Our Legacy as Consumers

It’s been in the news here. The world’s oceans are full of plastic, and the problem is growing. Scientists are just starting to realize how big this problem really is.

Plastic is not biodegradable and doesn’t break down in the environment, all it does is break apart into smaller and smaller pieces, so called ‘Mermaid’s Tears’. Sand nearly everywhere in the world has been found to contain particles of plastic. These particles are eaten by marine animals and enter the food chain.

Kate just posted on the plastic soup floating in the Pacific Ocean that continues to grow. Some of this is consumer waste, but a lot of it is intentional or accidental dumping by the manufacturers or shipping companies. After all, when the Exxon Valdez sank it was big news, but when is the last time you heard of a cargo ship losing it’s load of plastic?

We all know when we buy something it has to be disposed of eventually, using landfill space or polluting the environment.

What about the other legacies?

I recently came across a series of websites or people’s Flickr accounts giving information and pictures about abandoned buildings or other structures. Apparently there’s a real following of people for this kind of thing. One that I found most interesting was the Dixie Square shopping mall in Harvey, Illinois, about a 25 minute drive from Chicago, abandoned in 1978 and still standing. This is the mall where the Blues Brothers movie was filmed.

The mall is standing there empty because there’s no money to tear it down, and no one wants to reuse the site for anything else. The empty mall now sits in the middle of an economically depressed area.

This isn’t the only abandoned mall! Here’s a website that tracks abandoned malls and bankrupt retailers. The Dixie Square mall is a little unusual, because most abandoned sites get demolished or refurbished and used for something else, usually bigger and better. What happens when they day comes when the economy can’t support building something bigger and better? Just what exactly is going to happen to all of these big box stores when big boxes aren’t needed anymore? Will something bigger and better take their place? Will we be able to continue expanding our economies at this rate after Peak Oil? Will we find some other way to ‘recycle’ this infrastructure?

Malls aren’t the only thing abandoned. Other sites include this amusement park (also here), London’s abandoned tube stations or numerous places in the former USSR.

Of course there are any number of scenarios for the future, not all of them bad, but seeing pictures of all of this abandoned infrastructure has really made me think about some of them.

7 Replies to “Our Legacy as Consumers”

  1. you two are from the midwest, so chances are you’ve been to places like gary and detroit and other towns where “the money runs out” and no one is left to tear down the mall. they will get reused, in one way or another. it seems mostly a question of community will. communities can and do have the right to dictate what happens to things that sit for too long “unused” by “legitimate” enterprise. those communities where people care to see these spaces become productive, do so, make them so. i’ve done some community zoning type stuff, and it’s easier than you think to have influence, esp in number.

    the trick is to have a friendly legal team ready to ‘wear them out’ in court. when wal-mart wants to ruin some wetland with an expanded parking lot, they know they are mostly/usually/already breaking the rules and laws to do that. how they do so has to do with deep legal pockets- most townships and communities can’t afford the legal onslaught that a walmart sized corporation can bring on. but in communities that are willing to “go the mile,” there are ways to reclaim that space you mention in this post.

    as time passes, that process will only get easier, for us greenies.

  2. Thanks for brightening my day Patrick. Did you watch the nice little video clip I put on the same post? That brought so many tears to my eyes I couldn’t even watch the rest of it! And I still haven’t but I know its there when I need it.

  3. Patrick,

    While I’m not surprised places like this exist, this was a very striking post. I haven’t been taken aback by something that really makes me think in a while, but this sure did it.

    Wow.

  4. I’m sorry everyone, it wasn’t my intention to give people nightmares… I’ll try to find some happier things to post about for a while.

    And yes, the video in Kate’s post is worth watching! I’ve heard about that family in Pasadena before, and I think they have a website too.

  5. Often I wish I could live in Ignorant Bliss! It is a very (superficially) happy place, I hear.It is hard to do justice to really important big things and be skippity-doo about little things, sometimes. Don’t stop informing us Patrick.

  6. Chidy is on to something. There is a motion (bill? whatever) in Cleveland city council to allow them to purchase abandoned/foreclosed homes for the princely sum of $1 each. They’re modeling it on a similar law elsewhere in the midwest–Detroit, I think.

    I’d have to do some digging to get the parameters that are needed for such a sale, but basically its purpose is to allow the city to buy the homes for cheap and instead spend the money to raze them if need be. And usually, by the time they’ve sat unoccupied for as long as they have to, to qualify for this kind of a sale, they have burst pipes, are stripped by looters of metal and anything else of value, and the only thing left is to raze them and turn them into green space.

    If it could work for residential properties, why not for commercial properties as well?

  7. It’s really sad to think of that happening to people’s homes. First lose your home because you can’t afford it anymore, then have the city tear it down because no one else wants it. There’s something wrong there.

    I guess the point I was trying to make in this post is it can be really expensive to tear down a building. In Amsterdam for example, disposing of a small debris box or skip with construction waste costs about €500 (at current rates US$750 or so). An average size house could easily fill 20 or more of these, or the equivalent. On top of this you have to pay labor and for the demolition equipment, this in addition to special disposal of any asbestos or toxic materials. Demolishing a house probably starts at $20,000 and can be much higher. A shopping mall could easily reach into millions of dollars.

    These costs are very energy dependent, so as the price of oil goes up so will these costs.

    Beyond the costs, all the material has to go somewhere! It can be very hard to recycle this kind of thing, and in some areas landfill space is at a real premium.

    The day may really come where it’s beyond the means of even governments to pay for this kind of disposal, and there may simply not be enough landfill space to accommodate it. If this happens, the buildings will end up just abandoned in place. I don’t think anyone is really giving this possibility much thought.

    In my mind this seems a likely scenario, especially in the US where there is so much of this kind of infrastructure.

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