Nowadays, people always throw the old things away when they buy new things, some people claim that the broken things should be repaired and used again. What factors cause this phenomenon? What effects the phenomenon leads to?

Modern culture is a consumerist one. It is also known as ‘disposable culture’ or ‘use and throw’ culture. In this essay I shall deal with the causes and effects of this phenomenon.

The most important reason leading to this phenomenon is the consumerist society we belong to today. We are flooded with choices and we want to buy the latest models of things and the latest fashion of clothes. Even the buying capacity of the average person has increased because of developing economies. Secondly, in order to buy more and more things, people have become workaholics and therefore they don’t find time to get things repaired. Finally, the manufacturing companies are compromising quality when they are doing mass production of things. So the things stop functioning very soon and sometimes the repair is costlier than the product. So, naturally, repair has taken a back seat.

The most serious effect of this phenomenon is on the environment. Our landfill sites are filling up with non bio-degradable wastes. It is also leading to pollution. Destroying used plastic is becoming a major problem everywhere. Even the recycling of plastic needs a lot of electricity. Conventional methods of generating electricity add to pollution. Disposing of a lot of waste materials such as heavy metals like lead and mercury and poisonous gases also adds to pollution. It is said that the earth can satisfy everybody’s need but not everybody’s greed. The amount of energy used in manufacturing and disposal of consumer goods is also leading us to a brink of energy crises.

To put it in a nutshell, I pen down saying that there are many causes and effects of this use and throw culture and steps must be taken on a war footing by the individual and government if we want to save our environment for our coming generations.