The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [168]
The air is clean nowadays, for two main reasons. The first is that personal cars have almost totally disappeared, while the punctual public transit system now serves every corner of the city, powered on clean, renewable energy. The second is that polluting industries have become extinct, driven out by the one-two-three punch of high taxes on carbon, waste, and pollutants; the high price of virgin raw materials; and government incentives for clean industries.
Because of the strict ban of toxic chemicals, on top of the costs of repairing their past damages to public health and the environment, industries can no longer afford to use hazardous chemicals in products. Green chemists and biomimicry experts have stepped in to provide nontoxic alternatives for everything from parabens and phthalates in cosmetics to fire retardants in furniture to PVC in toys. Inefficient and toxic buildings have been retrofitted and people are no longer allergic to their homes and offices.
We are well under way with the conversion to an ecologically compatible economy. Governments around the world have collaboratively instated a team of biologists, climatologists, and ecologists to work out what levels of consumption and emission are sustainable within the earth’s limits and in keeping with social equity. We don’t use natural resources faster than they can be replenished by the planet; we distribute those precious resources fairly and sensibly; and we are near our target of zero waste. There is no such thing as extraneous packaging now, eliminating a gigantic portion of the former waste stream. We generate organic wastes at levels at which they can be composted, returning their valuable nutrients to the soil.
Designers, engineers, and technology types constantly invent and improve on ways to do more with the resources we already have. Businesspeople cooperate to maximize resource efficiency and minimize waste, and “industrial ecology,” in which the waste of one factory is used as the raw materials of the next, is widespread. An increasing number of businesses are worker owned, and in those that aren’t, union membership is welcome.
We have a different relationship with Stuff. Because externalized costs have been internalized at every stage from extraction of natural resource to product distribution, Stuff is much more expensive. We have realized that much of the Stuff we used to buy just wasn’t worth it—neither in terms of its impact on the planet or the amount of our own time we devoted to paying for and maintaining it. There are other things we’d rather devote our time to now. Most communities have vibrant local economies with a healthy margin of goods, especially food, textiles, and energy, sourced from local production. Disposable goods are extremely expensive and rare. Products are built to last, and many of them are leased with service agreements, rather than purchased by consumers. At the end of their useful lives, products are taken back by the companies that made them and repaired or disassembled for parts.
This means that maintenance, repair, and disassembly—as opposed to production—are much more important sources of employment than before. So are science and technology. Without as much economic growth as before, we can’t maintain full employment—but nobody’s complaining. Instead, people work part-time with full benefits, often with an ownership stake in the business.
Resource use is taxed, allowing for basic-needs-based levels of use with minimal or no taxes, but placing higher taxes on higher-volume use. This raises the price of those resources and encourages people and industries to use them efficiently and sparingly.