Yet even with the horrible working conditions and starvation wages, the women feared losing their jobs, because they had no other opportunities. One told me that working for Disney allowed them to starve slowly, which was better than a quick starvation. The women wanted fair pay for a fair day’s work. They wanted us to use our voice as U.S. consumers and citizens to pressure Disney into improving the wages and living conditions for the workers, so they could have a healthy, decent life. They wanted to be safe, be able to drink water when hot, and to be free from sexual harassment. The mothers wanted to come home early enough to see their children before bedtime and to have enough food to feed them a solid meal when they woke. Since that visit, I’ve never been able to look at Disney products without thinking of the women of Port-Au-Prince.
In August 2009, Etienne e-mailed me to say, “The working conditions have not changed much in the industrial park in PauP [Port au Prince]. We are still fighting for the same changes and now the battle for an increase of the minimum wage is waging fiercely.”29 It’s been nineteen years since I first met the determined organizer and she is still fighting for worker rights in Haiti. In August 2009, the Haitian government did increase the minimum wage, but it still fell short of the five dollars a day that many workers were demanding. The new minimum wage is three dollars and seventy-five cents a day.30 A day! Three dollars and seventy-five cents for a full day sewing our T-shirts and jeans and pajamas.
Back to my T-shirt: a final impact to consider is its carbon dioxide (CO2) footprint, or its contribution to climate change. To grow the cotton for just my one shirt, about 2 pounds of CO2 are generated—to make petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides, and for the electricity used in pumping irrigation water. The cleaning, spinning, knitting, and finishing processes add another 3 pounds. So in total my little T-shirt generates about 5 pounds of CO2. That’s before it gets transported to and from the store and then gets washed and dried over its lifetime, which at least doubles its carbon footprint.31
When I visited the website of the clothing company Patagonia recently, it allowed me to calculate the footprints of several of their items, including one of their organic cotton T-shirts. The site told me where “nearly half” of the cotton came from (Turkey); that’s a long way away. The next stop listed was Los Angeles, for knitting, cutting, and sewing in one factory and dyeing in another, using oil-based dyes, some of which are not PVC free. Patagonia explains: “Although plant-based dyes would seem to be more environmentally benign, they can be hard to harvest in sufficient quantity for commercial use. Plant-based dyes often lose their colorfastness after very few washings.” Then the shirt was driven up to their distribution center in Reno, Nevada. According to their calculations, Patagonia’s T-shirt travels about 7,840 miles and generates 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide, even before it gets sent to your local store.32
Now, I don’t mean to imply that organic cotton T-shirts (and other clothes) aren’t worth the extra dollars you’ll likely need to spend on them. Organic cotton avoids the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which avoids the carbon involved in making those chemicals, keeps the groundwater and soil cleaner, and safeguards the health of animals and humans (farmworkers, residents of neighboring communities, and consumers). Organic farmers claim that the healthier soil (with the aerating services of earthworms that have not been killed by chemicals) causes less water to be lost in runoff, although biotech proponents say their genetically modified crops use less water. Factories like the ones Patagonia uses for the spinning, weaving, and sewing processes are at the forefront of energy conservation and also minimize toxic runoff. And if you see a fair trade logo, it means that the cotton farmers got fairer prices and the fabric workers got better than sweatshop conditions and were compensated more fairly than the women I met in Haiti.
For all these reasons, organic and fair trade cotton products are the better choice. But the best choice of all? Cherish the T-shirt you have. Wear it and care for it with the same persevering love you have for an heirloom piece of jewelry. Resist the urge to replace it with the newest color or neckline. I keep my T-shirts until they’re too worn to wear even to the gym, and then I turn them into rags. It’s what my grandparents did, and it’s good enough for me. Because even though the price tag said $4.99, or even $12.99 at Patagonia, that doesn’t come close to reflecting all the hidden costs of one plain white cotton T-shirt.
A Book
I have shelves and shelves of books. An entire wall in my bedroom is books. I have books on the kitchen counter, books spilling off my daughter’s shelves, books piled by the unused fireplace. Books occupy an odd space in my relationship to Stuff: while I feel uncomfortable buying new clothes or electronics, I don’t hesitate to pick up the latest recommended title. I asked my friends about it and found I’m not alone in feeling like books are somehow exempt from the negative connotations of too much Stuff. Do we feel the value of knowledge and creativity embodied by a book justifies its footprint? Do we just not think about the footprint? In writing this book, I realized that I knew far more about the environmental and health threats of my laptop, cell phone, or even my T-shirts than I did about the far more numerous books in my household. So I was eager to find out how books are produced.
Today, when we think of paper, we think of it coming from trees. However, paper has only been made from wood pulp since the 1850s.33 Before then—and still to some extent today—paper was made from agricultural crops like hemp and bamboo, and from rags and old textiles. The word “paper” comes from the Greek word (papyros) for papyrus, a writing material they developed by mashing strips of the papyrus plant. The first known piece of paper was made almost two thousand years ago by a Chinese court official, Ts’ai Lun, who used mulberry bush fiber, old fishing nets, hemp, and grass. In the fifteenth century, some books were printed on parchment, which is made from the specially prepared skin of sheep or goats, or on vellum, made of calfskin. It took the skins of three hundred sheep to print one Bible back then. Later, in the sixteenth century, cloth rags and linen were also frequently used as the fiber in papermaking.34 It wasn’t until much later—around the mid-nineteenth century—that large-scale wood pulp processing was developed, allowing trees to become the primary source for fiber with which to make paper, and hence books. (Not every book today is made from plant fibers: One exception is Bill McDonough’s book Cradle to Cradle, which was printed on plastic. E-books, of course, aren’t printed at all.) Paper can also be made from previously used paper. That’s recycling.
During all these hundreds of years, the basic steps of papermaking have remained the same. The fiber is mashed, flattened, and dried, and presto, you have paper. It’s not unlike art projects I do with my daughter where we put old paper, flower petals, and wrapping paper scraps in the blender with water, whir it up, pour the slurry onto a window screen, squish it flat, and lay it in the sun to dry. Just four categories of ingredients are needed: fiber, energy, chemicals, and water.
But this simple list is a little bit misleading. First, of course, there’s the problem of deforestation (see chapter 1 on extraction), including the less visible form of deforestation in which natural forests are replaced with plantations. Today, nearly half of the trees cut in North America go to making paper for everything from newsprint to packaging to stationery.35 Each year, about 30 million trees are used to make books sold in the United States.36 To give you a visual, there are about 26,000 trees in Central Park,37 so to make our books we use more than 1,150 times that number. Papermaking also uses vast amounts of energy and is among the top five emitters of greenhouse gases of all manufacturing industries.38 It requires huge amounts of water and toxic chemicals, which get mixed and released together into the environment.
No matter which source you start with—virgin trees, managed forests, agricultural crops, or recovered paper—part of the substance is useful and part is not. The desired part is the fiber. What are not wanted are the lignin, sugars, and other compounds found in wood and other plants.
If the source is paper that’s being recycled, then most of the lignin is already removed, but the inks, staples, perfume inserts, and other contaminants have to be taken out.39 Unfortunately, each time the paper goes through this process, the fibers get worn down and shortened, so they can’t be recycled more than a handful of times.
The process of separating the useful fibers from the unwanted parts is called pulping. There are two main technologies used to make pulp: mechanical and chemical. Mechanical pulping involves chopping, grinding, or mashing the source material to separate the cellulose fibers from other compounds. Mechanical pulping is twice as efficient as chemical pulping, but the resulting fibers are short and stiff, which limits their use to a lower quality paper, mostly for newsprint, telephone directories (when was the last time you needed one of these?), and packaging.40
Chemical pulping, the more widespread process, takes chemicals, heat, and pressure to separate the fibers. More chemicals are used later in the process as dyes, inks, bleach, sizing, and coatings. “The art of modern papermaking lies in the specialty chemicals used,” explained one chemical journalist. “Like spices for food, they give the paper that certain something.”41 And as paper use goes up, so does demand for those chemicals used in production. In the United States, the demand for chemicals for pulp and paper production is projected to reach 20 billion tons in 2011, with the chemicals valued at $8.8 billion.42
The most notorious and controversial chemical used in papermaking is chlorine, which is added to help with the pulping and also to bleach the paper. By itself, chlorine is a powerful toxin—so toxic that it was used as a weapon in the First World War. But when chlorine gets mixed with organic compounds (those that contain carbon)—which, in a slush made of mashed plants, happens a lot—the chlorine bonds with them to create nearly a thousand different organochlorines, including the most toxic persistent pollutant in existence, dioxin.43 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have both confirmed that dioxin causes cancer.44 It’s also linked to endocrine, reproductive, nervous, and immune system damage45—which really don’t seem worth it for having white paper. Me, I’d take slightly brown—or tree colored—paper over carcinogens any day.
In Europe, much of the paper—from toilet paper to book pages—is off-white in color. Many of their paper mills have switched to totally chlorine free (TCF) processes, using oxygen or ozone and hydrogen peroxide instead of chlorine to bleach paper.46 In the United States and Canada, many of our mills prefer elemental chlorine free (ECF) processing, which replaces chlorine gas with chlorine derivatives, such as chlorine dioxide. True, this beats dousing our paper with chlorine gas, and it reduces dioxin formation by about half. But any amount of dioxins is too much, even a speck. So TCF is definitely preferable. There is one last variation on the chlorine front: processed chlorine free (PCF) refers to paper made from recycled paper sources. This means the mill can’t guarantee that no chorine was used in the original paper production but promises that no chlorine was used in the recycling process.
Getting rid of chlorine requires some investment, but is a small price to pay compared to all those costs that get externalized onto the environment and people, such as the dioxin discharged into rivers that threatens fishing grounds, livelihoods, and community health.
One of the other toxins involved in papermaking is mercury, the potent neurotoxin that harms the nervous system and brain, especially in fetuses and children. Mercury has a backstage presence in papermaking, “upstream” at so-called chlor-alkali plants where chlorine and caustic soda (lye) are produced. The pulp and paper industry is the single largest consumer of caustic soda worldwide.47 Even though competitive, cost-effective, nonmercury alternatives exist to making chlorine and caustic soda, a number of chlor-alkali plants in the United States and the rest of the world still use mercury in their manufacturing. And once it’s been released into the environment, mercury doesn’t go away.
However, things are looking up: there has been enough sustained concern about mercury (see the section “Dangerous Materials” later in this chapter) that these plants are increasingly becoming a relic of the past, gradually being replaced with mercury-free alternatives.
So, back to the paper mill. Once the pulping process is finished, the pulp is mixed with water and sprayed onto a moving mesh screen. These screens get vacuumed, heated, and pressed to get them to dry into a consistent paper product—all processes that consume energy. Now the paper is ready to be printed.
At the press, there’s another slew of toxic petroleum-based chemicals added to the mix, which are used to make inks, clean the presses, and wash the so-called blankets (used to transfer ink-filled images to paper). At the top of the list comes toluene, which accounts for 75 percent of all toxic chemicals used in printing.48 These chemicals get released into the environment at frightening levels. Many escape as vapors known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which not only smog up the air, causing respiratory, allergic, and immunity problems, but also drop into soil and groundwater.
There are viable alternatives to petrochemicals for inks and cleaners, however, in the form of vegetable-based “biochemicals.” Although most are still made with some percentage of petroleum, they represent a huge improvement. They avoid a lot of the initial upstream pollution from the processes by which crude oil is extracted and refined into chemicals. They are much safer for workers at printing presses to handle and inhale and mean less investment in safety training and protective equipment. They are far less flammable. And they create far less toxic solid waste and emissions: while petroleum-based inks contain 30 to 35 percent VOCs, soy inks range from 2 to 5 percent.49
Soybean-oil-based inks have become the most popular of the vegetable-based inks and are now used by about one-third of the commercial printers in the United States.50 Although they’re priced slightly higher, soy inks turn out to perform better, producing brighter colors and requiring less ink to cover the same space, so they end up being more cost-effective than traditional chemical inks. They also make paper recycling easier, because they can be more easily removed from the old paper.
Once the pages are printed, they are stitched and/or glued together inside a hard cover (made of cardboard) or a soft paper cover. A final aspect of a book’s footprint involves its distribution and shipping, which I’ll examine in the next chapter.
Thanks to the work of advocacy organizations such as the Environmental Paper Network and the Green Press Initiative, and to sustainable business leaders like Inkworks Press, EcoPrint, and New Leaf Paper, both the papermaking and the publishing industries have become greener. A lot more books are being printed on recycled paper stock, using fewer petroleum-based inks. When they are made in processes that have a lighter footprint, today’s books often include a page explaining the source of the paper (recycled, virgin, from certified sustainable forests), the bleaching process, and the type of inks used, allowing readers a glimpse into the production process.
I took a look at the five books sitting on my nightstand as I wrote this. Two didn’t mention their fiber source at all, leading me to assume the worst. One said its pages are “printed on recycled paper” but didn’t provide specifics—what percentage recycled? Preconsumer (meaning trimmings from the paper factory that have never been touched by consumers) or postconsumer (meaning it was used and discarded by consumers)? Another confirmed its pages came from FSC-certified “well managed forests, controlled sources and recycled wood or fiber.” The last book was made from postconsumer recycled content, which is a higher form of recycling than using preconsumer paper because it diverts would-be municipal waste back into useful products. Only one of my bedside books mentioned the chlorine issue, proudly displaying both the TCF logo on its cover and the PCF status of the interior pages.
When I was initially approached about creating a book based on the twenty-minute animated film of The Story of Stuff, I was a little bit reluctant, thinking of the resources it would involve. Yet thous
ands of people were asking me for more information about what I’d touched on in the film, wanting to hold discussion groups, create curricula, and learn more about positive alternatives to the current system and actions they could take. And, as I know from my travels around the world, there are still a lot of people in a lot of places who simply don’t have access to the technology that would allow them to watch the film and access more detailed information online or as a DVD. So I agreed to do this book, but I held out for a publisher that committed to minimizing resources and toxic inputs in the book’s production. You’ll find an environmental impact statement for this very book on page 307.
My Computer
Collectively, Americans own more than 200 million computers, 200 million TVs, and around 200 million cell phones.51 I do have a laptop and a cell phone, but the truth is, I’m one of those people who is just not attracted to new electronic gizmos. The incessant beeping annoys me, and the thought of losing all my contact information or documents in a single zap gives me hives. I staunchly rely on my fifteen-year-old refillable paper appointment book, which has accompanied me to at least thirty countries, even though each year that passes it becomes increasingly difficult to find replacement pages, an endangered species. I love this well-worn, very unhip appointment book so much that once I even entered an essay contest sponsored by the company that made it. The first stanza of the poem I composed read: “It doesn’t light up; it doesn’t plug in. It doesn’t need batteries, has no secret PIN.” I prefer it to high-tech alternatives for all those reasons.
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