The Story of Stuff
How much a $4.99 radio actually costs and what 7 football fields are doing in the Amazon jungle.
If you think you “get” the concept of sustainability, are you willing to bet your favorite gadget on it? Let’s start with an easier question: Do you know where that gadget came from and how?
Instigator Annie Leonard spent 10 years traveling the world, tracking where our stuff comes from and where it ends up — essentially dissecting our “materials economy” to reveal the very real crisis it’s in. She then partnered with a couple of sustainability advocacy groups to produce The Story of Stuff – a part-educational, part-revelational, part-mobilizing 20-minute film that sucks you in, preconceived notions of sustainability and all, and hurls you into the nitty-gritty of it, all through delightful animation and a refreshingly fast pace.
The film reveals the fundamental brokenness of our consumption model — we’re using a linear production-consumption-disposal system, but running a linear system on a finite planet is, well, ludicrous.
Without stealing too much of the film’s thunder, we’ll just say that it busts a number of sustainability myths that even the most eco-conscious of us hold, pushing us to delve far deeper into the issue than the superficial nature of the “green” fad. (Hint: Recycling doesn’t help nearly as much as you’d like to think, so stop buying those I Heart Recycling shirts.)
The Story of Stuff explores issues of government and corporations as they relate to sustainability, probes political, cultural and commercial principles of consumerism, and really makes us question how it’s possible for RadioShack to sell a radio for the laughable price of $4.99, which doesn’t even pay for shelf space.
For us, the pinnacle of how deformed our culture is came from a quote of the famous post-war economist Victor Lebow’s frightening advice to the Eisenhower administration:
It’s not surprising, then, that we live in a world economy where those who don’t own or buy a lot of stuff simply don’t have value. Which explains why the Third World is being exploited, why natural resources are being pillaged from those who have inhabited them for generations, why that capitalist sense of entitlement is really humanity’s greatest downfall.
The film ends on a hopeful note, suggesting a more realistic solution in a new system based on sustainability and equity, where millions of us intervene with small contributions all along the system, so that our cumulative impact makes a real, tangible, literally world-changing difference.
And it all starts with seeing the big picture like you’ve never seen it before.
So go ahead, see. The Story of Stuff is easily the best thing you’ll do for your global citizen conscience this year.
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Just got done watching the video and it’s really well done, the only issue I have is with the whole “replace one chip” in computers. I think this is an oversimplification of a processor upgrade, and for the most part, until there is a major revision in the CPU design, they are designed to be replaceable. Now there are major revisions which require new sockets I would guess every 4-8 years or so.
On the same note, I couldn’t help but think of Apple during a lot of the video, and not just because that’s what she used in the beginning. Apple products are totally designed to fit this model. No way to upgrade the capacity, no replaceable batteries, coming out with newer, hipper versions of the same stuff each year, making them just a little better, something which could have been accomplished much cheaper if they allowed upgrades. For a company that’s touting themselves as green (and they definitely ARE one of the greener companies out there), they sure do miss the boat on sustainability, but that’s mainly because they are indeed a corporation, and a corp. will only do what’s in its best interests 99% of the time, and the other 1% of the time it acts altruistically are for PR purposes which still fulfill this goal.
I hear you on the whole planned/perceived obsolescence thing – Apple has truly mastered that game, where they use technology to plan the obsolescence and marketing strategy to make sure it is perceived so.
However, you’re actually wrong about Apple’s claim to green fame. (And I say this as a devoted Maccie as well as a realistic eco-evangelist.) They’re actually among the LOWEST-rated companies on Greenpeace’s infamous Green Ranking chart. Any emphasis on green in the last two Keynotes has been the result of precisely that pressure by more and more environmental organizations pointing the blame finger at Apple’s sub-par sustainability policies. So, in that respect, you’re right it’s all PR – what I call reactive rather than proactive. Mostly, I’m just surprised where you got your idea that Apple was eco-conscious in the first place.
I, actually, don’t think it is surprising at all that the average person (someone who is not actively researching the green policies of companies) would assume that Apple is one of the leading ones. Apple is pretty much associated with innovation and hipness, and in the today world these words also embody the notions of environmental-awareness and activism almost by default (it is pretty genius actually that Apple has managed to fool its customers like that). It is also extremely backwards of them and disappointing to the faithful customer that Apple are not on top of that green list.
True, although the surprising thing is that Chuck is actually extremely environmentally-conscious, far above average (one of the few people I know who went out of their way to find an alternative energy provider for their house) AND a programmer more than superficially familiar with Apple. Yet even so, he did make that assumption.
As far as “fooling” customers goes, I don’t believe it was Apple’s intention. (Certainly no evidence of any proactive communication on their behalf to allude to greenness prior to the ranking.) It’s just a matter of what I call “goodness by association,” or the halo effect of coolness. Customers who see Apple as “cool” (which, these days, is pretty much everyone, including PC-users, as much as they hate to admit it) assume that this “coolness” extends to all the company’s touchpoints, thereby assuming what is true of Apple’s design and software is also true of its environmental policy.
In Apple’s defense, they have made significant strides towards a more sustainable production and distribution process over the past year, from packaging to the plastics used in computer casing. BUT, the disappointing part to me is that it’s clearly reactive and not a genuine principle that should’ve been embedded in the company’s DNA.
[...] may recall The Story of Stuff — Annie Leonard’s brilliant 20-minute animated film, dissecting the “materials [...]