Throwaway Living, Back Then and Today
In the mid-1950’s there was a movement called “Throw-away Living”, where buying something and only using it once before dumping it in the garbage wasn’t seen as being wasteful, it was seen as a novelty. Single-use household items were marketed towards American families and they were received with excitement, which might cause some confusion now. The excitement stems from the idea of progress and leaving the past behind, after all, this was the next big thing!
Now, we have our children learning “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle”, and a sense of how important it is to reduce our output of waste, but before you feel like we’ve made any progress from the era of frantic 50’s housewives, remember that nearly half the food produced in the U.S. gets thrown away annually. 91% of plastic isn’t recycled, and we are producing 300 million tons of plastic every year (and that’s only single-use products!). We might have moved into a different mindset about how we treat our plastic trash, but we are still living in the 50’s when it comes to the practice of reducing, reusing, and recycling
Cosgrove, Ben. “’Throwaway Living’: When Tossing Out Everything Was All the Rage.” Time, Time, 2014, time.com/3879873/throwaway-living-when-tossing-it-all-was-all-the-rage/%C2%A0.
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