Rubbish Has No Value - Essay Example

The idea of shopping may be rooted from humanity’s basic needs but with the selections available in the market, one’s choice of brand or product is affected by personal choice and by pressures exerted by the society. From that idea, social scientists insinuate that the factors affecting the consumers includes income, education, family and peer-group pressure, social expectations, media influence, the role of retailers, and the nature of the goods themselves (Hetherington, 2009, p.29). Lucky for those who are mindful of their carbon footprint that they opt to go greener and shop wiser but that is not the case for the majority of consumers.

Every single day, new innovations are created by manufacturers and capitalists and with each new product are withered old models that are often left disregarded as mere rubbish. Just like in the case of mobile phones, laptops, cameras, and other gadgets, hundreds of brands and models are available in the market and a new one is released almost every week. The old stuff that people have will be then regarded as out of style, undesirable, and replaceable resulting to one’s discarding of these used stuffs and accumulation of the latest models.

In UK and England, for the year 2009 alone, the local authority generated 59 metric tons of collected waste (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, 2011, p.4). Note that this amount is just a mere fraction of the total waste collected around the globe for the past centuries posting a detrimental future for the environment if reckless consumption is continuously done. The question on the worth of rubbish is posted, does it have any value? Prior to deliberating a rational answer to that query, one must first comprehend the veritable essence of the term “value”.

Brown (2009, p. 113) stated that “value is a complex term that can refer to how useful something is, or the extent to which something is regarded as worthwhile, or the extent to which it can command a price.” This explains that the value of an item depends on the person that values it, that is one particular material may be valuable for person A while it is plain rubbish for person B. Rubbish has zero value. This is the common perception of a regular person. Household rubbish are thrown to the bin and collected in the morning to be dumped in an allocated area for proper treatment.

This type of rubbish are what we call waste. Waste created by human, consumed or unconsumed, and are seen by its users as invaluable and non-useful materials that they must get rid of. Wastage and wastefulness are the detrimental criteria of this generation that creates tons of garbage each day resulting to environmental stability – where the waste generated and resources consumed are not replaced equally by the environment (Brown, 2009, p.114) – and further result to a more complex problem of global warming.

Rubbish is valuable and it can be revaluated. Thompson (1979, cited in Brown 2009, p.130) coined the Rubbish Theory stating that some items can be revaluated or had its value depreciated to zero. He classified objects into three: the objects produced for ordinary use, the rubbish category of zero value and the durable category which value increases overtime. He states that some items which may be considered zero value in a certain era may be moved to the durable category after some time or the other way around depending on how