THE STORY OF STUFF
Page 29
Anderson’s complete overhaul of Interface proved that the shift of a billion-dollar petroleum-based industry toward environmental sustainability is feasible: since the adoption of its zero-impact goals in 1995, the firm’s use of fossil fuels and water, its greenhouse gas emissions, and waste generation has fallen drastically, while sales have increased by two-thirds and profits have doubled. Interface has diverted 148 million pounds (74,000 tons) of used carpets away from landfills, while more than 25 percent of its materials are renewable and recycled, a ratio Anderson says is growing rapidly. The $400 million Interface saved in costs avoided through the pursuit of zero waste has paid for all the costs of transforming its practices and facilities.16 Anderson notes that the company’s “products are the best they have ever been, because sustainable design has provided an unexpected wellspring of innovation, people are galvanized around a shared higher purpose, better people are applying, the best people are staying and working with a purpose, [and] the goodwill in the marketplace generated by our focus on sustainability far exceeds that which any amount of advertising or marketing expenditure could have generated.” The Interface example, he says, clearly “dispels the myth of the false choice between the environment and the economy... if we, a petro-intensive company, can do it, anybody can. And if anybody can, it follows that everybody can.”17
Green business experts often note that there are some potential silver linings to the huge scale of many companies today. For one thing, if a company with multiple suppliers all over the world demands greener standards—for example by banning packaging made of PVC—there can be a ripple effect throughout its supply chain, spreading the positive change as suppliers hustle to comply with the new requirements. Green business advocates also point out that bigger companies can leverage their economies of scale to finance environmental improvements as Nike, Whole Foods, and even Wal-Mart have done. What doesn’t get addressed by these arguments, though, is that the foundation of those businesses is still about making and selling more Stuff—which relies on the trashing of existing Stuff to make room for it.
So what excites me most about Interface is how they’re experimenting with shifting that fundamental paradigm that sees business’s role only as producing and selling ever more Stuff. Listen up, business-minded folks, because this is a hugely important innovation.
Interface was built on a conventional retail model: customers buy carpet. When it wears out, they pull it up, chuck it (so it ends up in the landfill or incinerator), and come buy new carpet. Ray Anderson was concerned that so much used and discarded carpet was going to the landfill each year. He also realized that most wear and tear generally only happened on about 20 percent of a carpeted area, yet the whole thing was being ripped out and thrown away. He figured out two things: (1) if carpets were designed to be modular (made of interchangeable tiles), just the worn part could be replaced; and (2) commercial carpet users only wanted the services provided by a carpet (e.g., noise reduction or attractive interior spaces) but actually had no need to own the floor covering outright. Thus, his business started selling carpet “tiles” and experimenting with leasing carpet, in the same way the copier company owns the copy machine and provides service to users who simply lease the machines.18
In 1995, Interface developed the Evergreen Lease program, which aimed to sell a floor covering service rather than an actual carpet. Rather than make a costly onetime purchase of carpet, businesses could pay a monthly lease fee for the service of having a floor covering, complete with the repairs and upkeep needed. And when the carpeting really was at the end of its life, the office didn’t have to figure out what to do with a few tons of spent carpet—Interface would come reclaim and recycle it, closing the loop.19
It’s a brilliant idea. It has huge environmental and economic advantages. This is the kind of change that moves from the realm of tinkering to transformation. But it hasn’t caught on (yet). It turns out that there’s a whole slew of accounting procedures and tax laws, institutional barriers, and subsides for virgin material (especially oil) that make it really hard to apply the leasing model. But Anderson isn’t giving up on the idea. He is confident that its time will come, as the price of oil and other virgin materials increases.20
Imagine if Wal-Mart owned the DVD player that you leased from them. After all, we don’t need to actually own a DVD player; we just want to be able to watch DVDs. When the player broke, Wal-Mart would take it back to repair it. They would have a financial incentive to design products to be modular, repairable, and upgradable rather than 100 percent disposable. Imagine how this shift would impact the contents of the trash that we set out on the curb every week.
Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)
In today’s world, especially in the United States, we throw a ton of Stuff away. Out it goes—when we don’t know how to repair it, when we want to make room for new Stuff, or because we’re sick of the old Stuff. Sometimes we throw something out thinking it will be easier to replace later than to store it until we need it again. Sometimes we even consider throwing things away a cathartic activity and congratulate ourselves on a productive day of getting Stuff out of the house.
Everything we commonly think of as garbage—from packaging and yard waste to broken Stuff, rotten food, or recyclables; everything we put in the bins that we set out on the curb—collectively makes up what’s known as the municipal solid waste stream, or MSW. All those nasty ingredients we examined in chapter 2 on production that end up in consumer goods, from mercury and lead to flame retardants and pesticides, and more than eighty thousand other chemicals—they’re in this stream now, too.
Some people in the recycling and reuse industry point out that “municipal solid waste” is a term that has outlived its usefulness and is actually an obstacle to getting people to think differently about the valuable materials they throw away. Dan Knapp, co-founder of Urban Ore, the premier reuse center in Berkeley, California, has long advocated using an alternative concept: “MSD,” or “municipal supply of discards.” Knapp explains that MSD “doesn’t carry the negative connotation of worthless crap that ‘waste’ does.”21 I like Knapp’s idea; just because someone has discarded something doesn’t mean it has no value. Nonetheless, I have used “MSW” here, since I draw largely on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and industry data, which still uses that term.
In 1960, we made 88 million tons of MSW in the United States— that’s 2.68 pounds per person, per day. In 1980, it had risen to 3.66 pounds each. By 1999, at which time recycling was a household word, we were at 4.55 pounds, just below our current rates.22 According to the EPA, Americans made 254 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2007. That comes out to 4.6 pounds per person per day!23 Compare that to your average Canadian (1.79 pounds per day), Norwegian (2.30), Japanese (2.58), or Australian (2.70). In China, the number is just 0.70 pounds per day.24
Source: Based on data from The UN Statistics Division, Statistics Canada, and Index Mundi. See note 24 for this chapter.
So what exactly is in our municipal waste? In the United States, here’s what the breakdown looks like:
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2007.
According to the EPA, nearly three-quarters of the weight of municipal solid waste is products—things that were designed, produced (usually from a combination of materials), and sold—including containers and packaging, nondurable goods (generally defined as having an intended lifetime of less than three years), and durable goods.25 This percentage of products in the mix is the most important shift, historically speaking, in garbage. One hundred years ago, even sixty years ago, most municipal waste took the form of coal ashes (from heating and cooking) and food scraps. In fact, the number of products in the MSW stream has increased more than tenfold over the course of the twentieth century, from 92 to 1,242 pounds of product waste per person per year.26
The explosion of manufactured products in the trash will hardly come as a surprise to most people who live in the United States. Consumer goods
are so plentiful and relatively cheap that it honestly is easier and cheaper just to replace Stuff than to repair it. We all have dozens of examples of this fact. When my VCR (remember those?) broke, it cost $50 just to have a repair guy look at it, while a new one that played DVDs as well only cost $39. The zipper on my fleece jacket broke. It cost $35 to have a new one sewn in, for which I could have easily bought a replacement jacket. The earphones for the little $4.99 radio I got at RadioShack broke. Big surprise, eh? No problem, I thought. I can just replace them with something from my drawer of parts salvaged from other broken electronics. No such luck. The whole radio was in one piece, connected without screws or snaps, so if any one part broke—the dial, the case, even the ear bud—it couldn’t be replaced or repaired. According to Consumer Reports, at least a fifth of the appliances (dishwashers, washing machines, gas ranges) sold between 2003 and 2006 broke within three years, while more than a third of those refrigerators with ice machines and dispensers needed service in that amount of time.27
I had to replace my decades-old refrigerator last year and was consoled only by how much more energy efficient its replacement was. But from day one the icemaker didn’t work. The repair guy came out three separate times to deal with it in the first ninety days, after which the warranty ran out and he stopped coming. By the third visit, we had gotten to know each other a bit. He shared with me his frustration at the electronic gadgetry that is a mainstay in today’s fridges now—some even have flat-screen televisions built into the door. He sighed: “I am a refrigerator repairman, not a computer technician, certainly not a television repairman.” I asked him how long this fridge would last, hoping I’d at least see my fourth grader through college before having to replace it again. “They used to last twenty, thirty years,” he said, “but nowadays you’re lucky to get five out of them.” I asked him why that was. He pulled his head out of the freezer, paused, looked at me, and said, “Ya know, it’s funny. It’s kinda like they want you to buy a new one faster.”
That’s the norm in the United States today. Since not many people are involved in making this Stuff anymore, few people know how to repair any of it, even the repair guys! The combination of our inability to repair things plus the ease of replacing them makes us mistake a lot of perfectly good Stuff for waste. Elsewhere in the world there are definitely places where repair is still the default response. My Bangladeshi friends keep their clothes for a long time and update the cut as fashion dictates, since most of them know how to sew, and there are also inexpensive seamstresses in every neighborhood. When furniture upholstery fades or tears, the fabric—rather than the whole chair or couch—is replaced. All over India, there are small shopkeepers, sometimes just sitting on a blanket on the sidewalk, who expertly repair clothes and shoes and electronics. In India, I ripped a pair of blue jeans across the knee. I took them to a tailor whose shop was an elevated cement platform, about one square meter, on a side street in Calcutta. All day he sat there cross-legged, mending people’s clothes and sharing tea with his neighboring shopkeepers and customers. I was amazed when I went to pick up my jeans hours later; he had actually woven the fabric back together, not just patched it. On further trips to India from the United States, I learned to take a whole suitcase of worn shoes, broken cameras, and other electronic gadgets since I knew someone there could repair them. Here in the States, they would have been trash.
There are signs that repairs will make a comeback in the United States. The economic meltdown in 2008 coincided with the first increase in consumer electronics service centers in fourteen years, and the first increase in appliance service centers since 2002, according to the Professional Service Association, which collects yearly data on appliance and consumer electronics service centers.28 Shoe repair shops are also experiencing a boom after a long decline. During the Great Depression, there were about 120,000 shoe repair shops in the United States. Today there are only 7,00029; however, many of these are reporting a 50 percent increase in business since the economic meltdown started in 2008. In 2009, Rhonda Jensen, owner of Reuter’s shoe repair shop in Topeka, Kansas, reported an increase from about thirty-five repairs each day to fifty. “When the economy gets bad, people get their shoes fixed, so we’re seeing a great influx of people. Maybe rather than throwing that shoe away they get it fixed.”30
Packaging
The largest and perhaps most annoying category of products we’re wasting in the United States is containers and packaging. Maybe you’re even surprised that this Stuff fits under the header of “products,” but it does, because it was designed by someone and produced for this purpose. You may not be going out of your way to buy it (what you generally want is the peanut butter inside the jar, or the MP3 player, not its plastic case, or the shaving foam, not its metal canister), but companies designed and produced it because they thought it would entice us—sometimes overtly, sometimes subliminally—to buy whatever is inside. Of course in the case of some foods or delicate items, packaging plays a role in keeping it fresh or intact, but even then, attracting potential customers is still a primary goal of packaging designers.
In The Waste Makers, Vance Packard cites some marketing psychologists justifying a belt sold inside packaging: “ ‘normally a woman will not be attracted by a belt hanging from a rack... It is limp, unstimulating, and undesirable. To the normal, healthy, energetic woman a hanging belt is not a symbol of virility or quality. It cannot possibly be associated with her man’... On the other hand, ‘a belt that is encased in a psychologically potent package’ has favorable symbolism and ‘is naturally assigned the role of symbolizing respect, affection, and even great love.’”31
Particularly pernicious examples of packaging are the flimsy plastic bags given out by stores in which to carry Stuff home, and single-serving bever age containers. With the former, government regulation is increasing: in San Francisco, Los Angeles, China, and South Africa there are outright bans—at least on the thinnest, least durable bags—and in Ireland, Italy, Belgium, and Taiwan, there’s a tax on plastic bags.32 Within six months of the Irish tax on plastic bags in 2002, their use declined by 90 percent. The BBC reported that in the three months after the ban was introduced, shops handed out just more than 23 million plastic bags—about 277 million fewer than normal.33
As for beverage containers, we have a ways to go. Each day in the United States, we use more than 150 billion single-use containers for beverages, plus another 320 million takeout cups.34 Disposable (or “one-way”) beverage bottles are a relatively new phenomenon in this country. For decades, we drank from refillable glass bottles, which were often washed and refilled locally, a process that conserved materials and energy and resulted in jobs. In 1960, one-way containers only accounted for 6 percent of packaged soft drinks in the United States. By 1970, the number had risen to 47 percent. Today less than 1 percent of packaged soft drinks is in refillable bottles.35 Other than in Berkeley, the bubble where I live and where walking around with a disposable plastic water bottle is as shameful as donning a fur coat, use of disposables keeps rising. Industry analysts expect U.S. demand for single-serving beverage containers to keep increasing by 2.4 percent a year, to 272 billion units in 2012.36
The simple bottle bill has been proven over and over to be a uniquely effective regulatory tool for reducing bottle waste and encouraging refillable bottles and recycling while also conserving raw materials, saving energy, and creating local jobs. Bottle bill laws require a small—usually 5 or 10 cent—deposit per container (beverage bottles or cans, usually), which is repaid to the customer when the empty bottle is returned. Despite massive industry opposition, bottle bills are now in place in eleven states in the United States, plus eight Canadian provinces and a number of other countries (including Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden).37 In 2009, Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced the Bottle Recycling Climate Protection Act of 2009 to Congress. The bill, H.R. 2046, would require a deposit on all beverages in standard containers up to a gallon. Deposits th
at aren’t collected will fund government programs to reduce greenhouse gas generation.38
Because bottle bills are so effective, every time an attempt is made to introduce or expand a bottle bill, the beverage industries go ballistic opposing it—to the tune of $14 million in campaign contributions aimed at defeating a national bottle bill between 1989 and 1994.39 The opponents argue that deposits are inefficient and old-fashioned, that reusing bottles threatens public health, that deposits simply duplicate what recycling already achieves, and that it constitutes a regressive tax that will hurt local businesses, leading to job losses. Their arguments are bogus. Really, it’s about money: it’s the beverage industries that will bear the costs of collecting and refilling bottles. The Container Recycling Institute, which tracks bottle bill progress, says, “The most outspoken opponents to bottle bills are almost exclusively the big-name beverage producers. The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch, and their bottlers and distributers fight deposit laws at every turn. Retail grocers and liquor storeowners also oppose deposit laws, and in recent years, waste haulers and owners of materials recovery facilities who want the revenue from valuable aluminum cans have joined the opposition.”40 These are the very same companies that boast in their commercials and public relations materials that they support recycling! Sure, they love recycling, as long as there are no bottle bills requiring it.
In 1953, a number of companies involved in making and selling disposable beverage containers created a front group that they maintain to this day, called Keep America Beautiful (KAB). Since the beginning, KAB has worked diligently to ensure that waste was seen as a problem solved by improved individual responsibility, not stricter regulations or bottle bills; it even coined the term “litterbug” to identify the culprit. By spreading slogans like “People start pollution, people can stop it,” KAB effectively shifted attention away from those who design, produce, market, and profit from all those one-way bottles and cans.41 In 1971, KAB created an infamous ad campaign featuring the “crying Indian” (played by actor Iron Eyes Cody, who was, in fact, not a native American at all, but of Italian descent),42 about which writer Ted Williams wrote, “It’s the single most obnoxious commercial ever produced... the ultimate exploitation of Native Americans: First we kicked them off their land, then we trashed it, and now we’ve got them whoring for the trashmakers.”43 More recently, in mid-2009, KAB made an unsuccessful attempt to buy out the National Recycling Coalition (NRC), the largest national coalition of serious recyclers and recycling advocates in the United States. NRC members protested loudly, saying that the KAB “is dominated by contributing commercial interests, most of whom are unwilling or unable to address the systemic changes needed to improve recycling.”44 Among the NRC members’ chief complaints is that KAB resists legislative or regulatory approaches, advocating only for voluntary industry initiatives that clearly are just not working.