The Story of Stuff

The things we buy come from the store, and the trash we discard goes to the curb, right? Well, that is a small part of the story. But things are grown, raised, harvested, slaughtered, mined, manufactured, transported, stocked, incinerated, dumped, landfilled; and all along the process people are employed, exploited, unemployed, displaced, served, and disserved – all over the world. We neither see nor consider these effects of our consumption – but we need to; we need to take a look at what we’re causing. It shouldn’t be weird to ask who sewed your shirt, or how your meat was treated. It should be weird to not ask, and not see, and not care. This should be especially weird for Christians, who so explicitly profess ideals of loving our neighbors, and doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. We’d better consider what it is we’re doing unto others, unto our neighbors.

One good introduction to your economic impact is a relatively short, charmingly pedantic video called “The Story of Stuff” (1). Here is an outline of what that video shows:

First, natural resources are being used up at an increasing rate. But these resources are finite; our planet is finite. So we simply cannot keep increasing the pace at which we use resources indefinitely. Consider the Amazon rainforest for example: 2,000 trees per minute are cut down, so the finite rainforest is shrinking, and we’re running out of trees.

What’s more, the way we use these global resources is nowhere near equitable. The United States makes up 5% of the world’s population, but uses an obscene 30% of the world’s resources, and produces 30% of the world’s waste (2). If everyone in the world lived like we do, it would take between three and five planets to support us! This obviously means that many of the world’s people are forced to live on less than their fair share. Moreover, their resources are used and their land is polluted to make goods for wealthy consumers like us, and many of them are put to work making our goods. In large part because of this, 200,000 people per day move from the environments that had sustained their ancestors, into cities filled with factories, sweat shops, and slums.

One notable fact about the production of our goods is that in total, it involves 100,000 synthetic chemicals, most of which aren’t tested for possible effects on human health. So not only are tons of untested chemical in consumer goods, but these chemicals are handled daily by factory workers all over the world, most of whom lack the regulations and protections which we Westerners enjoy as workers and as consumers. In addition to this, U.S. industry alone releases over 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals a year into the environment – and much more is released around the world, often with less regulation.

Goods then move from production to distribution in places like Wal-Mart, where the CEO is paid 871 times what the average U.S. worker is paid, and 50,000 times what the average Chinese worker is paid. Another key source of this corporate profit, and this cheap consumption, is the externalization of costs: corporations cause harm to their employees and to society at large which they do not pay for (3). So essentially, many people who help make our goods are underpaid, and many are not paid at all.

This economic system operates on such a scale, and at such a velocity, that there has developed a tremendous emphasis on shopping. Shopping is seen not as a practical chore, but as a leisure activity, or even a civic duty. After World War 2, retailing analyst Victor Lebow said, “Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption… we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate” – and this demand seems to have been met. The average American today consumes twice what the average American consumed 50 years ago. And the average American house today is twice as large as the average American house was in the 1970s.

Advertising plays a huge role in our overconsumption. The average American is targeted with more than 3,000 advertisements a day. That translates to seeing more ads each year than a person living 50 years ago would have seen in his or her entire life. These advertisements tell us that the ways we are and the things we own aren't good enough – and we need to buy stuff to fix that. So a cycle develops between advertisements, shopping, and work (4). To quote the “Story of Stuff” video directly,

“We’re in this ridiculous situation where we go to work, maybe two jobs even, and we come home and we’re exhausted, so we plop down on our new couch and watch TV, and the commercials tell us ‘you suck!’ so you’ve got to go to the mall to buy something to feel better. Then you’ve got to go to work more to pay for the stuff you just bought, so you come home, and you’re more tired, so you sit down and you watch more T.V., and it tells you to go to the mall again, and we’re on this crazy work-watch-spend treadmill – and we could just stop.”

Another significant factor in this consumption is the fact that many products are designed to wear out, and many other products get discarded well before they wear out when there arises a newer version, or a different fashion. So many things are discarded quickly, and so much is expended in production, that six months after the sale of goods in North America, only 1% of the material which flowed into this production system is still in use.

This obviously translates into an incredible amount of waste. The average American directly produces 4.5 pounds of garbage a day – but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Because for every garbage can you put out on the curb, 70 garbage cans worth of waste were made in upstream production (5). All of this garbage either gets dumped in landfills, or burned in incinerators and then dumped in landfills. Either way, it pollutes air, land, and water.

The “Story of Stuff” video closes by naming many of the things being done to improve this economic system, and the website gives a lot more information about how to take action yourself. I encourage you to check it out, and I’ll repeat just one of their tips: buy green, buy fair, buy local, buy used, and most importantly, buy less!

- - - - - - - - - -

1) You can watch the video here, and also find citations for all the information given below. I know the general thrust to be correct, so I have not read a ton of critiques, and I am not double-checking specific information – but if you do so, please leave a comment here about what you find.
2) That’s absurd! We don’t use 6%, which would be more than our fair share. We don’t use 10%, which would be twice our share. We don’t use 15% or 20% – we use 30% of all the resources that get used!
3) This harm either might be compensated from some other source, such as tax dollars, or might be suffered without any compensation at all. For example, think of a worker without health insurance who gets sick, and either gets no medical treatment, or goes to the emergency room on the tax-payer’s dollar; or think of pollution which we and our children face without any compensation from the polluters.
4) Tellingly, the top two American leisure activities are watching television, and shopping.
5) This fact should temper our enthusiasm about recycling. Recycling is no ultimate solution, and it does not exactly avoid waste, or cancel out environmental costs. But of course, do keep recycling, as it is much better than not recycling!