The Story of Stuff — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:19Do you have one of these?
2. 0:20I got a little obsessed with mine.
3. 0:22In fact I got a little obsessed with all my stuff.
4. 0:24Have you ever wondered where all the stuff we buy, comes from
5. 0:27and where it goes when we throw it out?
6. 0:29I couldn't stop wondering about that. So I looked it up.
7. 0:32And what the text book said, is that stuff moves through a system
8. 0:35from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal.
9. 0:41All together, it is called the materials economy. Well, I looked into it a little bit more.
10. 0:46In fact, I spent 10 years traveling the world,
11. 0:49tracking where our stuff comes from and where it goes.
12. 0:52And you know what I found out? That is not the whole story.
13. 0:55There's a lot missing from this explanation.
14. 0:58For one thing, this system looks like it's fine. No problem.
15. 1:03But the truth is it’s a system in crisis.
16. 1:05And the reason it is in crisis is that it is a linear system
17. 1:09and we live on a finite planet
18. 1:11and you can not run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.
19. 1:15Every step along the way, this system is interacting with the real world.
20. 1:19In real life it’s not happening on a blank white page.
21. 1:23It’s interacting with societies, cultures, economies, the environment.
22. 1:26And all along the way, it’s bumping up against limits.
23. 1:29Limits we don't see here because the diagram is incomplete.
24. 1:33So lets go back through, let's fill in some of the blanks and see what's missing.
25. 1:37Well, one of the most important things its missing is people, yes people.
26. 1:41People live and work all along this system.
27. 1:44And some people in this system matter a little more than others;
28. 1:47Some have a little more say. Who are they?
29. 1:50Well, let’s start with the government.
30. 1:52Now my friends tell me I should use a tank to symbolize the government
31. 1:55and that’s true in many countries and increasingly in our own,
32. 1:58after all more than 50% of our federal tax money is now going to the military,
33. 2:02but I’m using a person to symbolize the government
34. 2:04because I hold true to the vision and values that governments should be
35. 2:07of the people, by the people, for the people.
36. 2:10It's the governments job to watch out for us, to take care of us. That’s their job.
37. 2:15Then along came the corporation.
38. 2:17Now, the reason the corporation looks bigger than the government
39. 2:20is bigger then the government.
40. 2:22Of the 100 largest economies on earth now, 51 are corporations.
41. 2:28As the corporations have grown in size and power, we’ve seen a little change in the government
42. 2:32where they’re a little more concerned in making sure
43. 2:35everything is working out for those guys than for us.
44. 2:37OK, so lets see what else is missing from this picture.
45. 2:40We'll start with extraction.
46. 2:42which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation
47. 2:45which is a fancy word for trashing the planet.
48. 2:48What this looks like is we chop down trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside,
49. 2:53we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.
50. 2:55So here we are running up against our first limit.
51. 2:58We are running out of resources. We are using too much stuff.
52. 3:03Now I know this can be hard to hear, but it's the truth we’ve gotta deal with it.
53. 3:07In the past three decades alone,
54. 3:09one-third of the planet’s natural resources base have been consumed. Gone.
55. 3:15We are cutting and mining and hauling and trashing the place so fast
56. 3:19that we’re undermining the planet’s very ability for people to live here.
57. 3:23Where I live, in the United States, we have less than 4% of our original forests left.
58. 3:29Forty percent of the waterways have become undrinkable.
59. 3:32And our problem is not just that we’re using too much stuff,
60. 3:36but we’re using more than our share. We have 5% of the world’s population
61. 3:41but we’re consuming 30% of the world’s resources and creating 30% of the world’s waste.
62. 3:47If everybody consumed at U.S. rates, we would need 3 to 5 planets.
63. 3:52And you know what? We’ve only got one.
64. 3:54So, my country’s response to this limitation is simply to go take somebody else’s!
65. 3:59This is the Third World, which – some would say –
66. 4:02is another word for our stuff that somehow got on someone else’s land.
67. 4:06So what does that look like? The same thing: trashing the place.
68. 4:1075% of global fisheries now are fished at or beyond capacity.
69. 4:1580% of the planet’s original forests are gone.
70. 4:19In the Amazon alone, we’re losing 2000 trees a minute.
71. 4:23That is seven football fields a minute.
72. 4:26And what about the people who live here?
73. 4:29Well. According to these guys, they don’t own these resources
74. 4:32even if they’ve been living there for generations, they don’t own the means of production
75. 4:36and they’re not buying a lot of stuff. And in this system,
76. 4:39if you don’t own or buy a lot of stuff, you don’t have value.
77. 4:44So, next, the materials move to “production“ and what happens there is we use energy
78. 4:48to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products.
79. 4:54There are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals in use in commerce today.
80. 4:59Only a handful of them have even been tested for health impacts
81. 5:02and NONE have been tested for synergistic health impacts,
82. 5:05that means when they interact with all the other chemicals we’re exposed to every day.
83. 5:08So, we don’t know the full impact on health and the environment of all these toxic chemicals.
84. 5:12But we do know one thing: Toxics in, Toxics Out.
85. 5:16As long as we keep putting toxics into our inudstrial production systems,
86. 5:19we are going to keep getting toxics in the stuff that we bring
87. 5:22into our homes, and workplaces, and schools. And, duh, our bodies.
88. 5:26Like BFRs, brominated flame retardants.
89. 5:29They are a chemical that make things more fireproof but they are super toxic.
90. 5:33They’re a neurotoxin–that means toxic to the brain What are we even doing using a chemical like this?
91. 5:40Yet we put them in our computers, our appliances, couches, mattresses, even some pillows.
92. 5:46In fact, we take our pillows, we douse them in a neurotoxin
93. 5:50and then we bring them home and put our heads on them for 8 hours a night to sleep.
94. 5:53Now, I don’t know, but it seems to me that in this country with so much potential,
95. 5:57we could think of a better way to stop our heads from catching on fire at night.
96. 6:01Now these toxics build up in the food chain and concentrate in our bodies.
97. 6:05Do you know what is the food at the top of the food chain
98. 6:08with the highest level of many toxic contaminants? Human breast milk.
99. 6:12That means that we have reached a point where the smallest members of our societies - our babies
100. 6:18are getting their highest lifetime dose of toxic chemicals from breastfeeding from their mothers.
101. 6:24Is that not an incredible violation?
102. 6:27Breastfeeding must be the most fundamental human act of nurturing;
103. 6:31it should be sacred and safe. Now breastfeeding is still best
104. 6:36and mothers should definitely keep breastfeeding, but we should protect it. They should protect it.
105. 6:41I thought they were looking out for us. And of course,
106. 6:45the people who bear the biggest of these toxic chemicals
107. 6:47are the factory workers, many of whom are women of reproductive age.
108. 6:51They’re working with reproductive toxics, carcinogens and more.
109. 6:55Now, I ask you, what kind of woman of reproductive age
110. 6:59would work in a job exposed to reproductive toxics,
111. 7:02except for a woman with no other option? And that is one of the “beauties” of this system?
112. 7:07The erosion of local environments and economies here
113. 7:11ensures a constant supply of people with no other option.
114. 7:14Globally 200,000 people a day are moving from environments
115. 7:19that have sustained them for generations,
116. 7:21into cities, many to live in slums, looking for work, no matter how toxic that work may be.
117. 7:27So, you see, it is not just resources that are wasted along this system,
118. 7:31but people too. Whole communities get wasted.
119. 7:34Yup, toxics in, toxics out.
120. 7:37A lot of the toxics leave the factories in products,
121. 7:40but even more leave as by-products, or pollution. And it’s a lot of pollution.
122. 7:45In the U.S., our industry admits to releasing over 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals a year
123. 7:51and it’s probably way more since that is only what they admit.
124. 7:54So that’s another limit, because, yuck,
125. 7:56who wants to look at and smell 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals a year? So, what do they do?
126. 8:01Move the dirty factories overseas Pollute someone else’s land!
127. 8:05But surprise, a lot of that air pollution is coming right back at us, carried by wind currents.
128. 8:10So, what happens after all these resources are turned into products?
129. 8:15Well, it moves here, for distribution.
130. 8:18Now distribution means “selling all this toxic-contaminated junk as quickly as possible.”
131. 8:23The goal here is to keep the prices down, keep the people buying, and keep the inventory moving.
132. 8:29How do they keep the prices down? Well, they don’t pay the store workers very much
133. 8:33and they skimp on health insurance every time they can. It’s all about externalizing the costs.
134. 8:38What that means is the real costs of making stuff aren’t captured in the price.
135. 8:43In other words, we aren’t paying for the stuff we buy.
136. 8:46I was thinking about this the other day.
137. 8:48I was walking and I wanted to listen to the news
138. 8:50so I popped into a Radio Shack to buy a radio.
139. 8:53I found this cute little green radio for 4 dollars and 99 cents.
140. 8:56I was standing there in line to buy this thing and I was thinking
141. 8:59how could $4.99 possibly capture the costs
142. 9:03of making this radio and getting it into my hands? The metal was probably mined in South Africa,
143. 9:08the petroleum was probably drilled in Iraq, the plastics were probably produced in China,
144. 9:13and maybe the whole thing was assembled by some 15 year old in a maquiladora in Mexico.
145. 9:17$4.99 wouldn’t even pay the rent for the shelf space it occupied until I came along,
146. 9:22let alone part of the staff guy’s salary who helped me pick it out,
147. 9:25or the multiple ocean cruises and truck rides pieces of this radio went on.
148. 9:29That’s how I realized, I didn’t pay for the radio. So, who did pay?
149. 9:34Well. These people paid with the loss of their natural resource base.
150. 9:37These people paid with the loss of their clean air with increasing asthma and cancer rates.
151. 9:43Kids in the Congo paid with their future – 30% of the kids in parts of the Congo
152. 9:48now have had to drop out of school to mine coltan,
153. 9:49a metal we need for our cheap and disposable electronics.
154. 9:53These people even paid, by having to cover their own health insurance.
155. 9:56All along this system, people pitched in so I could get this radio for $4.99.
156. 10:02And none of these contributions are recorded in any accounts book.
157. 10:05That is what I mean by the company owners externalize the true costs of production.
158. 10:11And that brings us to the golden arrow of consumption.
159. 10:16This is the heart of the system, the engine that drives it.
160. 10:19It is so important that protecting this arrow has become the top priority for both of these guys.
161. 10:25That is why, after 9/11, when our country was in shock,
162. 10:28and President Bush could have suggested any number of appropriate things:
163. 10:31to grieve, to pray, to hope. NO. He said to shop. TO SHOP?!
164. 10:37We have become a nation of consumers. Our primary identity has become that of being consumers,
165. 10:44not mothers, teachers, farmers, but consumers.
166. 10:47The primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated
167. 10:51is by how much we contribute to this arrow, how much we consume. And do we!
168. 10:56We shop and shop and shop. Keep the materials flowing, And flow they do!
169. 11:02Guess what percentage of total materials flow through this system is still in product or use 6 months after the date of sale in North America?
170. 11:06Fifty percent? Twenty? NO. One percent. One! In other words, 99 percent of the stuff
171. 11:21we harvest, mine, process, transport – 99 percent of the stuff we run through this system
172. 11:25is trashed within 6 months. Now how can we run a planet
173. 11:30with that level of materials throughput? It wasn’t always like this.
174. 11:35The average U.S. person now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago.
175. 11:39Ask your grandma. In her day, stewardship and resourcefulness and thrift were valued.
176. 11:44So, how did this happen? Well, it didn’t just happen. It was designed.
177. 11:49Shortly after the World War 2, these guys were figuring out how to ramp up the economy.
178. 11:55Retailing analyst Victor Lebow articulated the solution
179. 11:58that has become the norm for the whole system.
180. 12:00He said: "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life,
181. 12:05that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction,
182. 12:10our ego satisfaction, in consumption.
183. 12:13We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
184. 12:18President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors Chairman said
185. 12:22that "The American economy's ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods."
186. 12:26MORE CONSUMER GOODS?
187. 12:28Our ultimate purpose? Not provide health care, or education, or safe transportation,
188. 12:34or sustainability or justice? Consumer goods?
189. 12:37How did they get us to jump on board this program so enthusiastically?
190. 12:41Well, two of their most effective strategies are planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence.
191. 12:46Planned obsolescence is another word for “designed for the dump.”
192. 12:50It means they actually make stuff to be useless as quickly as possible
193. 12:54so we will chuck it and buy a new one.
194. 12:56It’s obvious with things like plastic bags and coffee cups, but now it’s even big stuff:
195. 13:00mops, DVDs, cameras, barbeques even, everything! Even computers.
196. 13:05Have you noticed that when you buy a computer now,
197. 13:08the technology is changing so fast that in just a couple years,
198. 13:10it’s actually an impediment to communication? I was curious about this
199. 13:14so I opened up a big desktop computer to see what was inside. And I found out
200. 13:18that the piece that changes each year is just a tiny little piece in the corner.
201. 13:22But you can’t just change that one piece, because each new version is a different shape,
202. 13:27so you gotta chuck the whole thing and buy a new one.
203. 13:30So, I was reading industrial design journals from the 1950s when planned obsolescence
204. 13:35was really catching on. These designers are so open about it.
205. 13:38They actually discuss how fast can they make stuff break
206. 13:42that still leaves the consumer having enough faith in the product
207. 13:45to go out and buy anther one. It was so intentional.
208. 13:48But stuff cannot break fast enough to keep this arrow afloat,
209. 13:51so there’s also “perceived obsolescence.”
210. 13:54Now perceived obsolescence convinces us to throw away stuff that is still perfectly useful.
211. 14:00How do they do that? Well, they change the way the stuff looks
212. 14:04so if you bought your stuff a couple years ago,
213. 14:06everyone can tell that you haven’t contributed to this arrow recently
214. 14:10and since the way we demonstrate our value is contributing to this arrow, it can be embarrassing
215. 14:15Like I’ve have had the same fat white computer monitor
216. 14:18on my desk for 5 years. My co-worker just got a new computer.
217. 14:21She has a flat, shiny, sleek monitor.
218. 14:25It matches her computer, it matches her phone, even her pen stand.
219. 14:28She looks like she is driving in space ship central and I,
220. 14:32I look like I have a washing machine on my desk.
221. 14:35Fashion is another prime example of this. Have you ever wondered why women’s shoe heels
222. 14:40go from fat one year to skinny the next to fat to skinny? It is not because there is some debate
223. 14:44about which heel structure is the most healthy for women’s feet. It’s because wearing fat heels
224. 14:48in a skinny heel year shows everybody that you haven’t contributed to that arrow recently
225. 14:53so you’re not as valuable as that person in skinny heels next to you,
226. 14:56or, more likely, in some ad. It’s to keep buying new shoes.
227. 15:01Advertisements, and media in general, play a big role in this.
228. 15:05Each of us in the U.S. is targeted with over 3,000 advertisements a day.
229. 15:09We each see more advertisements in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime.
230. 15:14And if you think about it, what is the point of an ad except to make us unhappy with what we have?
231. 15:18So, 3,000 times a day, we’re told that our hair is wrong, our skin is wrong,
232. 15:22our clothes are wrong, our furniture is wrong, our cars are wrong, we are wrong
233. 15:25but that it can all be made right if we just go shopping.
234. 15:28Media also helps by hiding all of this and all of this,
235. 15:31so the only part of the materials economy we see is the shopping.
236. 15:35The extraction, production and disposal all happen outside our field of vision.
237. 15:40So, in the U.S. we have more stuff than ever before,
238. 15:44but polls show that our national happiness is actually declining.
239. 15:47Our national happiness peaked in the 1950s, the same time as this consumption mania exploded.
240. 15:54Hmmm. Interesting coincidence.
241. 15:57I think I know why. We have more stuff,
242. 16:00but we have less time for the things that really make us happy:
243. 16:02friends, family, leisure time. We’re working harder than ever.
244. 16:07Some analysts say that we have less leisure time now than in Feudal Society.
245. 16:12And do you know what the two main activities are
246. 16:14that we do with the scant leisure time we have?
247. 16:16Watch TV and shop.
248. 16:18In the U.S., we spend 3 to 4 times as many hours shopping
249. 16:22as our counterparts in Europe do. So we are in this ridiculous situation
250. 16:25where we go to work, maybe two jobs even, and we come home and we’re exhausted
251. 16:29so we plop down on our new couch and watch TV and the commercials tell us “YOU SUCK”
252. 16:32so we gotta go to the mall to buy something to feel better, and then you gotta go to work more
253. 16:36to pay for the stuff you just bought so you come home and you’re more tired
254. 16:39so you sit down and watch more T.V. and it tells you to go to the mall again
255. 16:41and we’re on this crazy work-watch-spend treadmill and we could just stop.
256. 16:47So in the end, what happens To all the stuff we buy anyway?
257. 16:50At this rate of consumption, it can’t fit into our houses
258. 16:52even though the average house size has doubled
259. 16:54in this country since the 1970s. It all goes out in the garbage.
260. 16:57And that brings us to disposal. This is the part of the materials economy
261. 17:02we all know the most because we have to haul the junk out to the curb ourselves.
262. 17:05Each of us in the United States makes 4 1/2 pounds of garbage a day.
263. 17:10That is twice what we each made thirty years ago.
264. 17:13All of this garbage either gets dumped in a landfill, which is just a big hole in the ground,
265. 17:17or if you’re really unlucky, first it’s burned in an incinerator and then dumped in a landfill.
266. 17:23Either way, both pollute the air, land, water and, don’t forget, change the climate.
267. 17:29Incineration is really bad.
268. 17:31Remember those toxics back in the production stage?
269. 17:34Well burning the garbage releases the toxics up into the air.
270. 17:37Even worse, it makes new super toxics. Like dioxin.
271. 17:42Dioxin is the most toxic man made substance known to science.
272. 17:45And incinerators are the number one source of dioxin.
273. 17:49That means that we could stop the number one source of the most toxic man-made substance known
274. 17:54just by stopping burning the trash. We could stop it today.
275. 17:59Now some companies don’t want to deal with building landfills and incinerators here,
276. 18:02so they just export the disposal too. What about recycling? Does recycling help?
277. 18:08Yes, recycling helps. reduces the garbage at this end
278. 18:13and it reduces the pressure to mine and harvest new stuff at this end.
279. 18:16Yes, Yes, Yes, we should all recycle. But recycling is not enough.
280. 18:20Recycling will never be enough. For a couple of reasons.
281. 18:24First, the waste coming out of our houses is just the tip of the iceberg.
282. 18:28For every one garbage can of waste you put out on the curb,
283. 18:3270 garbage cans of waste were made upstream
284. 18:35just to make the junk in that one garbage can you put out on the curb.
285. 18:38So even if we could recycle 100 percent of the waste coming out of our households,
286. 18:42it doesn’t get to the core of the problems. Also much of the garbage can’t be recycled,
287. 18:47either because it contains too many toxics, or it is designed NOT to be recyclable in the firs place
288. 18:53Like those juice packs with layers of metal and paper and plastic
289. 18:57all smooshed together. You can never separate those for true recycling.
290. 19:03So you see, it is a system in crisis. All along the way, we are bumping up limits.
291. 19:08From changing climate to declining happiness, it’s just not working.
292. 19:13But the good thing about such an all pervasive problem
293. 19:15is that there are so many points of intervention.
294. 19:17There are people working here on saving forests and here on clean production.
295. 19:22People working on labor rights and fair trade
296. 19:24and conscious consuming and blocking landfills and incinerators
297. 19:28and, very importantly, on taking back our government
298. 19:31so it is really is by the people and for the people.
299. 19:34All this work is critically important but things are really gonna start moving
300. 19:39when we see the connections, when we see the big picture.
301. 19:42When people along this system get united, we can reclaim and transform this linear system
302. 19:47into something new, a system that doesn’t waste resources or people.
303. 19:52Because what we really need to chuck is this old-school throw-away mindset.
304. 19:56There’s a new school of thinking on this stuff and it’s based on sustainability and equity:
305. 20:00Green Chemistry, Zero Waste, Closed Loop Production,
306. 20:04Renewable Energy, Local living Economies.
307. 20:08It’s already happening. Now some say it’s unrealistic, idealistic, that it can’t happen
308. 20:13But I say the ones who are unrealistic are those that want to continue on the old path.
309. 20:17That’s dreaming.
310. 20:19Remember that old way didn’t just happen. It’s not like gravity that we just gotta live with
311. 20:25People created it. And we’re people too. So let’s create something new.
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