Overview
Our society currently encourages production for planned obsolescence and repeated purchase of single-use items, especially paper and plastic packaging, followed by disposal. This pattern has become so normalized in our consumer-product-driven economy that we no longer notice it nor consider its consequences.
I want my students to become aware of how much stuff they routinely throw away. I want them to consider the accumulated effects of a society that throws away so much stuff. How much garbage do we really produce each year? Is that rate constant increasing, or decreasing? Where can we put all our garbage? What happens to those items that we throw away over time? How are we affected by the chemical residues, by-products, and breakdown products of our trash and industrial processes? How do we use calculus to compute cumulative exposure? What are the health effects of cumulative exposure to these substances?
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