Food for Thought — To get a little “real” for a quick sec, do you ever get an uneasy feeling when thinking that we might be damaging our beautiful planet just by the confinement of choices we have available? The massive storms, the growing number of wildfires, seasons appear to be changing. Does it ever feel like your values aren’t completely aligned with the way we have to live our daily lives? Ever wish that there were simple, even trivial, things you could do to help heal our planet and maybe even your conscience? Because we certainly do.
Right now, we live in a world where Americans spend $1.2 trillion annually on nonessential goods. In other words, items they don’t really need all the time. 1 out of every 10 Americans rents offsite storage making it one of the fastest growing segments of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades, 25% of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside them and 32% only have room for one vehicle. It’s more than safe to say that we’ve reached the era of “peak stuff“. It’s gotten flat our ridiculous in our humble opinion.
Every year our current system makes an enormous amount of stuff, which when not properly passed through a more circular system, inevitably creates billions of pounds of unsold inventory and excess, and for things like apparel, we often burn it. It’s creating more than 5 billions pounds of waste per year in the U.S. and over 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s equivalent to all of the trash produced by 5 million Americans a year — and it’s only growing. Our economy needs and thrives on growth, but only in a sustainable way that respects our closed-loop system here on Earth. This is not the same as the landfilled, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, waste-accumulating system we have now!
The system is broken. Let’s change it together. Become a contributor (instead of just a consumer) today with HereYaGo! Click here to learn more and download our app today on the app store!