Waste Generation Quotes

The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral.

Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one had only to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use.

One of the problems with industrialism is that it's based on the premise of more and more. It has to keep expanding to keep going. More and more television sets. More and more cars. More and more steel, and more and more pollution. We don't question whether we need any more or what we'll do with them. We just have to keep on making more and more if we are to keep going. Sooner or later it's going to collapse. ... Look what we have done already with the principle of more and more when it comes to nuclear weapons.

There's an inherent contradiction between appreciating the beauty of clothes and creativity and individuality, and the waste around the ideas of trends and seasons.

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy.

The only thing to do is say, "If you generate it in your country, you take care of it.

Because America doesn't have a strong textile industry anymore, we have to bring things like fabrics, zippers, and color tape into the U.S., and having so many elements involved in production adds to the amount of waste. You might have some things coming from Italy, a button coming from China, or lining coming from Korea; it's just endless.

If they [the Federal government] can't handle the [toxic] waste, they shouldn't generate it.

The next step after cheap is free, and after free is disposable.

The U.S. population, a mere four or five percent of the world total, creates half the world's toxic waste.

The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

An awful lot of food is thrown away. This you can call a spillover. It doesn't sort of enter into our economic system because it's a consequence of running things in a highly competitive way: the free market, global pricing and so on.

Consumption may be regarded as negative production.

When you look at the sheer volume of paper usage in the U.S. alone, it's truly frightening: paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, writing paper. Our consumption of trees is endless.

I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.

We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms — from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing

It's amazing how many people you see on TV. I did my first television show a month ago, and the next day five million television sets were sold. The people who couldn't sell theirs threw them away.

Films go into vaults, art into museums, and music into halls of fame. Most fashion is worn for a few seasons and off-loaded into the recycling bin or, worse, some landfill.

When microorganisms die, they make oil; when huge timbers fall, they make coal. But everything here was pure, unadulterated rubbish that didn't make anything. Where does a busted videodeck get you?

In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.

To ensure the rapid absorption of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility, or forced obsolescence through frequent arbitrary changes of fashion. Without constant enticement and inveiglement by advertising, production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year

The film business creates a large amount of waste, and I'm not immune to waste in the business.