Dead Sea consumerism

This weekend, my wife and I took our son for his first outing to a National Park. The logistical gymnastics of navigating a stroller, managing all of the baby-paraphernalia, and wrangling two basenji hounds bent on mischief meant that the camera stayed home on this jaunt.
In between seeing thistles and aster, watching half a dozen species of dragonflies and damselflies patrol the canal, and spotting a lizard I was taught to call a chameleon (but which is almost certainly actually some kind of skink), I saw a plastic toy floating in the water. Its owners lost interest almost immediately, and despite the fact that it would not have been an enormous effort to retrieve it, simply decided that it was a loss and moved on. When it finally washes up to a bank, someone will no doubt pick it up like the plastic litter I collected there yesterday, grumble about stupid yuppies leaving trash for others to deal with, and then blog about the indignity of the situation.
Having spent the last several months reading about the supply-chains for various toys, I began to think about the general flow of all of this stuff. It begins as some kind of petroleum source-product coming out of the Arabian Peninsula or its environs, or Canada or Brasil or Russia. Here and there it undergoes some intermediate processes of change and winds up in a factory in a boomtown in China. Manufactured bits are married to other manufactured bits, and they take a long trip to a port in the land of baseball and apple pie. The toy is loved or perhaps simply accepted for a brief time- it may enjoy a second life after a stint in a thrift store- before it finally winds up in a landfill.
What begins to emerge is a picture of products (and the raw materials and embodied energies thereof) following an economic path of least resistance until they reach the US. These products move like water flowing through a watershed, small streams coalescing into larger and larger ones, collectively moving toward the same end. Unlike a watershed, there’s little analogous to evaporation and transport, the processes that keep the water cycle- well- cycling. Instead, there’s a meandering line that ends just out of site from our homes, slightly mitigated by some recycling. Instead we’re simply accumulating waste and the long term costs of owning and caring for hoards of thrown-away junk. How long can we keep this up?