THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  It’s just not going to work. There isn’t enough for everyone to consume at this high bar. And if we were to make the selfish and immoral choice of going any farther down that path, then we would have to build bigger walls and fences and hunker down, because it would get ugly. As an official of the U.N. World Food Programme said, “A hungry world is a dangerous world. Without food, people have only three options: They riot, they emigrate or they die. None of these are acceptable options.”99

  Consumption, Climate, and Equity

  We’re hearing a lot these days about how much we urgently need to reduce CO2 emissions to stabilize the climate. CO2 is produced at every stage of the Story of Stuff, from drilling for oil to running factories to shipping our Stuff all over the planet. Stuff is the common denominator here. The more Stuff we consume, the more CO2 we’ll keep pumping out. Here’s the dilemma: levels of CO2 are already over the threshold beyond which catastrophic climate change will occur, as determined by top scientists, yet a lot of people need to increase their consumption in order to meet even basic human needs.

  This dilemma is proving to be a huge obstacle in international negotiations around climate solutions. The rich, overconsuming countries say they won’t commit to significant CO2 reductions unless everyone else does—especially India and China, which are fast approaching the top of the CO2 emitters list, but with far larger populations than ours (and thus much lower per-capita emissions).

  Developing countries resent the notion of limits being placed on their industrial activities and economic growth when historically they have contributed far less to the ecological crisis than the rich countries. A Brazilian diplomat at the 1997 Kyoto climate conference explained the climate negotiations from a developing country’s perspective: “They invite you in, only for coffee after the dinner. Then they ask you to share the check, even though you didn’t get to eat.”100

  A first-ever analysis and comparison of the carbon footprints of different countries was created by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Center for International Climate and Environment Research-Oslo. Not surprisingly, it shows that the higher a country’s per-capita consumption expenditures are, the bigger its carbon footprint. The national average per-capita footprints varied from 1 ton of carbon dioxide equivalents per year in African countries such as Malawi and Mozambique to roughly 30 tons per year in industrialized countries such as the United States and Luxembourg. The study also found that in poorer countries, food and services are a bigger contributor to the carbon footprint, while mobility—transportation—and the consumption of manufactured goods result in the greatest greenhouse gas emissions in rich countries.101

  One of the key innovations of the study is that it assigns the global carbon footprint from imports to the country that imports the goods—not the country that manufactures the goods. This approach is really important because globalized production chains allow companies to outsource the manufacturing of carbon-intensive products, thus hiding the real carbon costs of imported goods. What we need to avoid is a scenario in which countries with tight carbon emission limits can simply outsource the production of Stuff they consume to countries where the emission limits are not so restrictive.

  Redistribution and Reverence

  Around the world, current consumption patterns are destroying remaining environmental resources and the services that the earth provides and exacerbating inequalities. The crises of poverty, inequality, and the environment are all related—and they are all related to consumption. It is simply not an option for those of us in the wealthy countries to refuse to reevaluate our consumption patterns: the planet is in crisis, we’re not sharing fairly, and it’s not even making us happy.

  Here’s an alternative scenario: we realize that things have got to change, because the previous scenario isn’t the world we want. We need to make room at the table for those who don’t yet have a seat. According to Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity, “If the human family sets a goal for itself of achieving a moderate standard of living for everyone, computer projections suggest that the world could reach a sustainable level of economic activity that is roughly ‘equivalent in material comforts to the average level in Europe.’”102 Now, that doesn’t sound half bad to me; in fact, it sounds like the way to go.

  I like Alan Durning’s poetic vision of what the above level of consumption could look like: “Accepting and living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to what is, culturally speaking, the human home: to the ancient order of family, community, good work, and good life; to a reverence for skill, creativity, and creation; to a daily cadence slow enough to let us watch the sunset and stroll by the water’s edge; to communities worth spending a lifetime in; and to local places pregnant with the memories of generations.”103

  All we have to do is rethink and redesign how we’re living in order to produce and consume less Stuff, to better share the resources and Stuff we do have among us, and—the topic of the next chapter—to throw a whole lot less of those precious resources away.

  CHAPTER 5

  DISPOSAL

  A funny thing happens to most of our Stuff almost immediately after we buy it. What we paid for in the store and brought home was a treasure, a prize—a shiny toy, a stylish T-shirt, the latest model cell phone or laptop or camera. But once it belongs to us and takes up space inside our home, the Stuff starts losing value. “Our houses are basically garbage processing centers,” comedian Jerry Seinfeld riffed during a 2008 tour.1 As soon as Stuff enters our homes, it begins the transformation. We get something and it starts out prominently displayed, then gets moved into a cupboard or onto a shelf, then stuffed in a closet, then thrown in a box in the garage and held there until it becomes garbage. The words “garage” and “garbage” must be related, Seinfeld points out, because pretty much everything that enters the first becomes the second.

  But in all seriousness, economists have a real term for this transformation: “depreciation.” Now, it’s true that not every last thing we can buy depreciates: certain luxury items like fine art, antiques and collectibles, jewelry and well-crafted rugs are bought by the small percentage of people who can afford them with the expectation that these things will increase in value over time. But all the ordinary things that fill up our homes and our lives—this Stuff loses value like an inflatable PVC pool float loses air.

  For example, it’s commonly said that your car loses more of its value the day you drive it off the lot than on any other day (barring a day of catastrophic collision). In that very instant, just minutes from the moment in which you bought it, your car is worth about 10 percent less than the price you paid2—even though it’s still got that new car smell (which is often the toxic additives in the PVC off-gassing, may I remind you) and there’s not a scratch on it!

  The words “prize,” “praise,” “price,” “appreciate,” and “depreciate” are all related—they come from the same Latin root word pretium, meaning “value.” So how and why exactly does a shiny new thing go from a prize that we praise, appreciate, and pay a high price for to something that suddenly and steadily depreciates in value? As comedian George Carlin put it, “Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?”3 The value or lack of value that we assign to things is really arbitrary.

  Accountants use complex calculations to determine how the value of objects (or money, or business entities, or even whole countries) is reduced over time, usually related to usage, wear and tear, decay, technological obsolescence, inadequacy, or perceived inadequacy caused by shifting fashions. But I think there’s more going on here than what accountants tell us things ought to be worth—it’s the same system-wide message we looked at last chapter that influences our opinions about our Stuff. This message tells us our Stuff is no longer good enough for us and fuels our desire for more. And when our Stuff is no longer good enough, it’s like a magic wand is waved over it: Poof! Our Stuff is transformed into waste.

  There’s
an exercise I often do with kids when I’m speaking at a school. I take an empty soda can and I set it on a desk. “Can someone tell me what this is?” I ask them. “It’s a can!” they always yell out. Then I hold up a little trash bin. “What about this?” “That’s trash,” they say. I show them what’s inside the bin: an empty soda can. In the bin, it’s trash. I take it out and place it next to the first one. “What about now?” “It’s a can.” The point, of course, is that there’s no difference between the can on the desk and the can in the bin. Waste is defined by where something is, not what it is. It’s about context, not content.

  This is the same argument made by Dr. Paul Connett, a chemistry professor at St. Lawrence University, whose fascination with waste may even surpass my own. Over the last twenty-five years, Connett has given more than 1,200 presentations on waste to students, urban planners, community residents, policy makers, and anyone else who will listen.4 In his presentations, Connett sometimes picks up a garbage can and pulls out its contents for people to consider. He holds up paper, a glass bottle, a pen out of ink, a plastic bag, maybe a banana peel, and asks that each of them be identified. “Is anything in here called waste? No—these are all resources in the wrong place. ‘Waste’ is a verb, not a noun. Waste is what we do by mixing them together... Separated, they are resources; mixed together, we waste them.”

  I agree with Connett in all cases except for those items designed so poorly or made from ingredients so toxic that they should never have been produced, sold, or bought in the first place, like a PVC shower curtain or a PVC anything. Or a disposable plug-in air freshener. Or a flushable single-use toilet bowl brush. Or a Hummer private vehicle. Or those rigid plastic cases that hold new electronic gadgets hostage inside. Or just about anything in the SkyMall catalog. In my opinion (and actually, in Connett’s as well) all these things are a waste—of materials, of energy, and of the human ingenuity spent designing and marketing this junk instead of spent figuring out how to meet people’s actual needs in healthy ways.

  It’s in communities that own the least amount of Stuff that you really see just how subjective that line is between waste and resources. I learned of this subjectivity especially clearly in South Asia, where I spent three years in the mid-1990s. There, broken, outdated, or empty objects were and are understood as potentially useful materials rather than items destined for a trash can. You’ve heard that expression “Necessity is the mother of all invention”? How about: Poverty is the mother of recognition of trash as containing valuable resources? Not so catchy, I know, but it really is true.

  In Dhaka, Bangladesh, I lived in a house with a half-dozen Bangladeshis. Having a westerner live with them was a novelty, and they had fixed up a clean and sparsely furnished bedroom especially nicely for my arrival. As I unpacked my Stuff (some clothes and personal “care” products like my Pantene Pro-V—this was pre-GoodGuide, and I didn’t know about the nasty chemical ingredients), I noticed there was no garbage can in my room. So on my first trip to the market, I bought a simple little trash can. But soon I discovered that the “away” of my throwing things away had a different meaning than back in the States. What I threw into the trash resurfaced around the neighborhood, put back to use. I noticed my light blue flowered deodorant container on a neighbor’s living room shelf, now a vase filled with flowers. I saw my empty Pantene conditioner bottle again in the form of a toy: someone had stuck small rods through it and attached wheels, and a neighbor boy pulled it around on a string as a toy car.

  Back in the United States (and in other wasteful, wealthy countries) we need to overcome the social stigma of reuse. What if “secondhand,” “used” or “preowned” signified an attractive, desirable option for everyone, rather than a poverty-driven necessity? Throughout our country’s history, when times have been tough—either on the individual or national level—our response has been to waste less, share more, and hold on to our Stuff longer. The economic downturn that began in 2008 again inspired many to rethink frugality and thrift. Waste haulers across the country are reporting a decrease in waste put out at the curb as well as a change in content: less packaging and fewer single-use disposable items as people are buying less overall and switching to money-saving and waste-reducing alternatives.5 Some recyclers are noticing an increase in bulk food containers as families are opting to stay home and cook real food, rather than eat out or buy preprocessed food.6

  However, there’s a whole industry known as “waste management” that relies on a rigid understanding of waste. And since they’re making a bundle on it, to the tune of $50 billion a year,7 they’d prefer not to have us questioning their definition. To them, waste is unquestionably waste, and the more that’s produced for them to “manage,” the merrier they are.

  This industry divides waste into several different categories based on the source of the waste, what it’s made of, and how it needs to be handled. The main categories are: industrial waste, municipal waste, and construction and demolition waste. There’s also medical waste and electronic waste, which are often handled separately because of specific hazardous components in each. Here’s a rundown on these categories:

  Industrial Waste

  Industrial waste includes all the leftovers from the extraction and production processes I described in previous chapters—the result of making everything from paper, steel, and plastics, to clothes, glassware, ceramics, electronics, and processed food, to pharmaceuticals and pesticides. It is generated by mines, factories, sweatshops, paper mills—“from fabricating, synthesizing, modeling, molding, extruding, welding, forging, distilling, purifying, refining, and otherwise concocting the finished and semifinished materials of our manufactured world,” says the sustainable business guru and author Joel Makower.8 The hundreds of hazardous materials used in those processes—cleaners and solvents, paints and inks, and pesticides and chemical additives—are in there too. Ray Anderson, the CEO of the carpet manufacturer Interface and a sustainable business pioneer, says that a full 97 percent of all the energy and material that goes into manufacturing products is wasted: “We are operating an industrial system that is, in fact, first and foremost a waste-making machine.”9

  Industries (everything from manufacturers of paper, steel, glass, and concrete to food processing, textiles, plastics, and chemical manufacturing, to water treatment) do waste prolifically, generating 7.6 billion tons a year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,10 but as much as 13 billion tons according to other sources!11 And both these figures omit agricultural waste, which runs in the additional billions of tons, as well as greenhouse gas emissions and air and water pollution, which could very reasonably be counted as well.12 Yet because the industrial waste is created and disposed of where most of us never see it (unless we work in the industry or have the misfortune of living alongside a factory or disposal site), it’s easy to forget it exists. Out of sight, off-site, out of mind.

  To help bring this issue to light, Joel Makower has charted our Gross National Trash:

  Source: J. Makower, 2009. Note: “Special waste” was defined under the U.S. Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 and refers to waste from mining, fuel production, and metals processing. In other words, it’s more industrial waste.

  As Makower writes:

  It’s only a matter of time before the story of Gross National Trash gets told and the public recognizes that for every pound of trash that ends up in municipal landfills, at least 40 more pounds are created upstream by industrial processes—and that a lot of this waste is far more dangerous to environmental and human health than our newspapers and grass clippings.* At that point, the locus of concern could shift away from beverage containers, grocery bags, and the other mundane leftovers of daily life to what happens behind the scenes—the production, crating, storing, and shipping of the goods we buy and use.13

  While still the exception, many industries are getting serious about reducing their waste, showing others that doing so is both possible and economical. Some have done
so because they realize that waste is made of materials they paid good money for and there are bigger profits to be made, both in buying less replacement material and in paying less for waste disposal. Some are reducing their waste because their directors honestly care about the planet. Some are doing it because it’s good PR. And on some level, it’s not important which motivation fuels them as long as the result is a serious reduction in waste and environmental impact. Of course, still others are just pretending to reduce their waste or are hyping marginal reductions to make their businesses look better—a practice called greenwashing. This false advertising is a huge problem. It undermines the credibility of those in the business world who are making good-faith efforts, and it diverts attention and delays governmental action to force higher standards across the board, which is still the most effective way to get businesses to address their massive environmental impact.

  My hero in industrial waste reduction is the previously mentioned CEO of Interface, Ray Anderson. Interface is the largest producer of commercial floor covering in the world, supplying about 40 percent of all the floor tiles used in commercial buildings globally.14 In 1994, Anderson had what he himself calls a revelation, when he realized that the planet was in deep trouble—not to mention his grandchildren—and that his beloved company was contributing to the problem. Anderson now believes that virgin materials must be switched for recycled materials; that the linear system of “take-make-waste” must shift to a cyclical “closed-loop” process (in which materials are infinitely reused or repurposed so that waste is eliminated); that power from fossil fuels must be replaced by renewable energy; that wasteful processes must become waste free; and that labor productivity must be replaced by resource productivity.15 That right there is the next industrial revolution—at least the materials part of it—in a nutshell.