(V):

Consumer capitalism has fallen into a system of discardable items that are meant to last for a few years. In that way consumers must constantly keep replacing what they buy every few years.

If we go back a few years, say the 1970s, people would have thought it was stupid to buy a piece of electronics (like a calculator) only to replace it or throw it away in two or three years. Now we routinely buy cell phones, MP3 players, etc., and we know that after two or three years they will be "obsolete".

There was a time when people would reuse everything. My grandmother would wash plastic bags and reuse them over and over until they were in tatters and could not be used any more.

15 years ago a computer would cost $3000-4000 (at least 2000 pounds in the UK). If you had told those consumers that their computer would be obsolete in six months, they would have refused to buy them. Now computers are cheap and there are so many old computers that we don't know what to do with all that plastic.

Plastic windows became popular (at least here in Canada) because they are more energy efficient. Plastic is a poor transmitter of heat compared to metal, so in our cold weather plastic windows make sense. However, they last less. It used to be that brick and mortar was the preferred way to build homes. Here in Canada the construction industry shifted to plywood and particle board. It is more energy efficient, but after 30 or 40 years homes literally fall apart. Brick lasts centuries. Companies like Home Depot have made billions by convincing home owners to replace or renovate homes with materials that will need to be replaced in a few years.

I think it is environmentally unsustainable. The more garbage we make, the more pressure there will be to find a place to put that garbage. Shipping it to India might be OK for industrialized nations trying to sweep the problem under the carpet, but sooner or later all that garbage will come back to haunt everyone, just like Radon gas in homes built over covered landfills.