Every time I’m in a department store, I become keenly aware of just how much stuff we churn out every day.
You see it on the pallets plonked down in the middle of the wide aisles. On the racks of identical clothes. At the checkouts filled with tat. Now mentally multiply what you see by the number of stores you know exist around the world.
So. Much. Stuff.
Which would be bad enough if people actually bought and consumed all of what you see at the store. But we don’t. In most cases, manufacturers simply crank out their wares and hope people will buy them. Millions of units sit on shelves briefly, and the cheaper stuff quite often simply gets tossed in dumpsters out back of the store if it doesn’t sell. Still in the packaging!
The stores might send the more expensive stuff to a liquidation place to recover some of the value. There it will sit on the shelves briefly and unsold units get tossed in the dumpsters out back of that store.
How wasteful is this? Let us count the most obvious ways:
- Energy to collect resources to manufacture.
- The resources themselves.
- The energy required to manufacture.
- Energy to transport it to the stores.
- Energy to take it to the dump or to the liquidation warehouse.
- Energy to take it to liquidation retail.
- Energy to take it to the dump.
Then there are the non-obvious costs:
- Human time and energy.
- Environmental damage which then causes health problems, which is a whole new cascade of problems and costs.
- Habitat destruction and biodiversity costs, which is another cascade.
- Exploitation of labour costs in many jurisdictions, oh yes, yet another cascade.
- Implicit here in this overproduction is that this encourages over consumption, and this in turn creates emotions like envy, dissatisfaction, and anxiety.
It’s insanity.
What slays me is that it doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve had ‘on demand’ manufacturing capabilities for years.
In book printing, for example, it’s possible to have a system that prints a single copy of a book at a time. It’s called print on demand, and in a day’s run, you could print a single copy of dozens of different books, only manufacturing what people have already ordered. (My own books are available this way.)
We have the technology, to borrow a phrase from an old TV show, to do this for just about everything. Why don’t we?
Because once a manufacturer sells it’s wares to a store, it can basically walk away from all the downstream problems it creates. Indeed, it’s actually incentivized by this system to create the cheapest possible version of it’s product (prone to breakage, not easily repaired) to sell you the same product more than once. You and I know this as ‘planned obsolescence’ in so-called ‘white goods’ (dryers, ovens, etc), but it also applies to consumables. Bottle of Coke? The packaging becomes someone else’s problem. A shirt in a colour that’s no longer on trend? Someone else’s problem. Disposable floor cleaning cloths? You guessed it: someone else’s problem.
Start talking about things like on demand manufacturing to your friends. Learn about and post about concepts like the circular economy on social media. Let’s start turning this ship around.