Garbage.

Editor,

As Heather Rogers points out in "Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage," planned obsolescence drives the consumer society -- and 70% of the struggling American economy -- no less in fashion than in every other product realm.

A crucial problem for capitalism, leaving its inherent inequities aside, is that growth, upon which leverage and investment depend, is antithetical to sustainability, in the sense of a steady state where products are repairable and built to last.

Growth, in addition to squandering energy and other resources, creates pollution that a sustainable economy would not, the most obvious example being garbage if you visit the places where what you put in the garbage can winds up.

Re: "Shoppers on a ‘Diet’ Tame the Urge to Buy" (7/22/2010)