Where did we get all this STUFF?
Have
you ever asked a young child where milk comes from? Did that
child answer, “The store”? We chuckle at this misunderstanding.
However, we might hold some similar misunderstandings ourselves.
For instance, where do T-shirts and shoes come from? What
about computers? Or, the fast food meal of burger, fries,
and a cola? Tempted to answer as that young child did?
Find
the real answers in John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning’s
book, Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things (Northwest
Environment Watch, 1997).
Ryan and Durning set out to look
at a typical day in the life of a consumer from the standpoint
of resource consumption. Each day, the average American adult
consumes about 120 pounds of resources—most of it indirectly.
This includes all of the resources—from fuel to wood to farm
products—that go into making the things that we use and eat
every day.
In traveling through the consumer’s day, Ryan
and Durning trace the history and whereabouts of the components
needed to make these common products: coffee, newspaper,
Tshirts, shoes, bikes and cars, computers, a hamburger, fries,
and a cola.
For instance, the T-shirt pulled on in the morning,
made from half polyester and half cotton, weighs about 4
ounces. Here’s where it might have come from:
The polyester
portion of the T-shirt probably began its life as a few tablespoons
of petroleum. The drilling operation used diesel fuel, heavy
metals, and water to flush away rocks and debris and get
to the oil. The crude oil was then transported by ship to
a refinery, made primarily from steel, where it was processed
into various products. Some of this processed oil went by
truck or rail to a chemical factory where, through a long
process involving several more chemicals, it was turned into
long plastic fibers.
The 2 ounces of cotton in the T-shirt
came from 14 square feet of cropland somewhere in the southern
U.S. Tractors, irrigation systems, and various pesticides
were used as the cotton was grown. A cotton gin separated
the fibers from the seeds. The fibers were sent to another
southern state to a textile mill where they were blended
with the polyester fibers.
A knitting machine at a different
textile mill created the fabric, which was then shipped
to a foreign country where it was cut and sewn on a sewing
machine
to make the shirt. The shirt came back to the U.S. on
a ship.
The example of the T-shirt points out that most of
our products
are better traveled than we are—and illustrates that
fuel,
transportation, machinery, human labor, and a host
of other inputs go into every item that we handle throughout
the
day.
Look around you. Give some thought to how many resources
were used just to build the walls standing in the
room where
you’re seated reading this.
Intrigued? Check
out a copy
of Stuff. Not only will you have a new respect for
the complexity of the items you use every day, but you’ll
also
have a
desire
to purchase new products with care and consideration,
to make them last as long as possible, and to reuse
and recycle all you can before you dispose of anything.
