Thrift v. Waste

How Sweden Fixed my American Concept of Disposability Without Really Trying

A car much like my grandmother owned.

Our first apartment here was in a beautiful old building overlooking a tree-lined boulevard, one of the best addresses in Stockholm. It was only temporary, a six-month contact until we figured out what the hell we were doing. We rented it furnished because our stuff was in a container bobbling across the Atlantic. The only word I could offer to describe the decor was tragic. It was the worst interior I had ever seen. “Why do these people have such terrible taste?” my first guest asked, 90 seconds into her tour of the place. You couldn’t miss it. 

Among the apartment’s treasures was a leather couch in bright teal. The dog loved it but the rest of us steered clear. It was a tired, old thing. My husband had owned the same one in college and when he’d bought new in the ‘80s, he’d paid the equivalent of $150. A few months after we’d moved out and the landlord was selling the place, the teal couch appeared on a local buy-and-sell site. The asking price? The equivalent of $150. 

That took balls, I thought. Because a 40-year old couch doesn’t command the price it did when new. A couch isn’t an appreciating asset, like a dividend-paying stock or a private equity investment. Couches depreciate in value because people – and dogs– sit on them for years. So I knew I was dealing with some kind of cultural reality that was unknown to the American mind. I thought it was parsimony, but now I think it’s something else. 

I’d noticed around then a sea change in my habits. I had a new awareness of avoiding waste. I bought only enough fresh fruits and vegetables and never more than I needed, as I routinely did in the U.S. because what the hell? I didn’t buy a car even though it would have been nice, because I didn’t really need one. Public transportation was fine. I’d always recycled, but now that meant carting bags of glass and plastic over the ice to the public bins a few blocks away, which I did with dedication. I rarely bought new any more and started squeezing out the last few blobs of toothpaste and the very last drops of dishwashing soap. Nobody had sat me down and told me to do this. It was just in the air. 

For a non-rich Swede – which is to say most of them – to buy something is to make an investment. You are tacitly agreeing to love, honor and cherish this thing forever. You are promising to keep it free of damp and tarnish and disrepair, to faithfully take care of it in whatever way it needs, forever. To make a purchase is a serious undertaking. To waste is disrespectful and wrong and also disgusting. A Swede wouldn’t want to be perceived as rooting and snouting and grubbing, whereas historically, Americans don’t knock themselves out worrying about this. 

It’s a question of mindset. One of my Swedish friends reuses tea bags like it's 1943. When you buy herbs at the grocery store, you get the whole plant so you can keep it growing. And Swedes resell things that you wouldn’t piss on in the U.S., like unmatched lids and dented and dull aluminum cheese trays from the ‘30s. There’s an awareness of scarcity. At first, I thought it had something to do with Sweden’s very short growing season, in which no lingonberry goes unpicked. This far north, there’s not much time before it gets cold again. But now I think it comes from Europe’s history of war. Even though Sweden remained neutral for the last few big ones, the cultural memory persists here. There could be a time when there would not be enough.

My grandmother was a Depression-era baby and it left its mark. After a restaurant meal, by which I mean a meal at the diner or Luby’s, because that’s where we went, my vivacious, blue-haired granny would sweep into her purse whatever freebies she could get her hands on. Packets of mustard. Sweet’N Low. Mints. Salt and pepper. Anything. She left the straws and napkins, but if it was edible, it was going in. And this was no petite purse, but Mary Poppins sized. Outside in the parking lot under the broiling Texas sun, she’d do a quick perimeter check to make sure no one was watching, with an expression that I would describe as crafty. Then she’d transfer her swag to the trunk of her car, which was enormous and stuffed to the brim.

The size of my grandmother’s purse.

My seven-year old brain didn’t understand what she was doing. It was wrong to steal, I knew, but is it really stealing if it’s something that’s free, anyway? In any event, nobody needed 1,800 packets of ketchup, or 375 pods of single-serve Half & Half, especially out of the trunk of a car in the Texas summer, where internal air temperatures could exceed 170 degrees. Something mysterious was going on here. Now I know that if you grew up without enough food or feared that you wouldn’t have enough to eat, hoarding makes sense. If you have known scarcity, you never forget it.

I can’t think of many examples of thrift from my time in the U.S, although I understand this is changing fast. Traditionally, Americans chuck everything out when we’re done with it. Everything was perceived as pretty much disposable. We gobble and consume. It’s in the air. Before I moved to Stockholm, I arranged for an estate guy to come and take everything away from our huge house in Connecticut. I didn’t just give it away. I paid him to haul it off. And here are Swedes at the loppis, or flea markets, trying to sell a single coffee mug from 1954.

Some 20-odd years ago, I had the misfortune to have to drive past Staten Island’s Fresh Kills dump several times a week. For a long time, that’s where residential waste from New York City went. Fresh Kills closed in 2001, but before it did, it was the biggest landfill in the world, spanning more than 2,000 acres. It was bigger than Gibraltar. In fact, the archaeologist Martin Jones characterizes it as “among the largest man-made structures in the history of the world.”

I understand why: It’s stuffed with all of my Garanimals from the ‘70s. My big sister’s macrame bikini is in there, and my little sister’s Fisher Price Play Family Farm Set. There must be small mountains of Folger coffee grinds and empty cans of Minute Maid frozen orange juice concentrate and shards of Corning Ware casserole dishes. So much iceberg lettuce and so many beaded curtains and shag carpets and eight-track tape players. And, maybe, if the world is going the way I think it is, the idea of waste is buried there, too.