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It's not really relevant, but I'm having a hard time picturing a household that consumes 200 unique items every week. Must be pretty fancy.



Try to think of a house using ingredients and some portion of 200 complete items.

Also the odd item you occasionally need when something goes out of stock locally (like a trash bag, clothing reaches end of useful life etc).


200 unique items is just a basic house. You are forgetting all the essential products used to operate said house as well as all the family members inside, plus pets. 200 is average.


Well the number was pulled out of the air, but you don’t think a family of four has 200 distinct items in their trash + recycling every week?


Durable goods would take that number way up from 200 for an average US family.


After I posted I had the same thought. But then I realized that durable goods from a store usually come in packaging, so measuring outgoing material isn’t as inaccurate as it sounds as first.

Most of us are really pretty bad at tracking our purchases. We don’t want to look at them because it means admitting we have a problem. But we know the trash is full all the time and don’t think about how that correlated with consumption. Basically I was trying to trick people into an honest conversation about something nobody likes to be honest about.

And at any rate if the quantity is “more than 200” then it just reinforces GGP’s point.




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