There Is No “Away”: Life Inside a Throwaway System

There is no such thing as “away.”

When we throw something “away,” it does not disappear. It changes form. It fragments, degrades, disperses. It may leave our sight for years, even decades, but it does not leave our atmosphere, our water, our soil, or our ocean. We must fight this tyranny of trash: as Churchill said in “.... our beaches, and in our skies....we shall never surrender.

It comes back to us.

Not neatly. Not recognisably. Not as a single object you can point to and say, "That was mine”. It returns weathered by sun and salt and time, scattered across ecosystems like confetti from a celebration nobody intended to hold. Bottle caps. Polystyrene beads. Fishing line. Shards of packaging so degraded they are almost unidentifiable, except for one thing: they clearly do not belong there.

Some of it might once have been ours. Most of it wasn’t.

That is precisely the point.

The Throwaway System That Pretends Disposal Is the End

We have built an entire economic model around a comforting fiction: that disposal marks the end of responsibility.

Once something leaves our hands, into a bin, a lorry, a recycling system, a landfill, we are encouraged to believe it is no longer our problem. The mess is tidied. The inconvenience disappears. Responsibility is transferred.

But “away” is not a place. It is a story we tell ourselves.

When waste goes to a landfill, whether down the road or shipped across borders, the problem is not solved. It is relocated. Often into communities with less political power and fewer resources to resist it, such is modern-day colonialism.

For decades, this relocation has been called waste management.

Now we are living with the consequences. Across the UK and Europe, historic landfills, poorly documented, inadequately regulated, sometimes forgotten, are leaking into rivers, groundwater and coastlines. Materials once considered safely buried are breaking down into microplastics and chemical pollution that no clean-up can easily reverse.

This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a throwaway system designed to move waste out of sight, not out of existence.

Even When You Try, You Still Produce Waste

I make a significant effort to avoid plastic. I bring my own bags. I reuse containers. I compost food waste. I avoid over-packaged products wherever possible, even when it costs more or takes more time. I know that having the option to make these choices is itself a privilege.

And still, at the end of the week, I have rubbish that must be thrown “away.”

Because there is no way to participate in the modern economy without producing waste.

That is the uncomfortable truth we rarely say out loud.

The problem is not individual carelessness. It is a structural design.

Recycling Was Never Designed to Save Us

Recycling is often presented as the moral endpoint of consumption. If you recycle correctly, you have done your part. If you do not, the blame quietly shifts back to you.

But placing something in a recycling bin is still an act of disposal.

Consumers operate within extremely tight constraints. It is extraordinarily difficult, and in many cases functionally impossible, to buy everyday goods without plastic packaging. Food, toiletries, electronics, clothing, household goods, plastic is embedded into almost every purchase, not because consumers demanded it, but because it is cheap, light, versatile and profitable.

Recycling does not alter that reality.

At best, it slows the journey to landfill or incineration. At worst, it gives the illusion that the system is working while production continues to accelerate.

Responsibility is framed at the level of the household bin, rather than at the point of extraction, design and corporate decision-making.

Dig, Make, Dump, Repeat

More oil and gas are extracted to produce more plastic. More raw materials are mined to manufacture short-lived goods. More energy and infrastructure feed a consumption model that we already know is environmentally unsustainable.

Many products filling our homes today are destined for the landfill within months. Those that last longer often do so not because they were designed to endure, but because individuals repair what they can and lower expectations of quality.

This is not a failure of personal ethics.

It is a failure of design, policy and economic priorities.

Waste management has grown into a vast industry - one that depends on the continued production of waste to exist. That should give us pause.

When “Away” Comes Back

Plastic does not respect borders. It moves through rivers, coastlines and currents. It fragments as it travels, becoming harder to trace and eventually impossible to recover.

Polluted beaches are not the core problem.

They are evidence.

Sending material “away” does not remove it from Earth. It simply relocates it within a closed system. There is no external landfill for this planet.