The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [55]
Each new generation of technical improvements in electronic products should include parallel and proportional improvements in environmental, health and safety as well as social justice attributes.76
If semiconductor capacity can double every two years, how about likewise halving the number of toxic chemicals and doubling the usable life span of these same devices every two years? Sadly, more than ten years since the Soesterberg Principles were adopted, technical improvements continue to get far more attention and make far greater progress than corresponding environmental and health improvements. And the vast majority of the environmental health advances that computer companies have made have only come after sustained campaigns by NGOs. Those NGOS—Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Clean Production Action, Electronics TakeBack Coalition, Good Electronics, Greenpeace, Basel Action Network, and others—are going to continue to work hard to press the electronics industry for improvements, but it would be a lot easier for us all if electronics producers embraced sustainability and social goals as seriously as technological and economic goals.
In the meantime, what I do is resist the impulse to trash my old electronics and replace them with the latest, shiniest versions. My appointment book and 2006 laptop do just fine.
Stupid Stuff
Some consumer products are so inherently toxic or wasteful or energy intensive that improving production just isn’t a viable option and it would be better to just stop making and using them. If I could wave a magic wand and do away with two everyday items in order to have a huge positive impact on human health and the well-being of our planet, those two things would be aluminum cans and PVC. And if you’re looking for some really easy, immediate things you can do to lessen your own impact, start by eliminating these two toxic and totally unnecessary materials from your life.
Platinum—I Mean Aluminum—Cans
As I was walking along in downtown San Francisco the other day, two enthusiastic promoters were handing out freebies of some new caffeinated drink. “Try it! It’s fair trade! It’s made with organic ingredients! It’s good for you and the earth!” I declined the offer and decided not to rain on their feel-good parade by telling them what a joke it is that a fair-trade organic drink is packaged inside one of the most energy-intensive, CO2-producing, waste-generating products on the planet: a single-use, single-serving aluminum can.
In the United States we consume about 100 billion cans per year, or 340 per person: almost one a day. That’s ten times more than the average European and twice as many as the average Canadian, Australian, or Japanese. In places like China and India, people are only consuming about 10 cans per person per year on average (with wide disparities between social classes), although that number is expected to rise as their economies explode.77 People like cans because they’re light, they don’t break, they chill quickly, and they have a reputation for being widely recycled. If the real story were more widely known, people might stop using aluminum cans so carelessly.
A can starts its life as a reddish ore called bauxite, which gets strip-mined in Australia, Brazil, Jamaica, and a few other tropical spots.78 The mining displaces native people and animals and cuts down legions of those brave soldiers in the war against global warming—the trees.
The bauxite is transported elsewhere to be washed, pulverized, mixed with caustic soda, heated, settled, and filtered until what’s left is about half the