January 17, 2025

Further thoughts on rubbish

It's not just broken donations. We seem very uncomfortable with having to throw certain things away

In an interesting coincidence of timing, while I was doing the final edits on last week's essay I came across a thread on Bluesky about library weeding.1 Most non-librarians tend to think of a library as a passive repository for the written word, but in fact they're actively curated and maintained. And sometimes this means disposing of books that no longer serve a purpose. Whether they're outdated and obsolete, worn out to the point of being unreadable, or simply no longer appealing to library users, they need to be thrown away to free up shelf space for something that will be read.

To those of us who have got into the habit of seeing books as friends, this is a little sad, but some people treat it as a scandal. They post pictures of skips full of discarded books and try to compare it to Nazi book burnings. Now, there are some fairly obvious differences between burning research in order to suppress knowledge and disposing of a physical object that's outlived its use, but the fact that they consider such an inflammatory comparison shows the depth of their feelings even as it says nothing good about their sense of proportion.

Taken alongside the insistence that charity shops should be able to make use of worn out or broken donations, it seems like a lot of people are really resistant to being told that some things are only fit for the rubbish. That seems odd in a world full of single use items essentially designed to be thrown away, but this kind of discomfort isn't rooted in logic. Perhaps the action of using something for a while, or imagining it in use, changes the values in play.

Or maybe worrying about the disposal of bigger and more consequential things is our way of managing the deeper anxiety over how much is designed to be thrown away. We can't cut out single use packaging without massively changing our lifestyle, so "rescuing" a book, a piece of furniture, an item of clothing from the landfill can feel like a way to make up for it.

There's no denying that much of what we own is no longer built to last. Clothing is made as cheaply as possible, which inevitably makes it poorer quality. Electrical and electronic items are designed to be impossible to fix ourselves, and there's pressure to "upgrade" electronics every time the manufacturers come up with a new model. Constantly buying new stuff sometimes seems to be the only socially acceptable way of expressing ourselves or enjoying life.

Fixing most of that is beyond the power of any given consumer, but apart from a right to be able to fix things, there doesn't even seem to be much appetite for change. The same people who insist they want products that are better made complain when they're offered something correspondingly more expensive. We could save up and buy something that will last, assuming it's not a necessity we need straight away, but that's such a dreary idea. Surviving in modern society is so stressful that it's hard to pass up the mood boost of a shiny new thing right when we want it. And so the cycle continues.

Even if we could completely change our mindset and come to terms with fewer and more expensive goods, that would only solve half the problem. The best made item, maintained with the utmost care, still has a finite lifespan. A much longer one, it's true, but that only increases the wrench when it has to be replaced.

Ultimately, we need to get more comfortable with the fact that things all eventually wear out. I'm the last person to be giving a prescription for that, given that something as simple as deciding when my toothpaste tube is empty causes me significant anxiety. But I can say that while we're getting there, we need to manage the discomfort ourselves. Not take it out on librarians trying to keep the collection current.