Where does this fit in?

This is a disassembled Braun OxyJet oral irrigation and electric toothbrush base unit. You can see the transformer which is very heavy because if its iron core. You can see the motor for the water pump for the irrigator, the pump unit, and the tubes for the water. You can see the large pieces of plastic housing, the AC cord, and other parts.

Most people don’t disassemble their electric appliances when they get rid of them. To disassemble this I needed a special type of 5-sided drive bit to remove the housing screws, something most people almost certainly won’t have in their homes.

This big thing of mostly plastic and metal gets thrown into a garbage bin then transported to a landfill where it sits and (hopefully) breaks down over many, many years. Because landfills are so compacted the process of natural breakdown is actually significantly inhibited. The flow of water and the ability of sunlight and even air to access the parts is restricted. It would just sit there for a very long time. How long? It would be interesting to know to what extent anyone even knows or cares about this.

My hope in breaking this appliance down – as I tend to do with all appliances that I must discard – is that the components will be processed as recycling.

But what happens to the vast amounts of ‘waste’ that gets dumped into landfills? What happens to these landfills over time?

Something is very wrong, is very sick with a society that does this. In a wholesome society this would never happen – if only because it doesn’t need to happen. There’s no reason that these vast monstrosities that are landfills need to be occurring except because humans don’t give a fuck.

Everything that humans create we have the ability to process appropriately. But we fail to do this. What the fuck is this?

This is the big question. Because while some people get stuck on things like justifying the existence of ‘capitalism’ – put in quotes here because I refer more to the process of people referring to what is conceived as capitalism than to whatever capitalism actually might be – what this waste, misuse, and abuse is is another thing.

What is the nature of capitalist activity such that this waste and abuse occurs? Or is the waste and abuse related to something else? Perhaps it relates to a mode of demanding out of the material world by humans in order to serve their wants. Is such a mode ‘capitalism’? Or is it something else?