle or not. If that’s the case let’s talk about individual significance.
We meet a lot of people in the course of our lives. So, just imagine how much power do we hold as an individual to influence the world. If the fashion influencers can influence us into buying fast fashion, we too can surely influence slow fashion sure that’s not easy, but easy is not something we are looking for we are talking about being ethical.
So, we as individual consumers, how are we responsible for our mother earth turning into landfills and what can we do, again as a significant individual to reduce the impact. The quantity of garbage we generate reflects the number of new products we buy, and therefore the energy, resources, and upstream waste that are involved in producing those items.
If we turn conscious about what we buy, what we create demand for, changing our extravagant, full of trash lifestyle to a low-waste living we can have our positive impact. “So exactly how can we make the shift in our day to day lives to go low-waste”? Avoiding the single-use plastics, getting out of the trap of fast-fashion, choosing the second-hand options, and really buying what you need are some of the simple but very impactful ways to live a low-impact life.
It wouldn’t be appropriate to consider yourself insignificant especially in this age of social media as we go on influencing each other so why not that we consider influencing the right way. Only that can make us live in a better place a better life being a rational conscious consumer.
