assignment story of stuff

This short film ’The story of stuff’ from Annie Leonard tries to show and illustrate the lifecycle of stuff and how it affects us, the people and also the environment and in the whole, our world, how wasteful we all are and what everyone can do to avoid destroying our planet.

The main problem is that we all know about the environmental problems, the global warming, the CO2 emission, child labour and low-wage countries because we see it so often on TV, which is one thing no one can deny doing it, but we only care as long as we are directly confronted with these issues.

To start with shopping. We all like buying new and trendy stuff. Who is looking for the signs inside the shirt or jacket where is declared in which country it has been made? And if it is from China or Bangladesh who wouldn’t buy it because of this fact? I believe nearly no one of the customers, it only matters that it is cheap or on the contrary what label or brand the product is from.
Another fact is the boom of the low-cost airlines. Everyone prefers a cheap flight over an expensive if it is offered and one don’t require a good service.

The large corporations try to hold as much consumers as possible with low pricing because of their elastic demand in sectors of atomistic and/ or oligopolistic competition. To reach this they have to cut down their costs of extinction, production and distribution. But all this comes also back to the consumers who work for such large corporations with wage cuttings and longer lasting working hours.

It became so far, that a german producer of beer said in his advertisment: With buying a crate of beer you can save one square meter of rain forest in the Amazon. Is it possible? Can we only stop cutting trees with consuming more stuff? But it is quite positiv that such a corporation became anxious about the environment, realises that something has to be done and hopefully set the people thinking about the problem.

I don’t want to blame only the consumers, the companies are also not innocent. All of them try to increase their profit by increasing their revenues and decreasing their costs. Decreasing the costs of the product lead to materials which are not as sustainable as others and that has a direct impact on the persistence of the product. Instead of buying a new computer or coffee brewer every five years it becomes neccessary every two years which also increases the rate of consumption.

I think we have to become more aware of our environment and of our world. We have to change our whole attitude towards consumption but it will be a long and hard way because we are so used to the world and the way we live at the moment, the convenience, that we don’t see the neccessity of changing.