The Story of Stuff

Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff is a useful text that influences the reader to reevaluate their own lives, and where each individual fits into the spectrum of our planet's dire environmental issues.

Leonard's chapters focusing on consumption and waste were most salient to me. I normally consider myself very waste conscious, making sure to "recycle" as much as possible. However, Leonard's explanation of the issues of consumption made me realize that my efforts to recycle are completely undermined by my disregard for the first "two R's"-reuse and reduce.

I suffer from the same state of mind that most Americans do: we always need more, and we constantly need something better. I consider shopping to be a hobby of mine, which is problematic on many levels. As I read The Story of Stuff, reflecting on my own consumption habits, I immediately thought of when I worked at the popular clothing store Forever 21. Forever 21 is known for having a huge variety of clothing at very low prices, and one of their unique attributes is that they get new shipments every day. For one, this means that enough merchandise is bought from the store to have room for hundreds more items to arrive every day. Also, whenever I was put in charge of merchandising for the day, I would spend hours opening boxes, plastic bags, unwrapping saran wrap, and disposing of the packing peanuts and other packing materials. Apart from the cardboard boxes, none of the other materials were recycled, rather just thrown in the dumpster. These process of unpacking the new shipments and disposing of the packaging is a process that happens every day, 364 days a year. On top of just unpacking shipments, there's still countless waste factors that go into operating this Forever 21-the plastic bags given to the shoppers, the textiles and materials that all of the clothes are made up of, and of course the "old" clothes of the consumers that are being replaced by their new Forever 21 purchases. And of course, this is just one store in the middle-of-nowhere-Indiana. I am overwhelmed to think of this on a global, let alone national level.

One solution I am already utilizing, even though I recognize that we can no longer try to "consume our way out of this mess", is to shop secondhand. Vintage (as we can observe amongst the Oxy "hipster" scene), is actually widely embraced in the fashion and style world. Rethinking what we call "waste" is one small, but necessary, step to ameliorating our consumption-induced crisis.

--Roxanne Butler