Wall-E Environmental Issues

Despite taking place in a space utopia for a large part of the movie, WALL-E sheds a darker undertone of consumerism, human environmental impact, and global catastrophic risk that society should take into consideration in order to prevent a total wasteland scenario. The consumerism in apocalyptic works such as WALL-E reflects that of Earth. The people in WALL-E have accumulated piles and piles of trash due to their greedy wasteful nature. There is so much waste that it even orbits around the earth itself. The people of earth today follow this same pattern as well.

This is what seems to have happened in the case of Wall-E as the company Buy-N-Large is hinted at being the reason the earth in Wall-E has fallen into ruin. The company itself reflects

In the year 2013, Americans alone produced about 254 million tons of trash. Out of this huge amount of waste only about 34.3% of it was actually recycled, which equals about 87 million tons. The other 167 was used to fill up landfills and there is only so much room on earth left for this garbage to go. There is also the issue of littering that is not accounted for. The total amount of garbage that is dumped into the ocean annually adds up to 9 billion tons. This is ruining the habitats of the marine life and contaminating the water. The fault of this lies on everyone on Earth. 75% of people admitted that they littered in the past 5 years. There is even a garbage island floating in our ocean, mostly comprised of plastics.

Manufacturing is the powerhouse of the world economy and more is produced each day to suit the needs of the people. To keep up with this mass production, companies create products of usable but low quality. They gain more money by doing this instead of selling long-lasting products, which although would be convenient for the customer, the person selling would have a much harder time making money for themselves. People then throw away the finished product after it has ran out of use and accumulate mass amounts of