Consumption at Oxy

This past week I went on the 'Toxics Tour,' a tour led by the Communities for a Better Environment (CBE). The tour took our group around Los Angeles looking at the factories in highly industrial areas such as Vernon and Huntington Park, eventually leading us down the 710, alongside countless semi-trucks, past the oil refineries, to the port of Los Angeles. The port is the heart of the distribution Annie Leonard touches on in chapter three of The Story of Stuff. If you haven't seen it yourself, I would recommend taking a trip over down to the port. There are so many shipping containers, it takes a second to realize how big they actually are, each "could hold all of the contents of a three-bedroom house" as Leonard says. Its amazing to see the massive amounts of what we consume at the hub of distribution. It wouldn't be far fetched to wager that most of the goods inside these containers are headed to a Wal-Mart, Costco or the Target in Eagle Rock Plaza frequented by Oxy students.

As horrible as our dependency on the globalized distribution of goods we consume is, Annie Leonard does offer great alternatives. I checked out a couple of the websites she suggested and think it would be a good idea to share these resources with students at Oxy.

www.goodguide.com

GoodGuide "provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of consumer products."

This site is a great way to hold yourself accountable for what you purchase, and also could be a good way to hold the college accountable for what they are making available to us.

www.freecycle.org

This is "a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free."

My family has used this to get rid of old appliances etc. This would be a great resource for students at the beginning of the school year (as an alternative to constant Target runs) and end of the school year as an alternative to throwing everything away.