Another Rant

Sometimes I come home and find unusual things sitting on a bench in our garage - jackets that don't belong to anyone in the family; a pair of child-sized hiking boots; men's slacks that are too large for my son or my husband. I know immediately who put them there and where they came from - my husband found them in our local rural dumpster. All of these items are perfectly fine, just someone outgrew them or got tired of wearing them. My gripe is that they are so casually thrown out during a time when places like Goodwill are begging for donations. I have a friend who knows someone who throws away all of her clothes, every year, and buys new ones; same with her child's toys. This isn't a woman who has a six-figure income (not that it would be ok in that case either). She is a single mother who works in a factory. What has happened to our society? It seems we've gone beyond the concept of planned obsolescence. It's bad enough that we have to dispose of our electronics because they no longer work with current technology or because it's cheaper to buy than to fix. Now we just get tired of something and into the trash it goes. What makes me sadder is that rescuing perfectly good items from the dumpster is actually illegal! Let's put on our thinking caps and come up with some solution to this crazy problem.