What's behind America's "love affair" with junk?
When Alison Stewart was cleaning out her parents' basement after their deaths, she was startled to find a "junk situation."
"They had just accumulated so much and I would tell people what I was doing and from the lady who did my nails to Bernie Madoff behind bars - everybody had a junk story," Stewart told "CBS This Morning" Friday. "And my reporter radar went up and I thought, 'What is going on in our world that we have this much stuff in the 21st century?'"
That was the catalyst for her three-year investigation of America's obsession with junk. As she details in her new book, "Junk: Digging Through America's Love Affair with Stuff," Stewart said the problem is the cause of a "mashup of generational issues."
"You have people like my folks who were born in 1929 who were taught to save. And then you have baby boomers who were taught to buy. And then also it became cheaper to buy new than to fix, and now you have the millennial... everything is on the phone and I share my cars," Stewart said.
As our junk pile grows, so too does the junk-removal industry. Stewart rode along with top junk-removal companies across the country -- including Trash Daddy, Annie Haul and Junk Vets - and found that Americans spend an enormous amount of money to remove junk from their homes. In fact, the industry is worth nearly $1.5 billion. In 2014, the Container Store brought in nearly $800 million in sales and there are more than two dozen reality TV shows starring junk.
In order to clean up the mess, Stewart advises that you begin by refraining from touching the items to prevent any emotional attachment, citing a "mug study" by scientists.
"They gave people a mug and once people held it, they didn't want to give it back as opposed to people who put the mug next to them," Stewart said.
Stewart also suggested that you seek junk professionals for help.
"A lot of the junk professionals will not say 'throw out' or 'trash.' They will say, 'let it go,'" Stewart said. "They want people to have some power over it. And the idea is as one told me, it is people are holding onto the memory, it's not the thing."