#landfill

From the article:

The project aims to plant 50,000 native violets over the next two years, with support from a grant awarded this year by the National Environmental Education Foundation to Freshkills Park Alliance. “Planting these violets is incredibly important to the ecosystem within Freshkills and also the region,” Mark Murphy, President of the Freshkills Park Alliance, said. “Our 2,200 acres of native grassland is not just a place of beauty, but a place of highly efficient carbon capture, of resilience, regrowth and environmental sustainability.” The violet project process began by removing invasive mugwort and Chinese bushclover from the grassland. The Greenbelt Native Plant Center team then tilled the soil and laid landscape fabric to prevent new invasive growth. [...] Over the next two years, the Freshkills Alliance science team will study the impacts of large-scale native violet planting. They will also reintroduce native pollinators to assess the success of the planting project and the challenges posed by global warming and the reduction of air safety regulations, Murphy shared.

So I really don’t know what exactly I did, but I was on Instagram and yo. Look, I wasn’t ever a fan of the "clean girl" trend, but I just found it fascinating how everyone’s ditching it for 2016 Zara Larsson coded makeup and outfits. Like good on you, but I was just thinking about what would happen to all the stuff from the clean girl era. I wanted to see whether certain aesthetics actually "die" or if we just stop talking about them. So I pulled Google Trends data. Then I checked resale markets. Then I made a spreadsheet.

I became slightly obsessed and turned it into a research question: How long does an aesthetic trend retains economic value after peak attention

If trends are accelerating, are they also collapsing faster? And if they are, what happens to all the stuff produced for them?

The Method

I picked three aesthetics:

Clean girl

E-girl

Cottagecore

For each one, I:

1. Mapped lifecycle phases using Google Trends

2. Identified peak attention

3. Took cross-sectional resale snapshots (30 items each, clothing only, no bundles, no joke prices)

4. Measured:

Median resale price

% under $15

Total listing volume

I treated resale value collapse as a proxy for economic devaluation.

Because once an item can't retain resale value, it's economically near-discard.

The Concept I Ended Up With

Economic Half-Life =

Months after peak attention until median resale price falls below $15.

Basically: how fast does a trend lose market survivability?

What I Found:

Cottagecore

Massive listing volume

73% under $15

Still huge resale presence years after peak

Long decay tail

E-girl

Peaked early (2021)

Lower listing volume

53% under $15

Slow bleed into low-value persistence

Smaller volume, but long persistence.

Clean girl

Slower rise (2022–2026)

Hit peak January 2026

83% under $15 almost immediately

Extremely tight price clustering (~$11)

This one collapsed economically almost instantly after peak attention.

Which suggests something new: Supply elasticity is now extremely high.

Production reacts so fast that by the time attention peaks, the market is already saturated.

I combined three proxies:

Share under $15 (value collapse)

Normalized listing volume (scale of material committed)

Post-peak persistence (how long low value lingers)

Cottagecore had the highest waste intensity

E-girl was persistent but smaller-scale waste

Clean girl had rapid short-term waste spike

The bigger pattern is that trend cycles are shortening.

Older trends take 12-18 months to collapse and ~1-3 years before resale value really died, but recent ones take 1-3 months to resale collapse and have under 6 months of survivability

Now because my entire page is about who profits and who holds risk, let’s analyze that real quick.

1. Platforms & influencers

Profit from attention velocity

Hold no inventory

2. Producers

Profit from volume

Offload surplus

3. Consumers

Absorb depreciation

Internalize resale failure

4. Secondary markets

Attempt to clear oversupply

Normalize ultra-low prices

Environmental systems absorb what markets can't, and economic devaluation precedes physical waste.

So what supreme is that trends behave like speculative assets. Early adopters extract symbolic and sometimes economic value, late adopters absorb depreciation, and platforms profit from volatility itself. As cycles shorten, the gap between profit extraction and waste generation widens. Costs move downward when move upward.

So what exactly I'm gonna do with this, I'm not sure. But I definitely want to expand because this is interesting, so here’s my very rough plan:

Expand to 10+ aesthetics

Build an Aesthetic Volatility Index

Stress-test the Economic Half-Life model

See whether post-2023 trends collapse nonlinearly faster

Anyway.

I’m hooked.

If you guys want, I'd really appreciate if you could recommend different aesthetics for me to do next, or tell me if you want a more in depth guide on how to do this yourself.

But anyway.

"The Netherlands is pulling even further ahead of its peers in the shift to a recycling-driven circular economy, new data shows.

According to the European Commission’s statistics office, 27.5% of the material resources used in the country come from recycled waste.

For context, Belgium is a distant second, with a “circularity rate” of 22.2%, while the EU average is 11.5% – a mere 0.8 percentage point increase from 2010.

“We are a frontrunner, but we have a very long way to go still, and we’re fully aware of that,” Martijn Tak, a policy advisor in the Dutch ministry of infrastructure and water management, tells The Progress Playbook. 

The Netherlands aims to halve the use of primary abiotic raw materials by 2030 and run the economy entirely on recycled materials by 2050. Amsterdam, a pioneer of the “doughnut economics” concept, is behind much of the progress.

Why it matters

The world produces some 2 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste each year, and this could rise to 3.4 billion tonnes annually by 2050, according to the World Bank.

Landfills are already a major contributor to planet-heating greenhouse gases, and discarded trash takes a heavy toll on both biodiversity and human health.

“A circular economy is not the goal itself,” Tak says. “It’s a solution for societal issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, and resource-security for the country.”

A fresh approach

While the Netherlands initially focused primarily on waste management, “we realised years ago that’s not good enough for a circular economy.”

In 2017, the state signed a “raw materials agreement” with municipalities, manufacturers, trade unions and environmental organisations to collaborate more closely on circular economy projects.

It followed that up with a national implementation programme, and in early 2023, published a roadmap to 2030, which includes specific targets for product groups like furniture and textiles. An English version was produced so that policymakers in other markets could learn from the Netherlands’ experiences, Tak says.

The programme is focused on reducing the volume of materials used throughout the economy partly by enhancing efficiencies, substituting raw materials for bio-based and recycled ones, extending the lifetimes of products wherever possible, and recycling.

It also aims to factor environmental damage into product prices, require a certain percentage of second-hand materials in the manufacturing process, and promote design methods that extend the lifetimes of products by making them easier to repair.

There’s also an element of subsidisation, including funding for “circular craft centres and repair cafés”.

This idea is already in play. In Amsterdam, a repair centre run by refugees, and backed by the city and outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, is helping big brands breathe new life into old clothes.

Meanwhile, government ministries aim to aid progress by prioritising the procurement of recycled or recyclable electrical equipment and construction materials, for instance.

State support is critical to levelling the playing field, analysts say...

Long Road Ahead

The government also wants manufacturers – including clothing and beverages companies – to take full responsibility for products discarded by consumers.

“Producer responsibility for textiles is already in place, but it’s work in progress to fully implement it,” Tak says.

And the household waste collection process remains a challenge considering that small city apartments aren’t conducive to having multiple bins, and sparsely populated rural areas are tougher to service.

“Getting the collection system right is a challenge, but again, it’s work in progress.”

...Nevertheless, Tak says wealthy countries should be leading the way towards a fully circular economy as they’re historically the biggest consumers of natural resources."

I will never ever stop hating them for obvious reasons ಠ⁠ಗ⁠ಠ