Is Your Next Purchase Designed for Landfill?

This morning, during a jog with my partner, we passed by a familiar scene: our street lined with bins waiting for collection. It’s a normal part of weekly life. But today, something about it struck me differently.

Maybe it was the quiet of the early morning, or the rhythm of our footsteps, but I found myself wondering—not just where those bins were going, but what they represented. Each bin, each bag, each bulging lid… behind them is a trail of choices we’ve made. Things we bought, things we used, things we threw away. And not just us. Everyone on this street. Everyone in every street. Every street at every corner of the planet.

And then this thought:

Every product has a beginning—but do we ever ask where it ends?

We live in a world dazzled by innovation. Every day, new products launch. Smarter gadgets. Shinier packaging. Lighter, stronger, more “sustainable” materials. We marvel at what they can do, how they’re made, the problem they claim to solve. But how many of us pause to ask: And then what?

What happens when the novelty fades? When that clever container cracks or the tech becomes obsolete? Where does it go?

We’ve normalised not knowing. Not because we don’t care—but because the system doesn’t ask us to. It’s designed for speed, not reflection. For upgrades, not outcomes. And so the things we discard vanish from view, quietly stacking into invisible mountains somewhere out of sight, out of mind.

That moment on the street reminded me: we each have our own invisible landfill trailing behind us. And it grows, item by item, with every “just this once” purchase, every convenient choice.

But I don’t say this to shame. I say it because it’s something I’m still working through myself. Even now, building a company like Echoing Green Earth, I catch myself falling for promising new tech and make compromise on this very question: Can this return to the earth? That question ought to be wired into every company’s product-development process.

We can blame the system for failing to give us straightforward paths to sustainable living—and that critique is fair. Yet, from a personal and household level, there's really something simple we can do: when we’re tempted by a new product, we can pause—just for a moment—and ask:

What happens at the end of its life? Will it live again as soil, or rest forever as waste?

It’s a simple question. But it might just change everything.