"The city of Leonia remakes itself every day: each morning its inhabitants wake between fresh sheets, wash with soap bars still warm from the wrapper, put on brand-new dressing gowns, take sealed tins from the most advanced refrigerator, and listen to the latest jingles from the newest model radio. On the sidewalks, wrapped in crisp plastic sacks, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck (...) The result is this: the more Leonia discards, the more it accumulates."
This is the "invisible city" invented by Italo Calvino—but how can we not see in it our own real cities today, where disposability has become the dominant mode of consumption?
Yet in nature nothing is created and nothing destroyed; everything transforms. The objects we buy, once thrown away as useless, do not vanish. They end up in landfills that degrade the land, poison the air, and contaminate groundwater. Or they go to incinerators, becoming toxic and carcinogenic smoke.
We cause further pollution in producing new objects to replace what we've discarded.
The logic of our throwaway civilization is deeply flawed—but not for everyone. Some profit handsomely. Manufacturers can ignore where their output ends up. Landfill and incinerator operators prosper the more waste we produce. The environment pays the price, degraded and poisoned. So do we—in health and in money (waste management consumes a fifth of municipal budgets).
And yet there is an alternative. We need only see the problem differently: treat what we call refuse not as trash, but as material that can be largely reused. Only then can we put development back on the right track—away from the reckless speed it travels today. Only then can we build a society with a future, for ourselves and for those who come after us.
— Marco Bersani, 2000
