Stuff, stuff and more stuff

As North Americans, we are bombarded everyday with advertisements for the newest ‘stuff’ that we all apparently ‘need’. As consumers we are brainwashed into thinking that we need stuff to be happy. We see other people with stuff and we feel that we need it too. We are constantly buying more and more stuff, half of it we don’t even need. We are just satisfying our need to have the newest and best stuff.

Do we really need those designer clothes? Or more vehicles than there are drivers? Or every new video game console that comes out on the market? I know some people who do all of these things, none in my class of course. The answer to all these is no. We need to stop being so materialistic, greedy and wasteful. People replace things that aren’t even broken and then we just throw everything away or store it in attics and garages. We need to stop and think about how much stuff we buy and how much of it we actually need to survive.

In the video “The story of Stuff”, Annie Leonard discusses the life cycle of the ‘stuff’ we buy. She outlines it from extraction all the way to disposal. The chain of events starts at extraction from the earth, production of the product, distribution in stores, consumption and then disposal.

Annie Leonard, The story of stuff

She talks about how we extract mass amounts of resources, mostly from other countries, expose our workers to toxic chemicals during production for low wages, sell products in mass quantities in stores to give the consumer the cheapest price, probably cheaper than the total cost to extract and produce the good. So who pays? The country whose resources were depleted and the workers who expose themselves to toxic environments for low wages, just so we can get stuff at the cheapest price, making us want to buy more! So we do, then we throw it out, because now companies make products that have a short lifespan. It’s true when they say they just don’t make things the way they used to. It’s as if they think we have a bottomless pit to keep throwing all the old stuff that nobody wants any more into.

Clearly producing so much stuff is taking a toll on our resources. We put so much energy into production of stuff. The concept of Biomimicry is a great way to incorporate natural processes into our products. If we can design products from nature inspired models, we can obtain products using less energy, less waste, and lower toxicity, making it very sustainable.

Tubercle Technology for wind turbines

Biomimicry examples

·       Self Assembly (CaCO₃ in self-assembling shells)

·       CO₂ as a feedstock (plants can do this)

·       Solar transformation

·       Power of shape

o   Energy efficiency: whale fins- aviation wing design

o   Self cleaning objects: leaf shape

·       Quenching thirst by drawing water from air and fog

·       Metals without mining- microbes do this

·       Green chemistry

·       Timed degradation: mussels in ocean- threads dissolve within 2 years

The coolest cases of Biomimicry can be seen at this link. Some things we can do to reduce the amount of stuff we consume is to buy things from garage sales, make your own stuff, and just stop buying stuff.

Information taken from my sustainable development serious class, taught by Dr Ling. Other sources from this website, http://www.whatwomenmake.com/the-forest-for-the-trees