Lawn Chairs Aren’t Just That
Mykala and I went on a weekend quest for lawn chairs. But, after watching The Story of Stuff on Friday, (which seeks to illustrate the wasteful, unsustainable, dead-end process generating the crap we buy) — we were less than enthusiastic about purchasing crap. You start to think about the stuff-making process. Oil that can’t be replaced is drilled for plastic. Raw plastic is shipped around the globe in container ships, which spill millions of pounds into the sea. Floating on the water, plastics follow currents and congregate in focal points the size of states. The oceans are trashed, the resources exhausted. Even worse, people are trashed. The latter is a contentious, ongoing issue. In this article about Chinese workers assembling Microsoft products, Chinese factories sound unbearable:
Even if we use just the 80.5 hours of actual work, this means the young workers were required to work 40 1/2 hours of overtime each week, which exceeds China’s legal limit on permissible overtime by 388 percent.
That article was followed by an AP report: some official actions were taken to discipline the factories in question. This is not even a speed bump for the factories — there is still no worker organization and no rights for workers. What’s more, the entire system is rife with bribes and underhanded dealing — the government comes to inspect, and the factories remove the underage workers on busses. American companies come to inspect, and they turn on the air conditioning. Any country transitioning from developing to developed hurts the environment and its population — but as I’ve said before the abuses taking place at this giant, modern scale are astounding. The fastest way to stop them is simple and impossible:
We, Americans, have to stop buying so much damn crap.
Of course, I’m being hypocritical here. We bought two new lawn chairs this weekend. They were made in the US… though that doesn’t make me feel much better about the plastics involved. Here’s the general thought process:
- Do we need it?
- Can we find it used somewhere?
- Do we need it?
- What is the total cost?
I was promoting the idea that we could take blankets and lay on the concrete patio out in the sun — ultimately, this seemed like a ridiculous and uncomfortable proposition. If all we had were blankets, we were more likely to pack up the car, burn fossil fuels, and go to a beach somewhere. Furthermore, used lawn chairs are impossible to find in good condition. I’d be refurbishing some if I had a space to do so or wasn’t so busy. So, used wasn’t a good option. We bought these plastic ones that will last forever (i.e. more than a few years), were made in the US, and are recyclable.
But here’s the thing: we had to care about this whole process. We had to know that Chinese products are cheap because the entire supply chain pushes down cost in dollars by sacrificing sustainability and human capital. The easiest thing to do would have been to go to 1 store instead of the 5 we visited; to grab the first thing we found, and to do the same thing next year. To preserve what “The Story of Stuff” calls “the Golden Arrow of Consumerism”, stores want you to buy crap that breaks so they can sell you the same thing next year. It takes extra effort to find something that will last a bit longer, but there is a middle ground between buying nothing and trashing the world every season.
It’s just hard to find.
Comments
Mykala
Like.