Presently, some people are using things shortly before throwing them away. This phenomenon is called a “throw-away” society and has been noticed in a few countries. The causes behind it might be the decreased cost of production, combined with increased expectations of life quality. As a result of their decisions to throw things out quickly, members of “throw-away” society save time, while using up production resources rapidly and polluting the environment with litter.
The first reason why people choose to throw away things after a shord period of usage is the fact that it is faster and cheaper to buy replacements than to fix old things, especially clothes. As the pace and volume of industrial production has been growing over the recent decades, clothes, gadgets, furniture and electronics grew cheaper and often not worth the time and effort required to repair them. For example, it is cheaper to buy a new T-shirt than to spend time and money on tailoring an old one. The other reason is the pursuit of high-quality things. People usually want to wear newest clothes that look fresh, use electonics that work perfectly. The mentioned new T-shirt will look considerably better than one that has been worn for a long time.
The consequnces are rather positive in short-term, while negative in long-term for modern people. It is very comfortable to renew things after using them shortly, because it requires almost no effort. If people had less opportunity to spend so much money to buy things without enough justification, they would have to spend a lot of time on fixing things, which requires certain skills that have to be learned patiently. Despite increasing comfort, this approach may quickly use up production resources and raw materials: when the demand is high, a high pace of production must be maintained constantly. Moreover, large amounts of litter are a natural result of throwing things out regularly. This behaviour on a worldwide scale markedly pollutes the environment.
In general, the phenomenon of a “throw-away” society may be considered a marker of an increased quality of life in some countries. In a pursuit to own the best and newest things, people may be tempted to throw out those that have been used for only a short time. Such behaviour on a large scale can be dangerous for the environment: raw materials may be used quickly and the environment can get polluted with litter.