The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [79]
Today we are running out of resources, while our population continues to grow. Yet our productive technologies have not kept up with this reality. We are still using processes that consume and waste huge amounts of energy and materials, acting as though both the supply of resources and the planet’s ability to assimilate waste and pollution are endless. We’re still celebrating economic activity that undermines the planet’s very ability to support life. We have to figure out how to transform our production systems yet again: to make far less Stuff and far better Stuff.
Starting Upstream
The very first stage of production—way before we start the physical production—is the most important and least visible step: design. The design determines:
which ingredients need to be extracted or created
the amount of energy used in making and using the product
the presence or absence of toxic chemicals
the length of the product’s life span
the ease or difficulty of repair
its ability to be recycled
the harm caused by burying or burning the product if it’s not recyclable
Architect Bill McDonough, an internationally renowned sustainability guru, calls design the “first sign of human intent.”183 Is our intent to make the cheapest-possible electronic gizmo to feed the latest consumer frenzy? Or is our intent to make a nontoxic, durable product made of ecologically compatible materials that provides a needed service, adds to society’s well-being, can be easily upgraded and repaired as technology advances, and can ultimately be recycled or composted at the end of its life?
Changes in design can involve incremental improvements, like removing a particular toxin from use in one product line. Or the changes can be truly transformational, as a result of rethinking some of our long-held, and limiting, assumptions—our paradigms. For example, the assumptions that “pollution is the price of progress” or that “we must choose between jobs and the environment” have long limited our creative thinking about innovative solutions that can be good for the environment, the workers, and a healthy economy. We can’t transform the system of Stuff unless we transform the way we think.
That said, it’s good to remember that even incremental changes, when replicated over millions of consumer products, can make a difference. Getting lead out of gasoline, for example, had enormous benefits in protecting public health, especially the developing brains of children. That one change saved millions of IQ points worldwide. In February 2009, a group of mobile phone manufacturers and operators announced a commitment to design mobile phone chargers to be usable on any phone regardless of make or model, and to be far more energy efficient.184
I received news of this commitment while visiting Washington, D.C. Rushing to get ready for the trip, I had left my cell phone charger at home. I had a jam-packed week of meetings and was relying on my phone to ensure smooth logistics. Not wanting to buy a replacement charger for just a week’s use, I asked the hotel if any previous forgetful guest had happened to leave behind a charger that would fit my phone. The desk clerk brought out a cardboard box with literally dozens of cell phone chargers, each neatly wrapped with their cords. I tried twenty-three chargers before finding one that fit my phone!
Changing the shape of the charger’s jack is a small thing, but mobile phone industry representatives expect this simple design change could reduce the production of phone chargers by half, which in turn could reduce greenhouse gases in manufacturing and transporting replacement chargers by at least 10 to 20 million tons per year.185 The mobile phone companies’ press releases made interchangeable chargers sound revolutionary, but really, it could have been part of the original intent when cell phones were first being designed and developed.
One of the most exciting trends in truly revolutionary design is called biomimicry, in which design solutions are inspired by nature. After all, as the Biomimicry Institute notes,