Solid waste 

Consumerism: Profiting from Waste

Browse for major ideas "Overcoming Consumerism," especially Part 2 (How consumerism affects society, the economy and the environment) and Part 5 (Environmental costs of consumerism).  Then continue below...

A.  Consumerism and Waste

Consumerism epitomizes the capitalist practice of producing both environmental problems and false solutions, in order to profit at both ends (see earlier discussion).  What is consumerism?  According to the essay "Why Overcoming Consumerism":

Consumerism is economically manifested in the chronic purchasing of new goods and services, with little attention to their true need, durability, product origin or the environmental consequences of manufacture and disposal. Consumerism is driven by huge sums spent on advertising designed to create both a desire to follow trends, and the resultant personal self-reward system based on acquisition. Materialism is one of the end results of consumerism. 

By the 1930s the world economy reached a point where it needed to manufacture needs and desires and raise the level of consumption so that the capitalist class could continue accumulating capital;  the system had reached a point where the appetites of capitalists exceeded the demand of consumers for basic goods and services. So began the impetus for, and the creation of mass consumerism.

By the 1950s a whole industry-- led by public relations and marketing-- had developed that functioned to help the capitalist class grab the surplus value from high production levels under "consumerism."  Massive consumerism was in force, and some troubling consequences were starting to be felt.  At the time, my own fledgling interest in political economy, ecology, and social criticism was inspired in part by Vance Packard (optional link), in works such as The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Waste Makers (1959).

Why everything sucks...		Mr. Natural meets...

B.  How Consumerism Is Fostered

Several important tactics that capitalists use to generate consumerism are:

• Creating new psychological "needs" in people

• Stimulating impulse buying (see below)

• Creating and marketing fads and styles to spur temporary "usefulness" of material goods (or social obsolescence)

• Making short-lived or hard-to-fix goods; many products are designed to have uneconomically short lives, with the intention of forcing consumers to repurchase too frequently.  This is technical obsolescence, often called planned obsolescence.

C.  More on Impulse-Buying

Merchant exploitation of impulse is now a science --   "...Products are impulsively bought to reflect self-identity. ...Men tend to impulsively buy instrumental and leisure items projecting independence and activity, while women tend to buy symbolic and self-expressive goods concerned with appearance and emotional aspects of self."  --Helgar Ditmar and others, 1995, "Gender Identity and Material Symbols: Objects and Decision Considerations in Impulse Purchases" (From http://snipe.ukc.ac.uk/ESRC/papers/gender/title.html, 3/99)

A warning...

"We are the most voracious consumers in the world."

  Optional online resources concerning consumerism

"Manufacturing Desire," Harry Flood, AdBusters #28, Winter 2000 -- "Wecome to the factory floor. The products? Things that are not essential, but hard to live without..." 

The Museum of Weird Consumer Culture -- "The most banal, grotesque, ironic, twisted or perverse creations of the capitalist marketplace." (Esp. see the Dog-Diaper website...)

"Should the U.S. Impose Limits on Incredibly Stupid S***?" -- humor from The Onion.

  "Study Unravels Consumer Waste," Lucy Chubb, ENN News, 2 December 1999 -- "As much as 12 percent of all products purchased by [U.S.] consumers are never used and are eventually discarded."

  Stuff and Its Secrets -- Looks at extended effects of computer, T-shirt, cola, sneakers, car, and bike.

  The Center for a New American Dream -- "... a not-for-profit membership-based organization that helps individuals and institutions reduce and shift consumption to enhance our quality of life and protect the environment."  See sample letter to the editor of a local newspaper about the over-commercialization of the holidays. Also, "CNAD asks America: How much is enough?"

  "Buy Nothing Day from the Mall of America [1998]," Adbusters, Spring 1999 (#25) -- "100 feet above the floor of the Mall of America... a 600-square-foot banner asked the Christmas crowds to think before they shop. The banner, featuring the caption 'Shop ‘til we drop?' and a cartoon of the Earth falling through a shopping bag, was so daringly hung by climbers Marin Goldstein and Han Shan that an entire day passed before maintenance workers could bring it down. 'There couldn’t be a more appropriate location to challenge our society’s runaway consumerism,' said Goldstein following the Minneapolis, Minnesota, mayhem."

  Overcoming Consumerism -- "...details ways that you can help defeat consumerism, save money, work less and lead a more satisfying and environmentally benign life while helping to restore the economic self-sufficiency of your community...[Includes] Resources/References that can help the reader become an educated grass-roots activist..."

  Affluenza, 1997, PBS video -- Examines the American epidemic of overconsumption. "Af-flu-en-za n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream. 3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth. 4. A television program that could change your life."

  "Yearning for Balance; Views of Americans on Consumption, Materialism, and the Environment," July 1995, Prepared for the Merck Family Fund by The Harwood Group -- Four key findings:

1. Americans believe our priorities are out of whack. They believe materialism, greed, and selfishness increasingly dominate American life, crowding out a more meaningful set of values centered on family, responsibility, and community.

2. Americans are alarmed about the future. People feel that the material side of the American Dream is spinning out of control, that the effort to keep up with the Joneses is increasingly unhealthy and destructive.

3. Americans are ambivalent about what to do. They want to have financial security and live in material comfort, but their deepest aspirations are non-material ones. People also struggle to reconcile their condemnation of other Americans' choices on consumption with their core belief in the freedom to live as we choose. Thus, while people may want to act on their concerns, they are paralyzed by the tensions and contradictions embedded in their own beliefs. In turn, they shy away from examining too closely not only their own behavior, but that of others.

4. Americans see the environment as connected to these concerns-- in general terms. People perceive a connection between the amount we buy and consume and their concerns about environmental damage, but their understanding of the link is somewhat vague and general. People have not thought deeply about the ecological implications of their own lifestyles; yet there is an intuitive sense that our propensity for "more, more, more" is unsustainable.

  "Critical Consumption Trends and Implications: Degrading Earth's Ecosystems," World Resources Institute, 1999 -- "Industrialized and developing countries have many common or overlapping interests in the environmental impacts of present production-consumption patterns. This common interest is especially evident in the examples examined-- food, fiber, and fishery products, the major natural resource-based economic sectors."

  Optional print resources concerning consumerism

  Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of Happiness, ed. by Roger Rosenblatt and others, 1999, Shearwater Books, 240 pp.  (about)

  Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, James B. Twitchell, 1999, Columbia Univ. Press, 310 pp.  (about)

  Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess, Robert H. Frank, 1999, Free Press, 336 pp.  (about)

  Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, John C. Ryan and others, 1997, Northwest Environment Watch, 88 pp.  (about)

  How Much Is Enough?: The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth, Alan Durning, 1992, W.W. Norton & Co., 200 pp.  (about)

  Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Paco Underhill, 1999, Simon & Schuster, 255 pp.  (about)

  Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America, Kalle Lasn, 1999, Eagle Brook, 320 pp.  (about)

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