THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  Changes in design can involve incremental improvements, like removing a particular toxin from use in one product line. Or the changes can be truly transformational, as a result of rethinking some of our long-held, and limiting, assumptions—our paradigms. For example, the assumptions that “pollution is the price of progress” or that “we must choose between jobs and the environment” have long limited our creative thinking about innovative solutions that can be good for the environment, the workers, and a healthy economy. We can’t transform the system of Stuff unless we transform the way we think.

  That said, it’s good to remember that even incremental changes, when replicated over millions of consumer products, can make a difference. Getting lead out of gasoline, for example, had enormous benefits in protecting public health, especially the developing brains of children. That one change saved millions of IQ points worldwide. In February 2009, a group of mobile phone manufacturers and operators announced a commitment to design mobile phone chargers to be usable on any phone regardless of make or model, and to be far more energy efficient.184

  I received news of this commitment while visiting Washington, D.C. Rushing to get ready for the trip, I had left my cell phone charger at home. I had a jam-packed week of meetings and was relying on my phone to ensure smooth logistics. Not wanting to buy a replacement charger for just a week’s use, I asked the hotel if any previous forgetful guest had happened to leave behind a charger that would fit my phone. The desk clerk brought out a cardboard box with literally dozens of cell phone chargers, each neatly wrapped with their cords. I tried twenty-three chargers before finding one that fit my phone!

  Changing the shape of the charger’s jack is a small thing, but mobile phone industry representatives expect this simple design change could reduce the production of phone chargers by half, which in turn could reduce greenhouse gases in manufacturing and transporting replacement chargers by at least 10 to 20 million tons per year.185 The mobile phone companies’ press releases made interchangeable chargers sound revolutionary, but really, it could have been part of the original intent when cell phones were first being designed and developed.

  One of the most exciting trends in truly revolutionary design is called biomimicry, in which design solutions are inspired by nature. After all, as the Biomimicry Institute notes, “nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.”186

  Biomimicry experts have identified the following list of core principles in how nature functions. Nature:

  runs on sunlight and uses only the energy it needs

  uses a water-based chemistry

  fits form to function

  recycles everything

  rewards cooperation

  banks on diversity

  demands local expertise

  curbs excesses from within

  taps the power of limits

  Biomimicry takes these principles and figures out how to make human technologies, infrastructure, and products that adhere to them as well.187

  What might this look like in practice? Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute, has endless examples. Rather than using toxic inks and phthalates to color Stuff, why don’t we imitate the peacock, which creates the brilliant colors we see in its plumage through shape—layers that allow light to bounce off it in ways that translate as color to the eye. Instead of burning fossil fuels to heat up kilns for firing high-tech ceramics, we can mimic mother-of-pearl, which self-assembles a substance twice as strong as those ceramics in seawater: no heat required. The threads that hold a mussel to a rock dissolve after two years; the packaging we design can likewise be engineered to dissolve when it’s no longer needed or wanted. Rather than mining virgin minerals, we can copy microbes that pull metals out of water.188 Engineers and green chemists are already experimenting with all of these alternatives with success. They just need funds for continued research and development and government regulations on their side to achieve a full breakthrough.

  Another revolution in the production of our Stuff is both necessary and possible. With existing and developing approaches, within a decade we could transform today’s most destructive processes and eliminate the most toxic ingredients from our factories and products. With the government mandating this level of change, business people putting their money where their souls (and grandkids) are, and designers and scientists doing what they do best—innovate and improve!—we could be there in no time.

  CHAPTER 3

  DISTRIBUTION

  Once upon a time it was simple: the only Stuff available to us was made locally or regionally. We picked it up in town, or it was transported to us in a horse-drawn wagon, often by the same person who made it. Unusual items—silks or spices, for example—occasionally arrived from faraway sources via one of three routes: returning armies loaded down with plundered loot, explorers returning from exotic lands, or the rare international traders who braved the dangers and shouldered the costs of overseas travel. By the fifteenth century, Europe had entered the Age of Exploration, and rich people were financing ventures specifically to acquire valuable Stuff like minerals (especially gold), textiles, spices, fruit, coffee, sugar. But even then, the elite consumers who could afford such treats had to exercise immense patience waiting while the goods made the voyage back and had to pay dearly for them once they arrived.1

  Today nearly everyone on earth is able to consume Stuff made on the other side of the planet. Stuff travels at lightning speed around the world. We expect to have everything at our fingertips in the exact color and the exact style we want, and not just fast but immediately. In just a couple of generations, humankind has accelerated and complicated the distribution of goods at a mind-boggling rate. It’s kind of like our grandparents were playing checkers, able to move their simple round pieces one or two steps forward or diagonally. Then our parents were playing chess, with a whole new array of two-dimensional moves by sophisticated bishops, knights, and rooks, not to mention the queen. And in my generation? It’s like we’re moving Stuff in the three-dimensional space-age version of chess that Spock plays in Star Trek.

  To look at this stage in the story of our Stuff we need to go way beyond investigating the modes of freight (via land, water, and air) or the routes Stuff takes around the globe, in and out of factories and containers and warehouses. Distribution includes vast information technology systems (Wal-Mart, for example, supposedly has a computer network that rivals the Pentagon’s, in order to keep tabs on the Stuff it moves). It encompasses the immense multinational retailers whose economies of scale are a key ingredient in making modern distribution systems feasible. And all of this activity happens against the backdrop of economic globalization, international trade policies, and international financial institutions, which set the larger context for how Stuff moves around the planet.

  The Skinny on Supply Chains

  To understand the path our products have taken to reach us, we need to understand their supply chains, which involve far more than merely getting something from point A (where it is made) to point B (where we buy it) but encompasses all the suppliers, component producers, workers, middlemen, financiers, warehouses, loading docks, ships, trains, trucks—basically every stop along the way from natural resource to retail outlet. In today’s globalized economy, a product’s supply chain can cover multiple continents and scores of businesses, each of which is trying to maximize its profit at that link in the chain. To that end, a whole complex science of supply chain management has evolved that fine-tunes every detail, to make and move things as quickly and cheaply as possible.

  Probably no one has more knowledge about supply chains than Professor Dara O’Rourke. During the years I was visiting
polluting factories and dumps around the world, O’Rourke was investigating garment and shoe factories—sweatshops—in Honduras, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China. He says that while much has changed since the Age of Exploration, even more radical change happened in just the last decade. O’Rourke boils the revolution of the last ten years down to two ideas: lean manufacturing and lean retail.2

  O’Rourke points to Toyota as the prototype for lean manufacturing; the company is famous for reconfiguring work stations so that assembly line workers wouldn’t waste an extra second or use one ounce of extraneous energy in reaching for a part they needed. Toyota kept refining their assembly, shaving off seconds at each step along the way, until the process was airtight. An important breakthrough in their model was empowering any worker along the line to pull the “stop cord” if they detected a problem with the product. Immediately the root cause of the problem (faulty machine, sick worker, bad design) would be investigated and fixed; this kind of troubleshooting is way more cost-effective than waiting until an inspector at the tail end of the assembly line finds flaws in the finished products. This innovation is credited for giving workers a greater sense of responsibility and job satisfaction, although it led to some workers accusing one another of “speeding up the line” and negated many of the pro-worker concessions that the labor movement had won in prior generations’ struggles.3

  Over the years, lean manufacturing has gotten uglier. Manufacturers analyzed assembly line production ad nauseam to figure out every possible way to cut any expense that didn’t add value to the end product. When that expense is toxic waste created by a particular technology, then its elimination is a good thing. However, when that expense is safety equipment or bathroom breaks for workers—as is often the case—then reworking factory operations to eliminate it is just plain scary.

  And this efficiency-über-alles mentality spread beyond the factories. It was applied to the whole of the supply chain. How? Well, here’s the key revelation: most companies from which we buy Stuff are no longer actually making anything themselves but are simply buying and branding Stuff that other people made. Nike doesn’t make shoes. Apple doesn’t make computers. Gap doesn’t make clothes. These companies buy those shoes, computers, or clothes (and the parts to assemble them) from multiple factories all over the world. In fact, a given factory often makes goods for competing brands that only get differentiated once the label gets slapped on.4

  What companies like Nike, Apple, and the Gap do produce are brands, and these brands are what shoppers are buying. Nike founder Phil Knight explained, “For years, we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product.”5 Companies spend billions on brand promotion, often not to advertise details of any actual product, but to maintain the image they want consumers to identify with their brand. As O’Rourke puts it, “When Apple sells you an iPod, it isn’t selling an MP3 player; it is selling a fashion statement.”6

  Because the focus is on developing the brand, rather than on making any actual items, the place where Stuff is produced is increasingly irrelevant. In fact, the actual costs of making an item—the materials, the workers, running the factory—and then getting it to the store account for only a fraction of the price charged for that item. Most of the money goes to the brand, which means that the more costs are lowered along the supply chain, the more profit the brand holder makes.7

  Because consumers play along and value the brand so highly, the balance of power along the supply chain has shifted from the manufacturers to the brands and retailers (who are sometimes but not always the same entity: at the Nike store, Nike is both brand and retailer, but if the Nike shoe is sold at Nordstrom’s, then they’re separate). It is they who now call the shots along the whole supply chain. They—not the actual manufacturers—decide what gets made, how fast, and for how much. If one manufacturer isn’t able to meet their demands, that’s fine, because there are plenty of other manufacturers ready to make the same product without complaint, often for a lower price.8 “This is the ‘treadmill’ that ensnares developing countries,” explains The Nation’s political correspondent William Greider. “If they attempt to boost wages or allow workers to organize unions or begin to deal with social concerns like health or the environment, the system punishes them. The factories move to some other country where those costs of production do not exist.”9 And David Korten writes in When Corporations Rule the World, “With each passing day it becomes more difficult [for factories] to obtain contracts from one of the mega-retailers without hiring child labor, cheating workers on overtime pay, imposing merciless quotas, and operating unsafe facilities.”10

  Removing themselves from the actual production of Stuff also allows the big brand-name companies to claim a level of ignorance about conditions—they can shrug and say, “Hey, they aren’t our factories.” This frees them from the responsibility and challenges and costs inherent in running real factories that employ real workers around the world.

  All of these developments led O’Rourke to call this the “mean lean” system.

  And that’s only the half of the new leanness. The other half is lean retail. Like lean manufacturing, lean retail also seeks to cut costs at every turn. The ways to do this include all the obvious: lower workers’ salaries in stores and refuse to provide health care benefits; stifle union organizing; and build gigantic stores in the suburbs where real estate is cheap, rather than in city centers where shoppers could access the store via public transportation.

  But the biggest way to cut costs associated with retail is to eliminate inventory. In the lean retail model, inventory is the ultimate waste. Traditionally, inventory was costly because it incurred storage expenses and consisted of materials temporarily not on the market. However, with today’s fast-changing fashions and speedy obsolescence, the wastefulness of inventory has taken on new proportions. It’s not just clothes that are in fashion one week and out of fashion the next—it’s now electronic gadgets, toys, even furnishings and cars.11 That means holding Stuff in warehouses for even a few days is a risky act that could waste a lot of money (and product).

  Michael Dell once famously said that “inventory has the shelf life of lettuce.”12 His company has been an industry leader in reducing inventory time. Dell computers aren’t made en masse and stored as inventory until they are sold, as in the old distribution model. With complex computer tracking systems, any purchase or order from a customer is communicated back to the factory where the components are waiting. The specific kind, color, and style of computer that’s desired is assembled and shipped; production is now based on individual demand. (This model is often called just-in-time, or JIT, in business lingo.)13

  The attempts to reduce superfluous production through more surgical, “small batch” production, “niche marketing,” and associated distribution all sound good, and from a business perspective they are, and even from an environmental perspective they might be, but the system is terrible for the workers. The combination of constantly changing styles plus consumers’ expectation of immediate gratification adds to the already sharp pressure on workers. Under these circumstances, a rising share of the workforce can pretty much forget any hope of safe, steady, sustainable work and instead end up in short-term or part-time contracts, or “casualized,” as political economists term it. This means reduced or completely eliminated benefits, lower wages, and less job security overall.14

  The toy industry is among the worst examples. Most toys are sold during the Christmas season. Every retailer wants to stock plenty of whatever the hot toy is, but each year’s hot toy isn’t identified until just before Christmas. Manufacturers can’t keep workers occupied steadily throughout the year preparing for the Christmas season: they have to wait until the hot toy is declared. Workers in toy factories end up working grueling long hours in the weeks before Christmas—and with this kind of time crunch all kinds
of corners are cut in terms of factory conditions and workers’ ages. There is built-in motivation for the workers not to complain since they don’t want to be among the one-half to two-thirds of the workforce that gets cut in the offseason.15

  Lean doesn’t have to be mean, O’Rourke says. There could be a “green lean” instead of a “mean lean” system. In the same way that Toyota workers were empowered to pull the stop cord on their assembly lines, we could have an entirely transparent system of supply chains in which all the stakeholders are encouraged to identify flaws throughout the system and halt production until that problem has been taken care of. The stakeholders include not just workers but members of communities who live near factories. Under such a model, if they saw stinky brown gunk flowing into their fresh-water source, they could “pull the cord.” The stakeholders also include consumers who, if they found out that a product contained toxic ingredients, could cry foul and give their feedback. And until the problem had been dealt with, the supply chain for that product would come to a screeching halt (which would provide incentives for brand-name companies to respond quickly). “Imagine a system in which firms would be pressured to produce goods not as cheaply as possible, but in ways that optimize labor, social and environmental benefits,” O’Rourke says.16

  That vision led him to take a sabbatical from his tenured Berkeley professorship to focus on realizing a long-term dream. For years, as O’Rourke visited factories and analyzed health and safety data on consumer products, he wondered what kind of information, delivered at what point in a purchase decision, could change a consumer’s action. He explored ways to deliver this information to people in an easily accessible way, preferably at the point of purchase. Now O’Rourke has created the GoodGuide, a free online searchable database that allows you to get current data on the environmental, social, and health impacts of more than 75,000 (and growing) everyday products and their parent companies.17 In late 2009, GoodGuide launched its iPhone application that allows shoppers to simply point their phone camera at a product’s bar code and immediately receive environmental and health data on the product, far beyond what any label will reveal. It may look like just another green shopping site, but it’s not. O’Rourke’s goal is “not to help consumers buy less toxic shampoo (although that would be good), but to send market signals up the supply chain to the people making the decisions about what is in these products and how they are made.”18 The GoodGuide has regularly updated information on the companies’ labor practices, corporate policies, energy use, climate impact, pollution track record, and even supply chain policies. It identifies ingredients in products and suggests less toxic or higher-scoring alternative products. Most important, it allows individuals to send messages to the companies behind the products.