By: Emmalee Krieg

Fort Collins, Colo — “The Story of Stuff” by Annie Leonard focuses on consumption. She points out the ideals of consumerism and how as consumers, this is where we play an active role in our addiction.

Consumption is fast-paced, especially in richer countries where we are able to “nourish” our consumer selves and “drown” out our other identities. Leonard ties buying stuff to social pressure and status which reinforces the cycle of replacing products and buying many new ones.

Leonard then carries into a conversation about planned obsolescence and advertising. This encourages people to replace products much sooner than is necessary by designing products that are “designed for the dump”, consumers will throw away more and buy more.

This directly contributes to not just over-consumerism, but the environment as well. With more consumerism, comes more production, which means more extraction. This results in depleting ecosystems with a loss of biodiversity.

Truthfully, it’s the most logical thing that comes to mind when thinking of over-consumption. The more stuff bought, the more stuff made, and the more stuff taken away from our natural world.

Human consumption can be seen in many ways from food and plasticware to clothes and shopping products.

With clothes specifically, we know that fast fashion plays a big role in consumption. What isn’t talked about enough is what happens to clothes after society is done with them.

While trends are in and out, that means clothes come and go as well. Even if we consider a decent amount of people avid thrifters, most clothes just go- they never come back.

A Bloomberg article said, “few are aware that old clothes are rarely recycled into new ones because the technology and infrastructure don’t exist to do that at scale.”

This means that tens of millions of garments are tossed out every day without the promise of being recycled. In fact, “Globally, less than 1% of used clothing is actually remade into new garments,” the Bloomberg article continued.

Unfortunately, we feed into this cycle of fast fashion which affects the environment. With a majority of our clothes never being recycled, it just contributes to waste and requires the extraction of more resources and materials to make more textiles.

Overall, our consumption is reinforced by the promise of new and trendy clothes at the snap of a finger.

Not only does overconsumption affect our rate of recycling, but it also affects our sustainability rates. According to a peer-reviewed article done by Xiang Ji, Jiasen Sun, Qunwei Wang & Qianqian Yuan, a study of nearly 10 years in regions of mainland China found a link between sustainability and consumption. They found that in certain regions, sustainability was extremely low.

“The primary driver of these two phenomena is pollutant over-emission and resource over-consumption respectively,” stated Ji and colleagues.

As consumption increases, so do all our energy sources used to create products. Our pollutants increase as well.

Since a lot of our consumption is built on planned obsolescence, we continue to overconsume. With the advertising strategy of needing “new” things all the time, we then create a lot of waste with our products.

With all this waste lying around, it does so much harm to our environment. An interesting way to get rid of this waste and actually use it for good, is to convert it into energy.

A front runner on this initiative is Project Drawdown. They have a project for “Waste to Energy.” Project Drawdown stated, “converting waste to energy could avoid 6.27–5.24 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 due to reduced methane emissions from landfills and reduced demand for fossil fuels.”

Waste to Energy is being adopted more and more throughout the U.S. As of now, it’s not seen as a long-term solution. Ideally, there wouldn’t be all this waste to make energy out of it.

“We consider waste-to-energy a ‘transition solution.’ It can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but social and environmental costs are high. It can help move us away from fossil fuels in the near term, but is not part of a clean energy future, ”Project Drawdown stated on their website.

Even with a cool solution of Waste to energy, it still has its drawbacks, “Converting waste to energy through incineration, gasification, or pyrolysis is a trash management strategy that can also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing methane generation from landfills and releasing energy that can substitute for that generated by fossil fuels. However, it also can contaminate air, water, and land with toxic pollutants.”

With all this consumption, comes a lot of waste. Society is often too eager to get rid of its “old” stuff. We encourage the buying of new goods at basically an unsustainable rate.

At the end of the day, over-consumerism is very unhealthy for the environment. It’s really the root of a lot of sustainability issues.