The Story of Stuff Project

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World’s top corporations cause $2.2 trillion in environmental damage

A study currently underway for the United Nations is calculating the cost of pollution and other environmental  damage caused by the 3,000 biggest public companies in the world. The study, which will be published this summer, has found that the economic cost of environmental damage by these top 3,000 companies is $2.2 trillion dollars, or more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable. This includes greenhouse gas emissions, other pollution, and water degradation. The final amount is likely to increase once additional costs – like toxic waste – are incorporated.

In an article about this upcoming report, the Guardian newspaper wrote: “The report comes amid growing concern that no one is made to pay for most of the use, loss and damage of the environment, which is reaching crisis proportions in the form of pollution and the rapid loss of freshwater, fisheries and fertile soils.”

So basically, what this upcoming report says is that a big chunk – about 1/3 – of the profits that these big companies are making is due to the fact that they are not paying the full costs of operating. They are shoving a whole range of costs – from pollution to climate change to water depletion – onto communities around the world – onto us! Communities around the world are bearing the costs with degraded health, soil, water and climate change. That’s just not fair.

In the Story of Stuff film, I talked about how externalized costs allowed me to buy a little radio for the irrationally low price of $4.99. This report in a good first step at showing the global scale of externalized costs. If we’re going to get our economy and environment back in order, a top priority must be forcing companies to pay the full costs of production. In economist-speak, this means internalizing externalities. That would be a strong motivator to get companies to invest in the cleaner, less polluting approaches and encourage all of us to avoid superfluous consumption. If the true cost of that cotton t-shirt or iPod was really included in the price tag, we might think twice before chucking and replacing it before we really need to. Think about that next time you look at those insanely low prices on so much consumer stuff – who is really paying the full cost of producing all this? Apparently not the companies which make it!

Remember in The Story of Stuff film, I talked about dioxin, a compound which is among the most toxic manmade chemicals known to science?

Dioxin is really nasty stuff. It causes a range of health problems, including cancer.  Dioxin is not created intentionally; no one sets up to actually make this super toxic poison. Instead, it is created as a byproduct and then released from a number of industrial processes including  burning garbage in incinerators, bleaching paper pulp with chlorine and the production of products as diverse as PVC plastic, pesticides, and Agent Orange. Because dioxin is connected to so many of today’s industrial processes, it is widely distributed in our communities where it builds up the food chain and eventually reaches each of our bodies.

Right now, those of us in the U.S. have a unique opportunity to  protect our communities from dioxin. (Of course, we also need to protect communities everywhere from dioxin and a good place to start on that front is IPEN, which is working on a global treaty to ban the most toxic chemicals, including dioxin.)

While preventing new dioxin is a better long term solution than cleaning it up after it has been produced and released, we still do need to clean up the stuff that is already contaminating our communities. The sooner, the better. This week, the U.S. EPA is seeking comments on its proposed cleanup guidelines for dioxin and the public comment period ends on Friday February 26th.

The EPA’s guidelines are a step in the right direction, but dioxin can be toxic at even very low levels of exposure, and that’s why we’re asking for your help to press EPA to develop stronger cleanup guidelines. We’re up against some of the biggest chemical polluters in the world – corporations like Dow Chemical.  We don’t have their big bucks but we have one thing they don’t — people power, people like you.

Please send a quick email, urging EPA to strengthen its proposed dioxin clean up guidelines, here.   Public comments are due Friday, February 26th, so please act this week.

There are many organizations working on stopping dioxin at source. In the U.S.  contact the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. Internationally contact IPEN. And if, like me, burning garbage in incinerators – which destroys resources and releases dioxin – makes you especially furious, contact GAIA to get involved in promoting safe and fair alternatives.

But first, send a quick message to EPA to ask them to make the strongest possible clean up standards for dioxin. Remember, public comment period ends on Friday, February 26th. While dioxin contamination may last forever, the public comment period doesn’t.

Thanks!
Annie

If you’re like me, an increasing amount of your worries these days focus on the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and the resulting potential for devastating climate chaos.

Years ago, when I first heard about climate change, I figured someone else would work all that out while I kept plodding away with my work on consumption, pollution and waste. Well, guess what? They didn’t work it out; in fact, the climate situation is far worse today than even recent scientific predictions. And guess what else? It turns out that climate and consumption are actually the same issue.

You see, most of the greenhouse gases countries emit come from our materials economy: the way we make, use, transport, and throw away all the stuff in our lives. As Boston College professor (and one of my favorite authors) Juliet Schor said “Global consumerism devours resources like there’s no tomorrow. And unless we address how much we consume, we won’t succeed in averting disastrous climate change.”

A majority of scientists now say we need to significantly reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere if we want the planet to resemble something close to what it is like today, supporting the kind of life that it does today. To do this, we simply have to use less Stuff – especially oil and coal. We have to rethink, redesign and rebuild a lot of things. We have to figure out different modes of transportation, growing food, building buildings, and having fun that don’t require endless new Stuff. It’s very possible to make these changes, but they won’t happen on their own. We need to get started.

Unfortunately, most of the world’s leaders and big businesses are instead promoting policy approaches that don’t bring us anywhere near the level of change that climate scientists say is needed—let’s call these “false solutions.” And there’s another problem with these policy approaches: the details are so technical and policy wonkish that it’s often hard to figure out what they are even talking about.

I wondered if it would be possible to explain the leading false solution, Cap and Trade, in a clear compelling way so that more of us are inspired to join the conversation. Working with Climate Justice Now!, the Durban Group for Climate Justice and Free Range Studios, we produced our new short film, The Story of Cap and Trade, to do just that.

We hope you like it. And more importantly, we hope it inspires you to get involved in the most important conversation of our lives.

We deeply appreciate the generous outpouring of support our Project has received over the past 48 hours in response to Glenn Beck’s continuing attack against the use of The Story of Stuff in classrooms across the country.

We created The Story of Stuff to get people thinking and talking. The result over the past two years—not to mention the past two days—speaks for itself.

The messages we’ve received from thousands of teachers and students who’ve seen the film—some of whom thoroughly disagreed with it—gives us confidence that young people are not only fully capable of engaging with the subject matter in the Story of Stuff, they’re asking for it. After all, they are the ones who will have to address climate change and the other environmental and social side effects of our throw away culture.

Beck’s line of attack appears to be motivated by the release of his new book: Arguing with Idiots.

But we have better things to do.

We’re developing a two-week educational curriculum—aligned to national standards, with a strong focus on critical thinking—that provides teachers with a fuller set of tools to help students consider and debate the message of The Story of Stuff.

In response to requests from thousands of faith-based institutions for more information, we’re field-testing a study program that helps people of faith explore how their religious beliefs connect with the message of The Story of Stuff.

We’re also in production on a set of new short films, the first of which we’ll be releasing this November.

We appreciate the new viewers, Facebook friends, contributions and other support that Beck has generated for us, but rather than respond to his outrageous claims, we’re going to stay focused on building the more sustainable, safe and just world our children, and all of us, deserve.

Thanks,

Annie Leonard and the Story of Stuff Project Team

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If you haven’t been to a landfill, I highly recommend it.  Transfer stations, where garbage is transferred from smaller trucks to bigger ones, and Materials Recovery Facilities, or MRFs, where some recyclables are pulled out of the trash before it is dumped, are also really interesting. Seeing the often-hidden back end of our materials economy can be a transformative, or at least a very thought provoking –if smelly – experience. Click Here to see pictures from our fieldtrip to the dump.

It was a trip to the landfill on Staten Island in New York City that first sparked my fascination with the way we make, use and throw away all the stuff in our lives. Ever since then, I’ve visited dumps whenever I visit a new city, all over the world. It is a great way to get insight into what is going on in a place, what the community values, how the people live.

If you visit one of these facilities in the U.S., you’ll see pretty quickly that we are humungous waste makers in this country. Nationally, we generate over 250 million tons of garbage each year, and that is only the municipal waste – or garbage – which doesn’t even include the much larger amounts of waste from industries, mining, and construction. We make enough garbage each year in the U.S. to fill  a convoy of 10-ton trucks long enough to wrap around the earth six times!  That’s a huge amount and it’s still increasing. In 1980, each of us in the U.S., on average, made about 3.6 pounds  (1.6 kg) of garbage per day; by 2007, this had increased to more than 4.6 pounds (2.1 kg).  It is an amazing thing to watch these gigantic trucks, sometimes lined up by the dozens, waiting to dump or move ever more garbage. It just goes on and on.

And what’s in these mountains of waste? Good Stuff! That is really what drives me nuts. It is stuff that could have been prevented, repaired, reused, or recycled. When our Story of Stuff team was watching “the pit” where the waste was dumped, we saw one truck unload perfectly good picnic table benches and a dozen big terra cotta pots full of plants. Augh, I’d been searching Freecycle for a bench just like that for my backyard. I briefly contemplated leaping into that cement pit to grab the bench, until I saw the big garbage smushing machine come by.

There was other stuff – electronics, furniture, toys – that was not perfectly good, but was still mostly good.  You know all that stuff that stops working because just one piece broke but it’s so hard to repair or recycle that it is easier and cheaper to just throw it away and buy a new one? There were truckloads of that stuff too.

In Europe and parts of Canada and Asia, governments are starting to ask why they and the taxpayers are getting stuck with cleaning up all this poorly designed, toxic containing, difficult to recycle stuff that companies keep putting on the market, designed to be disposable. They’ve developed a system called Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, which holds companies responsible for their products at the end of their useful life. The idea is that making companies responsible for dealing with all the stuff they make will encourage them to make their products less wasteful, less toxic, more durable and easier to disassemble for recovery and repair. Using tax payer money to go around picking up and whisking away all this broken stuff is like a subsidy for companies that choose to make wasteful disposable junk. Enough already.

Want to see for yourself what is coming out the back end of our systems of production and consumption? Call your local Waste Management Agency or Department of Sanitation, or whichever company has its logo is on the trucks which pick up the stuff in your neighborhood to request a tour of the dump, transfer station or MRF.  If you take pictures  share afterwards, please post them on FLCKR with the tag ‘StoryofStuff. If you have thoughts to share, head on over to our Facebook page.

And if that trip to the dump inspires you to get involved, you’re not alone! There are loads of groups working to on waste from the policy level to the practical level, working upstream to reduce waste at source and downstream to increase recycling and composting. My personal favorite is GAIA, an international network working to stop polluting landfills and incinerators and promote solutions that are better for the planet, for communities and for workers.  GAIA has member organizations in 81 countries, so GAIA is a great place to start regardless of where you live. If you’re intrigued by the idea of using EPR to hold companies responsible for the products they make, you can learn more at the Product Policy Institute . If you’re outraged about companies in rich countries which export hazardous wastes to poorer countries, contact the Basel Action Network . There are lots more groups on The Story of Stuff website and even more at Wiserearth.