Make Good PlacesI wrote a little bit about the role stuff plays in our identity and wellbeing recently. This is the second part of a four-part series on how to live well in the age of overconsumption.
Here’s the thing—our love of stuff has led us astray. Our way of making, owning, and using stuff has gone terribly wrong. We’ve made too much, gone overboard, and now the world is drowning in human-made stuff. And it’s (largely) America’s fault.
Here are a few mind-boggling statistics that highlight just how bad the state of our stuff-making has become and how it is the last thing our planet needs in the age of the climate crisis, all courtesy of the brilliant Sandra Goldmark:
- "The United States generates 150 million tons of landfill annually."
- "The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but consumes 30% of the world’s resources and creates 30% of the world’s waste. If everybody consumed at U.S. rates, we would need 3 to 5 planets."
- "In the past ten years, consumption by individuals in the United States has continued to grow steadily."
- "Household consumption represents up to 60 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and accounts for between 50 and 80 percent of total land, material, and water use. This includes our houses, our cars, our food, and our stuff. Of that household total, stuff represents 17 percent of emissions, and is the second-largest contributor to the “material footprint,” that is to say, resource and raw materials extraction. Put another way, by the US Environmental Protection Agency, “The extraction of natural resources; the production, transport, and disposal of goods, and the provision of services account for an estimated 29% of 2006 U.S. anthropogenic GHG emissions."
- "Stuff overflows our landfills, litters our beaches, and degrades into an enormous Pacific garbage plastic soup bigger than Texas. Manufacturing our stuff has been implicated in health problems in communities around the world, shoddy labor practices, and such tragedies as the Rana Plaza collapse—the deadliest garment factory accident in history."
Those of us in the United States, particularly the wealthiest among us, are buying and consuming goods without anywhere for them to go. We have finite space on this planet, and yet we’re producing and consuming goods with virgin materials without limit. It fundamentally makes no sense.
Psychologists Joseph Chancellor and Sonja Lyumbomirsky illustrate an endless cycle of acquisition and adaptation, referred to as the “hedonic treadmill,” in their hedonic adaptation prevention model (HAP). The HAP model shows how the pleasure one derives from a new purchase(s) both diminishes over time and creates higher and more unrealistic expectations for future purchases. Continuously rising expectations and aspirations, paired with diminishing positive emotional returns, drive people to consume more and more. All of us have multilayered expectations for something when we purchase it, and the HAP model shows that these expectations become continuously more complex and unrealistic the more we buy. This mentality towards stuff is both dangerous and rampant in the United States.
The story of stuff does not unfold with people as its only protagonist, though. This uniquely human dependence upon the things we make holds enormous—and dangerous—implications for the environment and all of the non-human beings that need the environment’s natural resources to survive, largely due to the material ingredients we use in the creation of our stuff.
We’re making and throwing away too many things with nowhere to put them. Worst yet, most of our stuff today is plastic.
What’s In Our Stuff?
Synthetic materials like polyester, nylon, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene, polystyrene— they’re all forms of plastics derived from petrochemicals (oil and gas). Why? Because it’s cheaper and easier for companies to manufacture. But the long-term impacts of these materials are all largely unstudied and untested, and we’re just now seeing some of the fallout from decades of plastic-driven manufacturing.
Science journalist Matt Simon explores the impact of microplastics in his 2022 book, A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. Researchers have long known that indoor air tends to be much more polluted than outdoor air (2-5 times more polluted than outside), but Simon cites multiple studies that showed just how many plastic pollutants sit in our air. Simon refers to a study that tested the indoor and outdoor air at the California State University Channel Islands campus. They found high concentrations of microfibers “suspended in the air indoors and discovered that microplastic fragments had become airborne as well. The more foot traffic the area had, the higher the microfiber count.” This is particularly alarming because people have a tendency to put more durable materials in high-traffic areas, and these durable options are almost always synthetic. The study found “more than six times the number of microfibers indoors as they did outdoors: with little airflow inside, the particles suspend in the air, waiting to be breathed in.” Simon’s research found that experts estimate that each us may shed a billion polyester microfibers in the air just by moving around.
Microfibers come from our clothes, rugs, blankets, toys, and upholstered furniture like sofas and chairs. All of these fabrics shed, especially as they are used, washed, and worn down. We can be exposed to these microfibers (microplastics) not only through inhalation but also through ingestion of food and drinks, hand-to-mouth ingestion, dermal absorption, and breastfeeding or placenta transfer. It should also be noted that there are countless other potential exposures to microplastics beyond synthetic fabrics, notably things like takeout containers, teflon and nonstick pots and pans, and interior and exterior paints, among others. Furthermore, risks of toxic chemical exposures also lie in the widespread use of plastic.
Plastics—and by extension microplastics—are comprised of polymers that are made up of thousands of different chemicals. These chemicals have wide-ranging health implications for us and our environment, including cancer, diabetes, fertility issues, developmental and neurological issues, asthma and respiratory issues, allergy sensitivities, and immunology issues. The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 grandfathered in thousands of untested chemicals used widely in our consumer goods; the EPA has only regulated a handful since.
The Body Burden Studies originally published in 2005 found, “an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals.” These chemicals are the same ones found in the air quality studies mentioned above. Since 2005, we have found microplastics in human blood, lungs, and stool. We’re just now starting to understand how synthetics change our biology, but we’re already drowning in them.
And it’s not just us—the end users—who are impacted by the toxicity of synthetic materials. The mountains of stuff we produce originate in an extractive, exploitative system from start to finish. We extract raw materials from the earth that we cannot afford to give up. Then, we pay often abysmal wages to those in poorer countries to turn that raw material into a usable product, frequently in unsafe, dangerous conditions with even more toxic chemicals that pose serious threats to their health. Once products make their way to wealthier countries, they’re used for a small fraction of their useful life before ending up in landfills, leeching chemicals into the surrounding environment. The health and safety of the waters, soil, plants, animals, and people involved with and near both the creation and disposal of toxic products are jeopardized. After chemicals and pollutants make their way into our waters and soils, they infiltrate the food we grow and re-expose us to microplastics and chemicals as we eat. Consider the plastics in your home, and in your immediate surroundings. There’s a lot, right? Now consider how many homes there are and how much of those plastics will end up in landfills and oceans. If we’re drowning in microplastics, I can’t imagine how much plastic our planet—our oceans, rivers, swamps, ecosystems, our aquatic life—is negotiating.
Winona LaDuke, in the book Healthy Materials: Design Frontiers, suggests that, instead of trying to replace every unsustainable and toxic item that fills our lives and homes, we should recognize that “maybe we need a little less stuff.”
She’s right. She’s right for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that all of this stuff is not making us happier or healthier. Now that we know that there are major health implications involved in the creation and use of the enormous volume of synthetic goods we’re producing, we have to ask ourselves if it’s worth it. Are we any happier with all of this stuff?
My answer—and those of experts at the top of various fields—is no. What drives health and happiness is not stuff.
Sustainability has long been stuck with a narrative of self-sacrifice; of doing more with less. While there may be some element of truth in that, what our economic system tells us we need is very different from what we actually need to live happy, fulfilled lives. I’m not saying you should give things up just because the planet is in crisis (though this is a worthy idea all the same). Instead, I’m saying that the stuff that litters our lives most often is not making us happy.
