A while back I talked about society’s obsession with efficiency. Over the last few days I’ve been witness to something quite opposite. At least I would call it opposite, what is after all the opposite of efficient? Waste.
The waste comes in the form of some sort of renovation or cleaning of student apartments. The process seems simple enough. A large waste bin is placed below the window of a given apartment and two burly men go into the place and start throwing everything out into the bin below. By everything I mean everything that isn’t screwed or nailed down.
The waste is the fact that most of the items being discarded are in relatively good shape, some are in excellent shape. I’m not certain why they don’t send the things to thrift shops. One of my roommates (a questionable source for any discussion) claims it’s because the immigrants began to fight over the free stuff that was waiting for pick up and so the decision was put forth to simply trash it all. The logic of that escapes me somewhat as does the reasoning of why you’d throw it out instead of giving it to a thrift agency. You save costs on landfill, transport, and the more elusive to quantify benefit of having a furnished population. The Norwegian state does after all provide for it’s people quite well and money that is going into new furnishings could go elsewhere if perfectly good furniture wasn’t being tossed in the landfill but instead given to less well off citizens.
It’s going on and it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.