I was going to write a post about a Disposable Society...but I found these interesting facts about our Society's current consumerism trends....
Did You Know...?
1. There are 300,000 items in the average American home (LA Times).
2. The average size of the American home has nearly tripled in size over the past 50 years (NPR).
3. 1 out of every 10 Americans rent offsite storage—the fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades. (New York Times Magazine).
4. 25% of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside them and 32% only have room for one vehicle. (U.S. Department of Energy).
5. The average 10-year-old owns 238 toys but plays with just 12 daily (The Telegraph).
6. 3.1% of the world’s children live in America, but they own 40% of the toys consumed globally (UCLA).
7. The average American woman owns 30 outfits—one for every day of the month. In 1930, that figure was nine (Forbes).
8. The average American family spends $1,700 on clothes annually (Forbes).
9. The average American throws away 65 pounds of clothing per year (Huffington Post).
10. Some reports indicate we consume twice as many material goods today as we did 50 years ago (The Story of Stuff).
11. Americans spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches ($100 billion) than on higher education (Psychology Today).
12. Shopping malls outnumber high schools. And 93% of teenage girls rank shopping as their favorite pastime (Affluenza).
13. Over the course of our lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours or 153 days searching for misplaced items.The research found we lose up to nine items every day—or 198,743 in a lifetime. Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork top the list (The Daily Mail).
14. The $8 billion home organization industry has more than doubled in size since the early 2000’s—growing at a staggering rate of 10% each year (Uppercase).
So, that said...
Which of these above mentioned facts can you work on so you and your family aren't just another contributor to these statistics?
*These facts taken from www.becomingminimalist.com
Ouch! Time to purge, purge, purge! We have too much coming into our house, and too little leaving it!
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