THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  Corporations:

  Some people have complained that the Story of Stuff film unfairly portrays all corporations as evil. For the record, corporations are not inherently good or evil. A corporation is just a legal entity. It’s how the corporation is run that makes it an asset or a detriment to the broader society. I know that many people within corporations do care about the planet and people and are working to lessen their company’s environmental impact. Some are going further, striving to be a force for positive change. Unfortunately though, there are some structural aspects of corporations that make them less than ideal neighbors—or planet-mates.

  First, some have gotten so big and powerful that they have disproportionately large influence and impact, increasingly overwhelming the democratic process. Of the hundred largest economies in the world, over half are corporations—ahead of most countries.2 When corporations control such a huge percentage of global resources, it’s pretty hard to reign them in when they start trashing the planet, as far too many do. In 2007, the 60,000-plus multinational corporations controlled half the world’s oil, gas, and coal and generated half the gases responsible for global warming.3 In the United States, corporations are legally beholden above all else to make profit for their shareholders. So entities with a number one goal of short-term profit control much of the world’s energy resources, the unbridled use of which is throwing our entire global climate into disarray.

  In addition to their size and influence, corporations benefit from a number of legal and structural mechanisms that grant them powerful rights while allowing them to avoid many responsibilities. For example, U.S. corporations enjoy the same protection of rights under the U.S. Constitution as individuals—aka “personhood.” At the same time, legal mechanisms exist that protect corporate shareholders with what’s known as limited liability.

  Even with these structural challenges, some corporations have taken steps to protect people and the planet while still making a profit (which, again, they are legally obligated to prioritize). Some corporations have made good progress toward using fewer resources, eliminating toxics, creating less waste, and respecting workers and host communities.

  Yet voluntary codes of conduct or the good intentions of those currently in charge have proven not to be enough. Both the corporate structure and the surrounding regulatory system need to be changed: we should do away with limited liability and “personhood” under the Constitution and demand an increase in corporate accountability, stronger antitrust laws and international liability, the extraction of corporations out of the political process, extended producer responsibility, internalized (vs. externalized) costs, and total stakeholder responsibility (and it should be recognized that stakeholders include workers, fence-line communities, consumers, vendors, etc. All these will facilitate corporations becoming less of a problem and more of the solution).

  Development:

  Intuitively we understand that “development” has to do with things getting better. Unfortunately, too often development has come to refer to progress toward implementing a fossil-fuel-intensive, toxics-laden, consumption-driven economy. Thus, small towns in Costa Rica with high life expectancy, literacy, and life satisfaction may still be considered less “developed” than U.S. cities with higher rates of environmental degradation, social inequality, and stress.

  The international “development” institutions, such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, have too often pushed policies and projects that promote a model of economic growth that makes things worse, not better, for people and the planet.

  We need to keep our eye on the goals: human and environmental well-being. If new infrastructure, urbanization, and resource consumption contribute to those goals, great, that’s real development. But if they start undermining well-being, then that’s destruction, not development. Some advances, especially in medicine and communication, are clearly positive. Other things that generally come when a country advances down this path, like toxic body burdens and greenhouse gas emissions, are anything but.

  Throughout this book, I’ve used the terms “developing” and “developed” as shorthand and as they are commonly used. I don’t mean to imply a value judgment: so-called developed countries are not better than those designated as developing. The same global socioeconomic divide is sometimes described as the Global North or OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) versus the Global South or nonOECD. (North versus South are not strict geographical references; for example, the wealthy nations of Australia and New Zealand occupy the Southern Hemisphere. Likewise, in many countries in the Global South, some communities enjoy “Northern” levels of resource consumption.)

  All the terms are imperfect. For simplicity’s sake, I chose to use the “developing/developed” designation.

  Externalized Costs (and Price versus Cost):

  Bargains abound: rock-bottom prices at big-box stores, discount outlets, online auction sites, even 99-cent stores. Yet there’s an unhealthy illusion at work there, a serious gap between the price you pay and the costs involved. The number on the price tag has very little to do with the costs involved in making Stuff. Sure, some of the direct costs like labor and material are included in the price, but those are dwarfed by externalized, hidden costs like the pollution of drinking water, health impacts on workers and host communities, even changes in the global climate. Who pays for these things? Sometimes it is the local communities, who now have to buy bottled water or filters or drink toxic water, since their local water is contaminated. Or the workers, who pay health care or disability costs themselves. Or future generations, who, for example, will pay by being unable to rely on forests to moderate the water cycles. Since these costs are paid by people and organizations outside the companies responsible for incurring them, they’re called externalized costs. Economists define externalized cost as “an unintended or uncompensated loss in the welfare of one party resulting from an activity by another party.”4

  The good news is that a growing number of economists are attempting to capture these ecological and social costs in the price of consumer goods through approaches like full cost accounting or life cycle assessments so we can better understand the real cost of making all our Stuff. Prepare yourself for the sticker shock when those hidden costs become visible.

  Organic:

  These days we usually hear this word in reference to agriculture, to describe things like vegetables, dairy products, or cotton fibers raised without petrochemicals, sewage sludge, or genetically modified organisms, among other bad inputs. Although I sometimes refer to this agricultural meaning, more often I mean “organic” in the language of chemistry, where it indicates that a substance contains carbon. That’s important for two reasons. First, because our human bodies (and the bodies of all living things), being carbon-containing themselves, have all kinds of biological/chemical interactions with and reactions to carbon-containing Stuff. So for example the pesticides made of organophosphates (parathion and malathion) and organochlorides (such as DDT) permanently deactivate an enzyme that is essential to the nervous system. That’s why people with pesticide poisoning often twitch and shake, experience blurry vision, and lose control of their bladder and bowels.5

  Second, the massive development of organic chemicals is relatively new, with many health and environmental impacts yet to be understood. Unlike the inorganic (i.e., non-carbon-containing) compounds like metal, stone, and clay, which we’ve been using for millennia, it’s just in the last century, especially since World War II that scientists have been going nuts developing new organic compounds. The result, according to Ken Geiser, author of Materials Matter, “has been a near revolution in one century in materials production and consumption.”6

  Stuff:

  When I say “Stuff” in this book, I mean manufactured or mass-produced goods, including packaging, iPods, clothes, shoes, cars, toasters, marshmallow s
hooters (this last from the SkyMall catalog). In the book I don’t extend the meaning to include resources, like logs and barrels of oil. I focus here on Stuff we buy, maintain, lose, break, replace, stress about, and with which we confuse our personal self-worth. Stuff as I define it here is also known as “crap.” You could substitute the word “goods” every time you see the word “Stuff,” but since goods are so often anything but good—i.e., excessively packaged, toxics laden, unnecessary, and destructive of the planet—I don’t like to use that term.

  Sustainability:

  This word gets thrown around all the time now, and it’s not always clear what’s intended. Perhaps the most common definition of sustainability evolved from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development’s description of sustainable development: meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.7

  My definition of sustainability includes a couple of other key concepts. For one thing, sustainability must include equity and justice. As astrophysicist and writer Robert Gilman defines it, “sustainability is equity over time.”8 Also, sustainability requires looking at the big picture, not just the sustainability of a specific forest or the climate in isolation, not just our household or city or country, but the whole enchilada. The Center for Sustainable Communities says that sustainability “consider[s] the whole instead of the specific. Sustainability emphasizes relationships rather than pieces in isolation.”9

  KEY TO RECURRING GRAPHICS

  A Sign of Hope:

  This drawing indicates that progress is being made on this issue, for example that there is growing awareness of the problem, inspiring citizen action or legislation in progress that will improve the situation.

  Another Way:

  This symbol means I’m presenting a viable alternative to the problematic status quo, for example green chemists developing safe compounds to replace the toxins used in production processes.

  CHAPTER 1

  EXTRACTION

  In order to make all the Stuff in our lives, we first need to get the ingredients. Now, some of these don’t occur naturally—the man-made synthetic compounds—and we’ll cover them too. However, many ingredients for our Stuff exist inside the earth or on its surface. They only need to be harvested or extracted... Only!

  Once we start examining them, we soon find that each key ingredient requires a lot of other ingredients just to get it out of the earth, processed, and ready for use. In the case of paper, for example, we don’t just need trees. We need metals to make the chainsaws and logging machines; trucks, trains, and even ships to cart the logs to processing plants; and oil to run all those machines and the plants themselves. We need water (a lot of it) for making the paper pulp. We usually need a chemical like bleach (no!) or hydrogen peroxide (better) to get a desirably light shade of paper. All in all, making one ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various other resources.1 And believe me when I say that’s a pretty simple example. That’s why we have to look at the whole materials economy, and often a map of the world, to get a clear picture of the ingredients that go into any one product on store shelves these days.

  There are lots of ways to think about the various resources that come from the earth. For simplicity’s sake I’ll use just three categories: trees, rocks, and water.

  Trees

  As I said in the introduction, having grown up in Seattle, a green city in an even greener state, I love trees. Half of the land area in Washington State is covered in forests,2 and I visited them every chance I had. Over the course of my childhood I watched in dismay as more and more forests gave way to roads and malls and houses.

  As I grew older, I learned that there are more than sentimental reasons to worry about the fate of our trees. Trees create oxygen, which—may I remind us—we need to breathe. That alone would seem sufficient motivation for us to keep them intact. As the lungs of the planet, forests work around the clock to remove carbon dioxide from the air (a process called carbon sequestration) and give us oxygen in return. These days scientists concerned about climate change research all sorts of elaborate, expensive, man-made schemes to sequester carbon from the atmosphere in hopes of moderating climate change. Seems like a waste if you ask me. We already have a natural system that not only sequesters carbon but also provides the exact kind of air we need to breathe: our trees. And their services are free! It doesn’t get much better than that.

  And there’s more—forests provide other vital services. They collect and filter our fresh water, maintaining the planet’s overall hydrologic cycle and moderating floods and droughts. They maintain soil health by keeping the nutrient-rich topsoil in place. What are we thinking, destroying these obvious allies?

  To name just one more reason that it’s a terrible idea to cut down forests: one-quarter of all our prescription drugs are derived from forests—rainforests in particular.3 Curare, an anesthetic and muscle relaxant used in surgery4; ipecac, for treating dysentery5; and quinine, for malaria6 are just a few examples. Not long ago, western chemists were turned on to a plant native to the tropical forests of Madagascar, the rosy periwinkle, after learning that the island’s healers used it to treat diabetes. It turns out the pink-flowering plant has anticancer properties, and is now used to make the medicines vincristine and vinblastine. The former is used to treat Hodgkin’s disease, and the latter has proven to be a total wonder drug for those suffering from childhood leukemia, who now have a 95 percent chance of survival, up from their previous slim 10 percent chance before the plant was discovered.7

  (Unfortunately, even though sales of the two drugs are in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year, almost none of this money winds up in the hands of the people in Madagascar, which is one of the poorest countries in the world.8 This will be a recurring theme.)

  It’s nuts to be wiping out forests anywhere on the globe, but it’s especially crazy to be clearing the tropical rainforests because they contain such richness of biodiversity. Generally, the closer forests are to the equator, the greater the diversity of trees and other species they contain. A twenty-five-acre plot of rainforest in Borneo, for instance, can contain more than seven hundred species of trees, which is equal to the total number of tree species in all of North America.9

  And the plants and other life we’ve discovered so far are just the beginning; most scientists estimate that only 1 percent of the species that exist in the rainforest (and only there) have been identified and examined for their beneficial properties.10

  If the loss wasn’t so tragic, it would be ironic that these invaluable repositories of not-yet-discovered useful chemicals are being cleared in the name of “progress” and “development.” It seems to me a far wiser development strategy would be protecting these forests that will potentially heal our ills (as well as provide the air we breathe, clean our waters, and moderate our climate).

  When I was kid savoring my time camping out in the forest, I hadn’t ever heard of carbon sequestration, hydrologic cycles, or plant-derived pharmaceuticals. Instead, one big reason I loved forests was the many animals that lived in them. Forests provide homes for about two-thirds of the species on earth11—from koala bears, monkeys, and leopards to butterflies, lizards, parrots, you name it. Cutting down these homes, especially in areas of rich biodiversity like tropical rainforests, leads to the extinction of as many as one hundred species a day.12 One hundred species per day? For some perspective, think of all the dogs you’ve ever seen; worldwide, they make up fewer than ten species (genus Canis).13 And there’s only one species of human! Losing one hundred species a day is a big deal. Those species could contain miracle medicines or could play some vital irreplaceable role in the food chain. Wiping them out is like throwing out our lottery ticket before we have even checked if we had the winning number.

  Imagine for a minute that some other species (maybe Periplaneta fuliginosa, aka the smokybrown cockroach) had control over the planet and was eradicating one hun
dred species per day to satisfy their appetites. What would we say about them? We might think their actions were a little unfair. What would we do about them? Lead an insurrection? Of course, we might not have a chance—from one day to the next we could just be extinguished, along with ninety-nine other lesser species.

  And trees don’t just house wildlife—around the world about 300 million people live in forests, while about 60 million indigenous people are almost wholly dependent on them.14 Forests are the main source of life for more than a billion people living in extreme poverty.15 Forests provide the “four F’s” essential for survival: food, fodder, fiber, and fuel. From healthy forests, indigenous, tribal, or other forest-dwelling communities gather or hunt for food, feed livestock, obtain materials to build homes, and collect firewood for cooking and heat.

  As I was growing up in Seattle, my primary relationship with forests was based on a fifth F: fun. I relied on the forests for hiking, camping, birding, and cross-country skiing, not for building materials. If I needed a snack, I’d head for the fridge, not the forest. Even after studying the issue, my understanding of the connection between forests and immediate survival was academic, not experiential. It wasn’t until I went overseas that I realized how directly forests sustain life in other countries.

  While traveling in the once lush Haitian countryside, I met families who had lost their homes after forests were cleared. After the destruction of the roots that held the soil in place and moderated water flows following a heavy rain, mudslides took the homes of those families. No forests, no flood control. In India, I saw women walking miles a day to collect branches to feed cows, patch roofs, or cook rice. No forests, no fodder, fiber, or fuel. Forests are essential to life. The values of all these kinds of services dwarf the price of timber from a felled forest.