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

Those of you who have seen the Story of Stuff, or who know me, know that I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff: where it comes from, where it goes, why it is designed the way it is and stuff like that.

Occasionally, I see some product that just freaks me out. That happened last week. I can’t stop thinking about this thing.

It is a new men’s shave gel, which I read about in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/business/media/04adco.html).  The product is called NXT, which is pronounced “next” and is made by Clio Designs. The shower gel itself is comprised of clear gel balls in a plastic bottle. But the gel is irrelevant. The whole article was about the bottle. NXT is packaged in a triangular shaped bottle with a light blue hue. The thing that freaked me out about this is that every single bottle has an LED light and 2 to 3 triple AAA batteries in it.

Two or three batteries in the PACKAGE, not even for the product ???? Batteries have such toxic components that many cities ban their disposal in the regular garbage and require them to be dropped at a household hazardous waste facility. We’re supposed to be designing toxics out of our production systems!

The product designer’s idea is that the bottle will let off a light blue light which will draw us to the shelves to buy it. News articles about the bottles say they “will glow on the shelves, inviting customers to pick them up. Every 15 seconds, a light-emitting diode in the bottom of the container flares on, stays lighted for a few seconds, then fades out.” What are we, moths?

I found pictures and more details on the product’s website, (whatsnxt.net) which explains that “…our products contain a mini-computer with LED lighting in the base. One bottle alone is cool but the whole line together is an experience.” An experience?? No it’s not. It is a bunch of bottles, and stupidly designed ones at that.

I called the company’s customer service line to ask them about the bottle. The woman I spoke to, who had to keep putting me on hold after every question, explained that the batteries will be handled safely because each bottle comes with a note requesting consumers to dispose of the batteries according to local laws. She didn’t know the specific plastic resin which each parts of the bottle was made from, but she did know that the top and base are different plastics so the customers will have to cut them apart in order to recycle the tube part, which she thought was recyclable.

So I called Californians Against Waste (http://www.cawrecycles.org/) to ask them. They couldn’t confirm how recyclable it is, since the NXT rep couldn’t tell me what plastic resin each piece was. But Brian Early at CAW did explain that “anytime you have an unusual shaped bottle, you decrease the chance it will be recycled.” You see, there are humans working the recycling lines and it is their job to pull out contaminants that get mixed it with the specific plastic type they are recovering. If something looks different, its chances of being diverted to the dump are higher.

One of the keys to mainstreaming environmental sustainability is by making it easy for people to do the right thing, rather than requiring an extra effort to chose the environmentally preferable option. If we create products and systems and infrastructure to favor the environmentally preferable choice, we don’t have to urge each person, one by one, to make the right choice. A package that has toxic-containing batteries which need to be taken to a household hazardous waste disposal site and which has to be sawed apart before maybe recycling part of it is not an example of making it easier for people to do the ecologically preferable option. In this case, I’d say the ecologically responsible option is to refuse to buy it – both the hype and the product.

A number of people have asked me how I got on this path of exploring the materials economy. It started in grade school and crystallized on a spring afternoon on Staten Island.

I grew up in Seattle, at that time a green and luscious city. My family would go camping every summer. Since this was in the days before DVDs in the back seats of family cars numbed young passengers, I’d look out the window, studying the landscape, for the whole drive. Each year, I noticed that the stores reached a bit further and the forests started a bit later than the previous year. I wondered where all those forests were going. I wondered how I could stop them from going away entirely.

It turned out to be fortuitous that I went to college in New York City, even though at the time it seemed an odd place to go for environmental studies. My college campus was on 116th street and my dorm room was on 110th street. Every morning I would groggily walk those 6 blocks, staring at the piles of garbage that line NYC’s street’s every dawn. Ten hours later, I’d walk back to my dorm, staring at the empty sidewalks.

I became increasingly intrigued with this microcosm of materials flow. I started looking into the trash each morning to see what was in those never-ending piles. It was mostly paper. Paper! That is where my beloved forests were ending up. In the U.S., 42 percent of industrial wood harvest is used to make paper. And about 40 percent of the stuff in municipal garbage is paper, all of which is recyclable or compostable if it hasn’t been treated with too many toxic chemicals. By simply recycling, rather than trashing, this paper, we could reduce our garbage by 40 percent, which would also drastically reduce pressure to cut forests and help with climate change and that doesn’t even get into the massive benefits of reducing paper use.

Once I realized that those morning trash piles were nearly half paper – were once forests – I was determined to find out where they were going. So I took a trip to the infamous Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Coving 4.6 square miles (12 square km), Fresh kills, is one of the largest dumps in the world. When it was officially closed in 2001, some say its volume was greater than that of the Great Wall of China; it’s peaks 25 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty. I had never seen anything like it. I stood at its edge in absolute awe. As far as I could see in every direction were couches, refrigerators, boxes, apple cores, used clothes, stuff. You know how a gory car crash scene makes us want to turn away and stare at the same time? That is what it was like. I just couldn’t comprehend this massive mountain of materials, reduced to muck, by some system obviously out of control. I knew this was terribly wrong. I didn’t understand it back then, 20 years ago, but I vowed to figure it out. And I did. It’s the Story of Stuff.