The Story of Stuff

Watching the story of stuff opened my eyes to the vicious cycle the world goes through to make more an extra buck. We take for granted the products we use and seldom think about how it ended up in our hands.

We live in a society that is driven by consumerism where users like you and me are obliged to get the latest model, keep up with trends, and strut in the latest fashion; this is also known as perceived obsolescence whereby users are pressed to keep up with the latest trend and become conformists, let’s face it a lot of people don’t want to stand out, they want to have a sense of belonging. So keeping up with the latest fashion will allow them to fit in and assimilate with others. Another design strategy that I learnt about was planned obsolescence. This strategy is where a product is designed to be thrown away and replaced like plastic bags, paper cups, but it was more surprising to find out that planned obsolescence was applied to bigger products such as computers. Although it does make sense as a majority of the electrical goods we throw away are still usable it just costs too much to repair then to buy a new one which adds to the vicious cycle.

With all these products being made you’d have to wonder where they came from. The life of a product goes through is a linear one.

Extraction-production-distribution-consumption-disposal

Since the system is linear it’s not possible to continue on this linear line on a finite planet. The United States of America alone which encompass 5% of the world’s population consume 30% of the world’s resources and contribute to 30% of the worlds waste and that if every nation consumed at the same rate as the US did we would need five planets to sustain our needs. After hearing these facts from the video it makes me wonder how long before we start to go interstellar and mine resources from other planets.