Chapter 3: Distribution, Selling an Image Not a Product

Chapter 3 in Annie Leonard’s The Story Of Stuff focused around the distribution of Stuff as she refers to it. I have read previous research regarding the distribution of material goods throughout the world and what kind of environmental impacts it has. This chapter though helped show some other aspects of distribution that I was not as familiar with. The opening section talks about how large companies like Nike and Apple aren’t exactly selling you the product they directly. They are trying to sell you the image or brand of their company that is encompassed in the stuff the consumer buys.

I am working on creating more water refill stations around campus with some classmates in the UEP 246 section. This idea of selling the brand or image of a company has a very strong role when it comes to bottled water. Many people falsely believe that bottled water is better for you, when in fact many bottled water companies have the same water quality as the tap water most people already receive. Not only students at Occidental, but also millions of people in the United States have a stigma about tap water. Due to genius marketing, bottled water companies have made the public think that purchasing bottled water is not only healthier but a sign of higher class. This advertisement has led bottled water into a four billion dollar industry. Although the bottled water market is shrinking within the Occidental campus due to price increases on bottled water, I think that there will need to be a shift in thinking when it comes to the difference between tap water and bottled water.

Disposal and Occidental College

Every year at Occident College tons of waste is created (food waste, paper waste, water waste, plastic waste, etc.). Although a few percentage of students are from other parts of the world or try to not create waste, the majority of this school has an American mentality when it comes to waste. Americans do not see the potential in trash! Trash is a very resourceful tool if people learn how to utilize it correctly. According to Anne Leonard, "communities that own the least amount of stuff [is when you see] just how subjective [the] line is between waste and resources" (184).

Occidental college produces a lot of food waste. Luckily, the school is learning about composting and the benefits that come along with it. When the school composts wasted food, it goes directly to the school's garden. This creates an eco-friendly cycle of new food. However, Occidental College has not taken advantage of the garden per-say. The Marketplace (the school's Cafeteria) does not sell or cook the food from the school's own garden. Hopefully, this will change in the future to make the school more sustainable.

At the end of each year when students move out of their dorms and go home for the summer, they leave very useful "junk" behind for the trash people to pick up. Some of this "junk" may contain working ipods, lamps, sheets, school supplies, ect. Most of the stuff people throw out at the end of the year is in perfect condition and can be used by anyone. From personal experience, I know this junk is extremely resourceful. I got a nice lamp for my desk this year. To fix this problem, the school should sift through the stuff at the end of every year and possibly give it was to goodwill or sell it to students.

The United States produces about 254 million tons of trash every year and of that 254 million tons, only 85 million of it is recycled (229). Recycling is a very good step into the light of sustainability. Over that past couple of years, Occidental has been enlightened to recycle paper, plastics, glass and aluminum. In order to increase recycling on campus, colored recycling cans have been placed all over the campus. For the most part, this system is working for the campus, but there is not enough education on campus about recycling and there are not enough recycling cans in convenient areas. Students on campus need to be shown what exactly is recyclable and what is not. Often, student will throw trash in the recycling bins, defeating the purpose of the cans. The second problem is that students will not recycle a bottle if there is not a recycling bin in sight.

In the end, what is comes down to is that we should not be focused on how much we recycle or how much resources we can get out of trash, but how little we can waste. Leonard states that, "focusing on the wrong end of [waste and recycling] can point our efforts in the wrong direction" (229). I believe it is important for Occidental College to look into the Zero Waste programs to learn how to decrease the school's footprint. "Zero waste advocates look at the broader system in which waste is created, from extraction to production all the way through consumption and disposal. In this way, Zero Waste is a philosophy, a strategy, and a set of practical tools" (234). From these programs the school will learn to reduce consumption, make resources out of trash, recycling, ect.

Chris Monteath

Community vs. Isolation

A lot of people are touching on the issue of community here at Occidental and Its relation to the campus's sustainability. What I want to touch on is student space and its relation to community. Because community affects sustainability and space arranges community I believe the design of student space has a significant impact on the campus's sustainability. Over the last two years I've come across a few oddities which I believe inhibit community.

1. Rangeview
This is the dorm which is the largest, newest, and cleanest. Despite the attributes, rangeview feels like a hotel. Hotels are nice but you should not be staying at one for longer than a week.

2. Lack of furniture around dorms
Many of the dorms have areas just outside the doors perfect for tables, chairs, and benches. You can't expect students to gather and relax on a slab of concrete. Why have a patio if it's never used?

3. lack of side walks
The campus is clearly designed for cars. The lack of sidewalks are not only inconvenient but dangerous.

4. Johnson "student center"
Despite being the "student union" not many students ever go down there. At one time it was a hub of student recreation. The pool tables are now gone and the bookstore has appropriated the best part. Imagine if students had the space for a pub or a program like Oberlin's clothing swap and free store:

Clothing Swap and Free Store

At the end of spring and fall semesters, a group of 10 student employees called the College Recycling Assistants hold a campus-wide event called “The Big Swap." At the Spring 2006 Big Swap, College Recyclers collected 388 bags of clothing, books, and dorm room items. The items are collected from each dorm by the College Recyclers and taken to a centralized location in the student union building. For about a week, the Recyclers keep everything that has been collected in this main space and people are able to come and take items they can put to use. At the end of that week, College Recyclers then take the remaining items to local charities. This greatly reduces the number of useful items entering the waste stream when students clean out their dorm rooms and off-campus houses at the end of each semester.

While in the past this “swap" only took place twice a semester, the college has now located a permanent space for a “Free Store" in the basement of Pyle where reuseable items of all kinds can be donated or taken for reuse. The new Free Store had its grand opening on February 22, 2007. It provides an excellent avenue for reuse of materials on campus, diverting useful items from the landfill and consequently reducing the extraction of natural resources.

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

The Story of Stuff

Leonard presents an interesting, transcendentalist approach to our current environmental calamities. While we are bombarded with news of ways to produce our products more efficiently, Leonard argues that it is not energy or resource inefficiency that is our problem, but rather unsustainable modes of consumption. It is our quest for the new type of electronic, or faster car, or the coolest new toy, perhaps a facet of our post-industrial consumer society, that is not only wreaking havoc on our environment, but on our mental and physical health as well.
But Leonard is not naive enough to suggest that an intrinsic element of the American economy will disappear anytime soon. She provides numerous examples, from better shaped cell-phone chargers, to the promotion of libraries, that channel our drive for "stuff" into more environmentally-friendly means. "Change," she states, "will come...eventually." The question is, will it come soon enough?
Her discussion in Chapter 3 regarding distribution was quite interesting. The only way in which real change will emerge is from an eventual change in the consumption habits of the consumer. While one might suspect that environmental and financial considerations would always stand in opposition, Leonard points out that that is increasingly not true. In a world more reliant on pesticides and transportation for food, a sizable market for organic and locally-grown food has emerged. This market is also not simply rooted in environmental concerns, but also has health concerns of pesticides and financial concerns of transporting food from across the world. It is this type of developming market, coupled with increasing energy costs in world with depleting fossil fuels, that will drive an eventual environmental revolution.

The Story of Stuff

My UEP 101 class last year spent some time discussing Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, after watching her online video. The video only briefly summarizes the supply chain, but after reading chapter 3 on distribution I have a much better understanding of the way the system works at this step, and the problems that exist. Leonard begins by introducing the concept of “lean manufacturing and lean retail” (108). Companies are streamlining all of their production in an attempt to cut costs, including cutting workers’ bathroom breaks and forgoing factory safety features (109). Lean retail, the second part of the problem, refers to the business practice in which companies only produce goods as they are demanded. This system may be beneficial for the corporation and help them to save costs, but it hurts the workers by not providing consistent work (Leonard, 111). Professor Dara O’Rourke argues that “in the same way that Toyota workers are empowered to pull the stop cord on their assembly lines, we could have an entirely transparent system of supply chains in which all the stake holders (and community members) are encouraged to identify flaws throughout the system and halt production until that problem has been taken care of” (111). O’Rourke’s idea reminds me of what we are trying to do here on campus through Environmental Problem Solving, the Sustainability Fund, the garden, etc. The students have the power to address problems that we see and demand change. O’Rourke’s vision for change is a system in which “firms are pressured to produce goods not as cheaply as possible, but in ways that optimize labor, social, and environmental benefits” (111). The biggest issues here on campus are the environmental impacts of our energy and water use, consumption, and waste production. Leonard emphasizes that the distribution of consumer goods has just as much of an impact on the environment as the extraction, production, and disposal. Oxy has made some progress towards trying to buy more locally produced goods. Hopefully, during the course of this semester we can help Oxy become more sustainable by playing the role of the stake holders in O’Rourke’s system and identifying the flaws and initiating change.

Community Instead of Consumption

What I found to be the main point of Leonard's chapter on Consumption, is that as human beings, more stuff isn't what is going to make us happier. People believe that it will because of advertising and what people tell us. But in reality we need to be more conscious about creating lasting and genuine human relationships. A main point of the chapter seemed to be that a strong community will bring you happiness far more than that new Apple product or a new pair of shoes. I believe that here at Oxy we do have at least some sense of a community. There will be times when you see people spending a hour or two hanging out with friends in the Cooler or on the Quad at lunch. But at the same time, there are often times, when people are just sitting in their rooms on their laptops mindlessly browsing the internet. I believe that Oxy strikes a nice balance between consumerist and community. We are Americans and as such, we have mostly been raised to be consumerists, but if we can see the value in the tight community of a small college, then there is hope for us, in terms of consuming less. As a member in this community people need to remember to take a break from the books every once and a while and take an hour to just hang out with friends.