THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  There are loads of examples of making intense resource efficiency a design goal, such as reduced packaging or redesigning products to contain fewer materials, which is known as “light-weighting.” Other design strategies include making Stuff more:

  Durable: So products last longer and don’t need to be discarded and replaced so quickly.

  Repairable: This has the added benefit of producing jobs.

  Recyclable: Materials should be chosen for their ability to maintain their integrity when recycled. Some materials degrade quickly, while others can be recycled many times.

  Adaptable: Instead of chucking our cell phones, laptops, etc. when new features become available, these items can have removable, update-able components, like lenses on a camera. The initial extra material or financial investment to make this change systemwide will be far outweighed by the costs saved on reduced extraction of new materials.

  Our most brilliant minds can and should be let loose on cutting-edge industrial design that focuses not on improving just speed and style, but on dematerializing—using fewer resources. For example, digital music has replaced tons of vinyl records, plastic cassettes, and CD jewel cases. Sleek flat-screen TVs and monitors are replacing old washing machine-sized ones. Packaging has been made thinner, lighter. In lots of arenas, resource use per product is decreasing. (Unfortunately this progress can be canceled out if overall consumption rates don’t likewise slow down.)

  2. At the Back End

  Vast amounts of metals, paper, wood, and water wasted each year can be recycled or reused. Once materials have been extracted and processed, it is far better to keep them in use than to chuck them and go blow up more mountaintops or clear-cut more forests. (This is not true for toxic compounds, like PVC plastic, or heavy metals like lead and mercury, which should not be recycled but should be pulled out of use and replaced with nontoxic, ecologically compatible materials.)

  3. In Our Hearts and Minds

  We can and should always be asking the question, are there nonmaterial ways to meet our needs? For example, a diamond set in a gold ring doesn’t equal love—love equals love! Listening well, being respectful, offering to help out, tenderness and intimacy: that’s what equals love in my book. How can we show our affection, engage our kids, and amuse ourselves without using more and more resources? Rather than our status being signaled by the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the size of our homes, can’t status be based upon kindness, experience, and wisdom? Let’s get creative, people!

  And we can get back to that essential social activity known as sharing. Car-sharing programs such as Zipcar, tool-lending libraries like the one offered by the City of Berkeley, and good old-fashioned borrowing between neighbors are great strategies for less resource intensive ways to meet our needs. This approach has the added benefit of building community and strengthening interpersonal relationships, which psychologists and social scientists have proven to be an important factor in mental health and happiness.

  CHAPTER 2

  PRODUCTION

  If you were surprised by how complicated it turns out to be to assemble a list of natural ingredients from the forests and rivers and mountains, and how extractive industries have impacts that you never considered (civil wars!), just wait. The next stage—production—might make your head spin. “Production” is the term for taking all the separate ingredients, mixing them together in processes that use lots of energy, and turning them into our Stuff.

  In the previous chapter I described how we get most of the materials and all the energy needed for production. However, there’s one last category of ingredient that isn’t found on top of the earth, or even underneath its surface: synthetic materials. Chemists combine molecules to create polymers, which make things harder, stretchier, softer, stickier, glossier, more absorbent, longer lasting, or flame or pest or water resistant. They also make alloys, or combinations of metals mixed together to give them specific properties—for example, stainless steel combines the strength of iron with the anticorroding qualities of chromium. Other common synthetic materials include plastics, polyester, and ceramics.

  Today, there are about one hundred thousand synthetic compounds in use in modern industrial production.1 They are so ubiquitous that most of the Stuff we’re used to having in our lives can’t be made without synthetic ingredients, or it can’t be made with quite the same qualities (not quite as shiny or stretchy or what have you). Now, synthetics aren’t inherently good or bad. Some are even made from natural ingredients while others are wholly developed in a laboratory. The distinction is simply that the new compound is something that didn’t exist naturally on earth.

  The trouble with synthetics is that most of them are a big unknown in terms of their impacts on our health and the health of the planet. Because few of them have been tested in the half century or so that most of them have been around,2 we run a risk by using them and exposing ourselves to them. The old thinking about chemical ingredients was that low enough exposure prevented health risks. But as was proved in the groundbreaking research of Dr. Theo Colborn and Dr. John Peterson Myers, environmental scientists and coauthors (with Dianne Dumanoski) of the 1996 book Our Stolen Future, low-dose exposures over time can have tragic outcomes, with the worst fallout from even infinitesimal levels of chemical contamination showing up in the next generation(s) as reduced intelligence, lowered immunity, ADD, infertility, cancer, and other potential effects of which we’re not even yet aware.3 In the upcoming section on dangerous materials I’ll talk about the negative impacts of some of the synthetics that we’ve already been able to track.

  But first, now that we’ve got the gamut of necessary ingredients—stacks of logs, tankers of water, mounds of metals, barrels of petroleum, piles of coal, yards of synthetic fibers, vats of chemical compounds, etc.—it’s time to peer into some factories and witness our Stuff being made.

  Of course, the process of production looks different for different kinds of Stuff. But there are also similarities—for example, every single production process requires an input of energy, and right now this is nearly always provided by burning coal or oil. I decided to approach the overwhelming number of production processes that are out there by investigating just a few of my favorite things, along with a few of my least favorite.

  My Cotton T-Shirt

  What a great invention, right? It’s comfy, breathable, washable, absorbent, and versatile. I can wear it under a blazer to an important meeting, over a swimsuit at the beach, or with my jeans—plus or minus a sweater—in just about every season. I can pick one up almost anywhere, even the grocery store or drugstore, and I’ll only have to spend $6.99 or $4.99 or maybe even $1.99 if I get a multipack or catch a sale. What’s not to love? Well, let’s see...

  I intentionally leave out agricultural products and food in telling the Story of Stuff; there are plenty of other people, books, and films covering those issues. But to unravel the story of my T-shirt, which provides a window into the whole textiles industry, we have to start out in the fields. Fluffy, thirsty, toxic: that could be the tagline for cotton, a shrub native to the tropics but today grown in the United States, Uzbekistan, Australia, China, India, and small African countries like Benin and Burkina Faso, with total global production at more than 25 million tons per year, or enough to make fifteen T-shirts for every person on earth.4

  Cotton plants love water—in fact it’s one of the world’s most heavily irrigated crops.5 And irrigation—with the exception of drip irrigation, currently used in a mere 0.7 percent of world irrigation systems—wastes a lot of water through seepage and evaporation.6

  One of the big issues with cotton and water brings us back to the concepts of virtual water and the water footprint introduced in the last chapter; cotton-buying countries are using up tons of water outside their borders. For example, about half of the 176 cubic yards (135 cubic meters) of water used per year for cotton consumption per person in the United States come from outside the United States.7 In Europe, a full 84 per
cent of the cotton-related water footprint comes from elsewhere in the world,8 which means U.S. and European consumers are essentially soaking up the water of cotton-producing countries elsewhere, decreasing the water available to people in those places, and leaving them to figure out how to handle the resulting water scarcity problems. (Note that the water footprints refer to water use not just in growing but also processing cotton, as well as the water pollution caused by both.) With global water scarcity increasing and impacting public health in a huge way, this scenario is downright unfair and is reason enough to pause before adding yet another cotton t-shirt to our already full drawers.

  One of the most tragic examples of water depletion is the former Soviet state of Uzbekistan, where state-run cotton farms drained the rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea, the world’s fourth-largest inland sea, reducing its volume of water by 80 percent between 1960 and 2000 and creating a near desert out of the once green and fertile area.9 The shrinking of the Aral Sea has literally changed the climate of the area, causing shorter, hotter summers and colder winters, less rainfall, and tremendous dust storms. The dust carries salt and pesticides including DDT, which are resulting in a host of public health crises. Growing cotton is not just depleting the quantity of water, it’s also damaging the quality of water that remains; there’s less water overall and what remains is increasingly polluted by agricultural chemicals.10 And we’re talking about a ton of chemicals.

  Though it takes up just 2.5 percent of the world’s croplands, cotton uses 10 percent of the world’s fertilizers and 25 percent of its insecticides11; agribusiness spends nearly $2.6 billion worth of pesticides on cotton plants every year.12 Farmers in the United States apply nearly one-third of a pound of chemical fertilizers and pesticides for every pound of cotton harvested.13 Many of the pesticides (which include insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides like aldicarb, phorate, methamidophos, and endosulfan) are among the most hazardous chemicals and carcinogens in existence and were originally developed by scientists for simultaneous use as nerve agents in warfare alongside their use as insecticides.14

  In conventional cotton farming, chemicals are first sprayed on the fields before planting to fumigate the soil. The cotton seeds themselves are often dipped in fungicide. Then the plants are sprayed with pesticides several times over the course of the growing season.15

  These chemicals are indiscriminate: they kill beneficial insects and microorganisms in the soil in addition to bugs that eat the cotton plants. Snuffing out the good bugs means eliminating the natural predators of bad bugs, which creates the need for yet more pesticides. Meanwhile more than 500 species of insects, 180 weeds, and 150 fungi have developed resistance to pesticides.16 All of this keeps chemical companies busy developing more, while farmers get stuck on “pesticide treadmills.” Further compounding the problem, industrial agriculture has whittled hundreds of diverse species of cotton down to just a handful of varieties; the common practice known as monocropping (planting farms with just one variety) makes farms even more vulnerable to pests, which love to feed on big fields of one consistent meal.

  Even when used according to instructions, pesticides drift into neighboring communities, contaminate groundwater and surface water as well as animals like fish, birds, and humans—and, above all, the farmworkers. Cotton workers frequently suffer from neurological and vision disorders. In one study of pesticide illnesses in my state, California, cotton ranked third for total number of pesticide-caused worker illnesses.17

  In many developing countries where environmental regulations are less stringent, the amount of pesticides, and their toxicity, is even greater, while workers are provided with even fewer safety precautions. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization points out that farmers in many developing countries use antiquated, dangerous equipment, which is more likely to result in spills and poisonings.18 According to the Pesticide Action Network’s Organic Cotton Briefing Kit: “In India, 91% of male cotton workers exposed to pesticides eight hours or more per day experienced some type of health disorder, including chromosomal aberrations, cell death and cell cycle delay... Pesticide poisoning remains a daily reality among agricultural workers in developing countries, where up to 14% of all occupational injuries in the agricultural sector and 10% of all fatal injuries can be attributed to pesticides.”19

  To top it all off, at harvest time the plants are sprayed with toxic chemical defoliants that strip off the leaves so they don’t stain the fluffy white bolls and so the bolls are more accessible to the mechanical pickers or “strippers.”20

  We’ve now left the cotton fields, but we’re still not even close to the finished product: my T-shirt. Taking the raw cotton and turning it into fabric requires a whole litany of industrial processes. The energy-sucking machines involved include a cotton gin that separates the fiber from the seeds, stems, and leaves, followed by machines that bundle the fibers into bales so they can be transported elsewhere, where more machines undo the bales, fluff the cotton, and press it into sheets called laps. Then come carding, combing, drawing, and spinning machines, which produce cotton thread. Finally weaving or knitting machines transform the cotton thread into fabric. But it’s still not the soft, bright fabric of my white T-shirt. It needs to be “finished.” This can involve “scouring,” which means boiling the fabric in an alkali like sodium hydroxide to remove impurities.21

  Next up: the color. Since my T-shirt is white, it’s going to get an especially strong dose of bleach—but even colored T’s get bleached before being dyed. (The dying process often uses benzene, heavy metals, formaldehyde fixing agents, and a whole host of chemicals, and because cotton naturally resists dyes, one-third of them run off into wastewater.) But back to my white one: to bleach its fabric, I can only hope hydrogen peroxide was used, but many companies outside the United States and Europe, where most garments are produced, are still likely to use chlorine.22 Chlorine is toxic on its own, but if it gets mixed with organic (carbon-containing) material, as can happen once the chlorine leaves the factory in wastewater, it becomes a carcinogen and neurotoxin.

  In the last stage before the fabric is trundled off to the sewing machines (or sometimes after it is sewn and assembled) it’s usually treated to become what the textile industry calls “easy care,” which means soft, wrinkle resistant, stain and odor resistant, fireproof, mothproof, and antistatic. Here we have one of the fabulous legacies of our post-1950s infatuation with science’s capacity to “simplify” our lives. So which magic potion did scientists find would keep fabric so carefree? Formaldehyde.23 This dangerous chemical (usually used as a building block of materials like resins and plastics) not only results in respiratory problems, burning eyes, and cancer, it can cause allergic contact dermatitis when it touches the skin.24 Um, I don’t know about you, but my clothes come into contact with my skin all the time. Other popular ingredients in this stage are caustic soda, sulfuric acid, bromines, urea resins, sulfonamides, and halogens.25 These can cause problems with sleep, concentration, and memory... and more cancer.

  Needless to say, it’s not only we wearers of cotton whose health is at risk: factory workers processing the fabrics are especially impacted, and the contaminated wastewater from these factories ultimately affects the entire global food chain. In fact, about one-fifth of the global footprint of cotton consumption is related to pollution from wastewater from fields and factories.26

  At last my T-shirt is ready to be born, and the finished cotton fabric is shipped off to the factory where this will happen. This is the stage we’ve heard the most about, on account of all the bad press that sweatshops have received. Sadly, despite the attention, the conditions for most garment workers are still horrendous. Many big brand clothing companies tend to seek out factories that pay the absolute lowest wages. Today this means places like Bangladesh and the “special economic zones” or “export processing zones” of China, where workers—squeezed into underlit, underventilated, deafening factories to perform mind-numbing, repetitive drudgery, sometimes for
eleven hours a day—receive wages as low as ten to thirteen cents per hour.27 Free speech and the right to form a trade union are routinely repressed as well. Child labor, though officially outlawed pretty much everywhere, still exists in shadowy pockets, most often employed when deadlines are tight.

  When I visited Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1990, I met with women who worked in sweatshops making clothing for Disney. This was six years before the New York–based National Labor Committee released its 1996 film Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti, exposing the hardships these workers face, but the plight of garment workers was already getting international attention and some of the women were nervous about speaking freely. Others weren’t shy, hoping their stories would be heard by people like me who might be able to shift Disney’s practices. Least shy of all was Yannick Etienne, the firebrand organizer from Batay Ouvriye (“Workers Fight”), who facilitated the meeting and translated the women’s stories.

  In the Haitian heat, we crowded into a tiny room inside a small cinder-block house. We had to keep the windows shuttered for fear that someone might see the workers speaking to us. These women worked day in and day out, sewing Disney apparel that they could never save enough to buy. Those lucky enough to be paid minimum wage earned about fifteen dollars a week for a six-day workweek, eight hours per day. Some of their overseers refused to pay minimum wage unless a certain number of garments were completed each shift. The women described the grueling pressure at work, routine sexual harassment, and other unsafe and demeaning conditions. Through international allies in the workers rights movement, they had learned that Disney’s CEO Michael Eisner made millions. In the year that Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti was released—1996—he made $8.7 million in salary plus $181 million in stock options, which comes out to $101,000 an hour.28 In contrast, these women were paid half of 1 percent of the sales price of the garment in the United States.