Consumption
Let’s reduce our use of finite resources by eliminating unnecessary consumption, fighting against planned obsolescence, and resisting the forces that are spreading a consumer monoculture worldwide.
Sharing items with neighbors and friends builds relationships and interdependence, and reduces the environmental impact of buying objects that are rarely used. Recreation and outdoor equipment, tools and kitchen implements are all great candidates for informal sharing networks.
Take action
- Learn ways to start either an online or offline network with How to Start a Neighborhood Tool Share, an article by Earth Easy.
- Join the simple, free online platforms Neighborhood Share Network (US) or Streetbank (UK), by providing a list of items you are willing to lend and people you are willing to lend to.
- Expand your local sharing economy further with Shareable's links to more than 300 guides to help you share resources in your community, spanning food, housing, transportation, tools and beyond.
Get inspired
- Sharing items is a key aspect of Dama, the traditional gift culture in Mali that forms the backbone of community. Learn more about this philosophy in the Gift Economy page of this Action Guide.
- The Small Farm Guild in northern Vermont, US, shares farm equipment – cider press, chicken processing equipment, food dehydrator, rototiller, and much more – among local farmers, homesteaders and gardeners.
Gift economies free us to give without an expectation of direct payment, and to receive without feeling indebted. They can help us shift our personal economies from a series of faceless transactions to a web of nurturing relationships. In most societies today, gift economies cannot form the entirety or even majority of our economic transactions. Nonetheless, they can be a vital part of our transition from global to local economies.
Take action
- Organize a Really Really Free Market – a space for people to get and give away goods completely free of obligations to pay, trade or barter – with Shareable's guide How to start a really really free market.
- Refuse payment – even in barter – for small goods or services you provide to others in your community. At the same time, explain the gift economy concept. See how long it takes to notice that others are doing the same.
- Join or start a Buy Nothing Group with the Buy Nothing Project, which facilitates hyper-local gift economies where people offer and request items with no transactions involved. There are more than 5,000 active local groups in 44 countries; if your area doesn't have one yet, the website offers everything you need to get started.
- Explore the economic, social, psychological, relational, spiritual and cosmological elements of gift economies with Charles Eisenstein's in-depth, self-guided course Living in the Gift.
Get inspired
- An Teach Saor in County Galway, Ireland is a thriving house, permaculture garden, and community space that operates without money. The article Happiness Without Money? This Irish Community Proves It's Possible shares their story.
- Reclaiming the Gift Culture, an anthology of 26 essays by Shikshantar: The People's Institute for Rethinking Education and Development in India, describes gift economies in Mexico, Mali, India, and elsewhere.
- GIFT, a documentary film by Robin McKenna, is "a tribute to something that can’t be measured or counted, bought or sold. An intimate exploration of real-life gift economies," covering both giving freely with no expectation, and giving to generate the wealth of social capital.
- The Singapore Really Really Free Market is one example of dozens around the world. The article The Really (Really) Free Market Operates Under a Simple, Radical Philosophy explores how these markets help us to see "how societies could function more equitably, compassionately, and sustainably."
The cumulative environmental costs of industrial consumer products – from mine to landfill – are astronomical. One of the best ways to reduce our impact is to step away from the destructive pressures of consumerism by consciously choosing to live with less.
Take Action
- Learn how to "live more on less" with this action plan from The Simplicity Institute, which has many more materials on simple living and resistance to consumerism.
- Find non-consumerist ways to celebrate holidays – from Christmas to Passover to birthdays – on NewDream.org.
- Learn about the benefits of downshifting – breaking the work-and-spend cycle – from LowImpact.org.
- To fight consumerism and help build a “hyper-local gift economy”, find or start a local group of the Buy Nothing Project. Also check out the book by the project’s founders, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan.
Get inspired
- Read about 7 Invisible Benefits of Living Simply in this essay by Courtney Carver.
- For the sheer fun of it, check out these videos from Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. There's a serious side as well, including direct action against major corporations and banks that profit from unbridled consumerism.
Plastic waste, driven by the expansion of the petrochemical industry and the explosion of single-use packaging accompanying corporate globalization, has swelled to become a global ecological and health crisis, leaving no part of the biosphere uncontaminated. While individual action is important, tackling this crisis will require going far beyond that, and moving upstream to stop the responsible corporations and industries and prevent the production of this harmful material in the first place. It will also require reversing globalization, contesting corporate power, and rebuilding localized economies that require less packaging by nature.
Take action
- Join Break Free From Plastic - the global movement working to stop plastic pollution for good - as an individual, organization or business, and take action against plastic today with these resources and campaigns.
- In the US, learn about the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act - "the most comprehensive set of policy solutions to the plastic pollution crisis ever introduced in Congress" - and send this letter or make this call to your representatives to support the Act; spread the word with this social media toolkit; and sign your organization on to this letter in support of the Act.
- Make your campus plastic free with this guide from Break Free From Plastic.
- Send this letter from Beyond Plastics to urge stores to phase out single-use plastic packaging.
- Join the #WeChooseReuse campaign across Europe to help replace single-use plastics with reusable systems.
- See the Get Involved page on the Plastic-Free July website for dozens of practical guides on reducing or eliminating the use of plastic in your home, office, school, community, and local government.
One reason modern economies are so environmentally destructive is that they must keep growing, forever. This means that consumption, too, must increase without end. But in highly industrialized societies, most people’s material needs have already been met. How are they convinced to keep consuming more and more stuff?
See More
The solution hit upon in the 1920s involved sophisticated marketing and advertising methods aimed at creating a “psychic desire to consume.” [1] These techniques make us feel inadequate if we don’t have the newest gadget, wear the latest fashion, drive the coolest car. Even if we have a closet full of clothes, in other words, we’re still induced to go shopping for more.
A related solution is known as “planned obsolescence” – products intentionally designed to be replaced after a year or two of use, even when they could be made to last a lifetime. Some companies make it almost impossible to repair their products even after a minor malfunction. In other cases there’s something even more nefarious going on: many printers, for example, have been designed to stop working after a predetermined number of copies are made. There’s nothing wrong with the printer – it has simply been programmed to stop working. [2]
Combine technological innovation with sophisticated advertising campaigns, and you get another form of obsolescence. The smartphone you buy this year – so much more advanced than last year’s model – will seem woefully inadequate when you hear about next year’s even more advanced model. As one tech writer put it, constant innovation means that “in two years your new smartphone could be little more than a paperweight." [3]
Planned obsolescence works so well for industry that 150 million cellphones are discarded in the US every year – most of them ending up in landfills or incinerators. [4] Apply that to all sorts of technological products, and it’s easy to see why e-waste is growing so rapidly. In fact, 2019 set a record for the amount of e-waste generated worldwide: 53.6 million metric tons of discarded phones, computers, appliances, and other gadgets. [5]
Reducing the environmental toll of consumerism will require, among other things, active steps to break free of the “psychic desire to consume”. Because advertising is so effective at promoting the idea that consumption is the key to happiness, it’s important to reduce our own – and especially our children’s – exposure to advertising whenever possible.
We can also reduce consumption by repairing the products we already have when they break. This Action Guide includes projects like community “repair cafes” where broken goods – from electronic devices to appliances, clothes, household objects and more – can be brought for repair. It also describes some of the efforts to stop corporations from making their goods difficult or impossible to repair.
Another way to reduce consumption is by sharing ownership of costly goods that we only use occasionally – like cars and pickup trucks, power tools, farm and garden implements, and even some household appliances. A number of projects described in this Guide aim to make such sharing easier.
Local economies can be highly effective at meeting people’s real needs, but they are not suited to satisfying the artificial desires created by the consumer culture. For that reason, strengthening communities and local economies goes hand-in-hand with reducing unnecessary consumption. The initiatives in this section of the Action Guide aim to do both.
References
[1] Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
[2] David Schrieberg, “Landmark French Lawsuit Attacks Epson, HP, Canon And Brother For 'Planned Obsolescence'”, Forbes, Sept. 26, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidschrieberg1/2017/09/26/landmark-french-lawsuit-attacks-epson-hp-canon-and-brother-for-planned-obsolescence/?sh=38806b2a1b36
[3] Andy Walton, “Life Expectancy of a Smartphone”, Houston Chronicle, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/life-expectancy-smartphone-62979.html
[4] Nathan Proctor, “Americans Toss 151 Million Phones A Year. What If We Could Repair Them Instead?”, Cognoscenti, December 11, 2018. https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-nathan-proctor
[5] Justine Calma, “Humans left behind a record amount of e-waste in 2019”, The Verge, July 2, 2020. https://www.theverge.com/21309776/record-amount-ewaste-2019-global-report-environment-health