story of stuff

The lady in the documentary mentioned that linear system isn’t able to work on planet indefinitely, because every steps along the system is reaching its limits.

All the process in each step did not taken the people into the account, what it means is that, no one knows there are actually organizations behind each process. Eg government, however corporations > government because globally, within 10 largest economies, 49 own by government and 51 own by corporations.

Extraction is a fancy word replacing natural resource exploitation  which is another fancy word for trashing the planet. We have to understand that there are limited resource on the planet for us to “extract”, in the pass few decades alone, we have used up 1/3 of the natural resources. The manufactories then use these natural resource along with toxic chemical and energy to create toxic contained products, then human consumes or exposes to these toxin, the worst is that the food product by the top of the food chain for the top of the food chain is breast milk, which is fed to the next generation. U.S. alone releases 4 billions lbs of toxic waste.

Corporations able to sell product so cheap which is impossibly profitable, because they externalizing the cost, in other words low price product are due to the fact that in each processing stage, community or natural environment pay for the cost, in other words damaging the environment, exploiting underage workers, deduct worker’s health insurance. Their goal is to keep the inventory of toxic contaminated goods moving and keep the price low by exploiting (shown above) and keep the customers buying.

U.S. after 911 president bush convince the general to continue to shop, like jimmy carter said in one of his announcement “ we are no longer identify ourselves of who we are by what one does, but what one owns…” usa primer public value is based upon how much they consume, however 99% of product in U.S. are trashed 6 months after consumption and ironically U.S.  ultimate goal is to produce sustainable consumer goods

Planned obsolescence – Design for the dump

Perceived obsolescence – throw away things that are working fine, but they change the look of it, so that the trend leads the way, and people who don’t have the newer version, it shows you have not contributed into the value system as part of the national consuming community

National happiness in usa peaked at 1950s, right before the consumerism exploded

Recycle isn’t enough even if 100% of household trash is recycled, because the factory produces 70 bins of trash to create your one bin of garbage.