Essay: Consumerism

Consumerism is starting to be a big problem, because a lot of us buy things just to buy them, not because we need them. It is very bad for the environment that we are buying more things than we need. Every time we buy something we don’t need it impacts the environment negatively. Another problem whit consumerism is that the stores throw out a lot of food they can’t sell but the food is not that bad, so you can still eat it. All the food the stores can’t sell just end in the dumpster.
There are starting to be groups of people that try to stop the gigantic food waste, they take the good food from the stores dumpsters. The people that take food from the stores dumpsters are called freegans. The word freegans comes from free food and vegetarian. The freegans only eat food from the dumpsters, and they get more than enough food. The freegans gets so much food from the dumpsters that they can give some of the food to the people in the subway. The freegans are not homeless or poor people, some of the freegans are high educated, so the freegans don’t do it because of the money they save, they do it because they care about the environment. There are more and more people that live the freegan lifestyle, and it is no longer in the biggest cities there are freegans. Today there are freegans all over the USA that is because the increasing focus on the environment and more and more people want to help the environment.
A lot of non-freegans says that they would never eat food from a dumpster because you can never know how long the food had been in the dumpster, and there are a lot of bugs and bacterial in a dumpster. To this the freegans says that he had never been food poisoned as a freegan, but people pay money to go to a restaurant and then they get food poisoned.
There are also other ways you can live if you don’t want to be a freegan. The no impact man and his family tried live their lives so they have no impact on the environment a whole year. They only buy food from the season and only local food, and then it doesn’t have to be transported from somewhere long away. And then they have eaten the food, every single that could be composted was getting composted, for nothing should go to waste. Then they have to go from one place to another, then either walk or take the bicycle. They also stopped using the elevator, so now they only use the stairs. They didn’t use toilet paper that whole year, because toilet paper is bad for the environment. In their apartment they don’t use any form of electricity so they could not use the TV or their phones and because of that the family was forced to be more together, which they see as a good thing. Another thing they didn’t do was to buy new things. All the stuff they bought was second hand stuff, because when they buy second hand stuff, there don’t have to be a produced of new things, and that’s very good for the environment.
After living a year like this, they could feel some grains, they had lost weight, because of healthier food, they have become greener, saved money and got happier because of more family time. And because of all the good things they had expired, they now recommend it to everyone else. On their website they have a guide to be a no impact man, but the guide is a little more simply than the project they have lived for a whole year.
So these two groups are a good example of the situation we are in, the environment is getting worse and worse, but there are also more and more people that there are trying to do something about it.