The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [15]
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 shooters (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,