The Story of stuff by Annie Leonard

In this video, Annie Leonard talks about the materials economy which is a process that includes extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal. People live and work all along the system.

Extraction: in the past three decades alone, one-third of the planet’s natural resources base have been consumed. For example, The U.S has 5% of the world’s population but they’re consuming 30% of the world’s resources and creating 30% of the world’s waste.

Production: there are over 100000 synthetic chemicals in commerce today. As long as we keep putting toxics into our production system, we are going to keep getting toxics in the stuff that we bring into our homes, workplaces schools and our bodies.

Distribution: means selling all this toxic contaminated junk as quickly as possible.

Consumption: is the heart of the system. 99 percent of the stuff we run through this system is trashed within 6 months. The average U.S people now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago. Planned obsolescence means they actually make stuff that is designed to be useless as quickly as possible so we will chuck it and buy a new one. Perceives obsolescence convinces us to throw away stuff that is still perfectly useful. Fashion, advertisements and media play a big role in this.

Disposal: She says each of us in the United States makes four and a half pounds of garbage a day. That is twice what we each made thirty years ago. All of this garbage either gets dumped in a landfill or first it’s burned in an incinerator and then dumped in a landfill. Either way, both pollute the air, land, water and change the climate. However, recycling can help to reduce the garbage but not enough. One reason is the waste coming out of our houses is just the tip of the iceberg and another reason is that much of the garbage can not be recycled either because it contains too many toxics or it’s actually designed not recycled in the first place.

It’s a system in crisis, but the good thing is that there are so many points of intervention. People working on saving forests and clean production. Green Chemistry, Zero waste, closed loop production, renewable energy, local living economies are already happening. Annie Leonard recommends people to find a creative new way instead of the old one. In conclusion, going back to industrial design, what designers need to pay attention is that they need to create stuff that not only functional and make people feel happy, but also using right materials which are environmentally friendly. This is very important.