It is often said that social networks know everything about us. They are not the only ones. Detailed information about our diet, our routines, our social life, our consumption habits and even our vision of the world can be extracted from the rubbish bin. Our residues allow us to draw conclusions that are apparently contrary to common sense, such as this one, already stated in the 1970s by the archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Arizona, William Rathje: in times of scarcity is when the most is wasted.
Rathje, father of an unusual scientific discipline baptized as basurology, documented that, in the midst of a beef shortage, in 1974, “three times more meat was thrown away than in times of abundance”. Something similar happened the following year with the consumption of sugar, which was accumulated and wasted in American homes, coinciding with a period in which its price doubled. The archaeologist devoted a substantial part of his career to promoting the Garbage Project (Garbage Project, as if it were a dysfunctional superhero command), an attempt to deduce behavior patterns in human societies from what can be found in their landfills. To Rathje we owe such significant findings as that the city of New York has risen about two meters since its foundation due to the accumulation of waste or that 13% of the total volume of garbage generated in Western cities is newsprint.
If this insightful pioneer were still active (he died in 2012), today he would be confirming the extent to which the current supply crisis generated by the pandemic and aggravated by the war in Ukraine has confirmed the perverse correlation between scarcity and waste. Albert Vinyals, university professor and expert in consumer psychology, confirms that the story told by the rubbish bin is as true as it is human: “It has to do with an impulse derived from the survival instinct. It leads us to stockpile products that are in short supply or we anticipate will be in short supply, but that we do not regularly consume.”
It is not even a question of speculative practices, of accumulating a certain product to do business with it in the medium term. “That would be perhaps perverse behaviour, but with a rational basis”, explains Vinyals, “but what is taking place in practice are compulsive buying processes that respond to a state of induced panic”.
About a quarter of the sunflower oil imported into Spain comes from the Ukraine. “This is a significant amount, and it is perfectly logical and understandable that the Russian invasion is translating into a brake on imports and the consequent stock breaks,” says Vinyals. What is no longer so rational is that “demand for this product skyrockets among people who do not consume it regularly, so that scarcity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” As a consequence of overbuying processes without logical basis like this, there is a tendency to waste more food than in normal circumstances because “the compulsive buyer finds himself with a product that he does not like, that he does not need or that he has hoarded without taking into account factors such as expiration date. Consequently, part of what is accumulated ends up in the rubbish bin.
“Most of our purchasing decisions are emotionally based,” says Vinyals. That makes us vulnerable, as the expert explains, “to the suggestion generated in us by the so-called ad populum fallacies, generalized and trivial points of view that we take for granted without real reflection.” If we hear that a product is going to be scarce in the medium term, as happened with toilet paper in the first days of confinement, we tend to hoard it.
Vinyals concludes that these punctual dysfunctions tend to be corrected as soon as the collective intelligence (and, consequently, the individual intelligences) gets used to the new situation and returns to its consumption patterns. “I do not dispute that in these circumstances of war there may be an objective problem of supply, but I wonder what would happen if people took these predictions literally, informed themselves about the large number of products derived from these cereals that exist and begin to accumulate them to the same extent that sunflower oil has accumulated.” Rathje has the answer: if something like this happened, the landfills of our cities would be filled with corn derivatives.
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