MW Waste

MADE TO BE WASTED: The unsustainability of the current system of production

Last updated: January 26th, 2019

Let’s talk about shopping. We buy a lot of stuff: food, clothes, shoes, stationery, electronics, furniture, presents, greeting cards, decorations for every different holiday. How much of the things we buy or gift actually get used to their full potential before being thrown away? It’s easy to throw most things away nowadays because it’s easy to replace them. And it’s just as easy to get trapped in this buy-store-dispose cycle in our consumerist society.

You may remember the online film The Story of Stuff, conceptualized and narrated by American sustainability activist Annie Leonard that went viral almost five years ago. The 20-minute animated film explains the process of how stuff we buy is produced from the first step of resource extraction to the very end—disposal. Leonard has been active researching and raising environmental and social justice awareness for over two decades. In her first venture, The Story of Stuff, she says the average American person today consumes and wastes twice as much as a person did fifty years ago. And disturbingly, 99 percent of total materials that are harvested, mined, processed and transported in the process of making things are nothing but waste six months after the date of sale. Only one percent of the materials are still used after those six months.

So clearly there’s a much larger and complex system—in academic lingo called the materials economy—at work in producing anything we buy. First, natural resources are extracted, or in Leonard’s words, “We chop down the trees, blow up mountains to get the metals inside, use up all the water and wipe out the animals.” Stage two is production: energy is used to mix toxic chemicals with natural resources in factories to make products laced with these health-hazardous chemicals. Then comes the distribution stage where the mission is to maintain low prices and sell as quickly as possible, keeping shoppers coming back for more. The next stage of consumption is, according to Leonard, the heart of this entire system. It’s what our governments and corporations have taken the responsibility to nurture and protect to keep the current economic model alive. After consumption, a product’s life comes to an end in the final stage of disposal. The rate of consumption today is so high that all our bought stuff can’t fit in our homes. Things would either end up in landfills or first burned in incinerators and then thrown into landfills. In both methods, land, air and water are polluted and toxins that were used to produce the goods are now released into the atmosphere.

For a while now, we have used this system to produce too much stuff. In just the past thirty years, Leonard says we’ve used up one-third of the world’s natural resource space. The current natural resource crises are the direct results of such reckless exploitation. It’s sometimes hard to grasp that the smallest things we produce, buy and waste do contribute to the increasing burden placed on the environment. This of course doesn’t translate into a Spartan lifestyle advocacy and it also doesn’t mean that shoppers are to blame for environmental damage. It does mean that we have a responsibility to choose wisely what we buy, to distinguish our needs from wants and not take material goods for granted.

Ultimately, we as consumers are only factors facilitating a fundamentally faulty production system. It’s faulty because it’s a linear system, Leonard says, “and you cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.” Our planet’s natural resources aren’t limitless and if we hope to continue to survive on them, then we simply cannot continue to use them without taking into account these limits. It matters that we buy things that are produced fairly and safely and we don’t waste stuff. But while many of us try to do this, the system continues to operate unhindered.

This model of overproduction and overconsumption didn’t just come about spontaneously, nor is it fuelled by consumer demands. It was very consciously designed by decision makers in an effort to refurbish the economy post-WWII. Leonard quotes American economist and retail analyst Victor Lebow’s solution that she says has become the norm for this system:

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals…We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

She also says that during Eisenhower’s presidency, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors announced that the ultimate purpose of the American economy was to produce more consumer goods. A system was being established where a lot of stuff would be produced and advertised unabashedly to plant desires for that stuff in the consumer. Leonard explains two strategies that have paved the way for this model: planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. Under the former, which picked up in the 1950s, things are intentionally made for a short life span, so they become useless as fast as possible and we have to buy new ones. Perceived obsolescence is more psychologically manipulative in that producers change the way things look continually. We’re thus pressured into throwing away perfectly usable things for the new versions to keep up with changing fashions, updated technologies and more. These concepts are very seriously and openly discussed by economists and designers as good business strategies, overlooking the inevitable long-lasting impacts on the environment.

So much stuff is produced, so many natural resources exploited, and so much of that stuff is wasted only to acquire more stuff that will soon be disposed of. It wasn’t too long ago when people had fewer wants and fewer things, but also when they made full use of their things before even thinking about throwing them out. My dad bought a Nikon camera in 1983, took care of it like his baby and used it for twenty-seven years before having to let it go “with a heavy heart,” he says. Twenty-seven years? A camera? This was fascinating for me and probably would be for anyone else from my generation who has probably owned at least a couple cameras, phones and computers already—possibly due to planned or perceived obsolescence. Many times, we tell our older family members to trade in their stuff for newer, more current things. And many times they are baffled as to why they should chuck out something that’s in good shape. Stewardship, thrift and resourcefulness were valued then, Leonard says. Many things we buy now were homemade like greeting cards or Halloween costumes. Things were also preserved to be reused and most broken things were able to be repaired instead of being thrown away for replacements. Why don’t we do this anymore?

We have become conditioned to buying things that get sparsely used and throwing away things to get newer and shinier stuff. It’s not because we’re bad people, but because the way the system works has made it easy for us to do this, especially when we don’t get explicitly shown the whole picture of what goes into making things we buy and what happens when they’re discarded. This system has made shopping a hobby and converted our wants into needs by keeping things cheap. This goes back to the distribution stage Leonard talks about. Things are kept cheap when manufacturers externalize costs. They externalize costs when, for example, they don’t pay workers enough or don’t take responsibility for ravaging the environment or cleaning up wastes produced from their factories. So when unreasonably cheap things are sold to consumers, Leonard explains, there are other people that work for cheap, people that lose natural resources, or people that have to live with toxicity in their environment produced from factory wastes that pay for what we didn’t have to. There really is nothing that’s free or cheap—only scams to deceive the consumer.

So where lays the solution? Consumer action? We can buy more responsibly, not buy or waste things just because they were free or cheap, use things to their full potential respecting the exertion that the environment went under to bring you those things and we can recycle. All of this helps undoubtedly. But the roots of the problem are policies and business practices that help sustain the linear and profit-driven production system. According to Leonard an awakening is happening in which a new school of thinking is advocating a system based on sustainability, green chemistry, zero waste, closed-loop production, renewable energy and local living economies.

A few months ago, Leonard brought to us her latest film, The Story of Change, exploring how fundamental change in the system can happen. She goes back in history to point out various grassroots movements like the American environmental movements of the 1970s, The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Apartheid Movement of South Africa and the Indian Independence Movement. She says all were successful in making revolutionary changes due to three major factors: the respective activists all shared a big idea that would make things better for everyone, they worked together until their problems were solved and they took necessary action. In our current economic system failure, Leonard says millions of us already share the big idea for a new sustainable system and show commitment to work together, but haven’t taken significant action yet.

The recent green wave has encouraged us to buy consciously, recycle and do other things to live a more sustainable lifestyle, but Leonard and political and environmental science professor Michael Maniates think we can do much more. “Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment,” writes Maniates in the Washington Post. “The greatest environmental problem confronting us isn’t melting ice, faltering rain, or flattening oil supplies and rising gasoline prices. Rather, it’s that when Americans ask, ‘What can I do to make a difference?’ we’re treated like children by environmental elites and political leaders too timid to call forth the best in us.”

This production and consumption intensive system is the problem and if government policies won’t change it, then citizens have to pressure for change. I think Maniates is right; we care and if we get more guidance and work together, we can make much bigger changes. Many people argue this is unrealistic, but as Leonard puts it, “the ones who’re unrealistic are those that want to continue with the old path. That’s dreaming.”


photo courtesy alextorrenegra (CC-BY)

  1. The Story of Stuff is one of my favourite documentaries. It so clearly links the consumer to the chain of production. Thanks for sharing this insightful article and for the reminder about consumption.

  2. I completely agree Jason, that documentary hits home! It shows the big picture we really need to be aware of. Thank you for your feedback 🙂

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