consumerism and waste products essay

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Consumerism and Waste Products

This article discusses about consumerism and the waste products. About how consumers affect the levels of waste production.

A consumer is someone who buys and uses goods and services. Consumers are not only found in human society but also in other societies. Consumerism also encompasses the evolving set of activities of government business enterprise and independent consumer organization that are designed to protect the rights and interests of consumers. Hence consumerism is a global problem affecting every section of the society. Product is something that is made, grown or obtained in large quantities so that it can be sold. Production is the basis for consumption. Production increases when the demand for a particular product increases. This increase in production is sustainable only when the quality of the product is maintained; the price is regulated and advertising claims are fair. Efficient consumerism is the most essential element to minimize waste and to promote the economy of a nation. Inefficient consumerism results in the following problems: -Uncontrolled manufacture of foods leading to inferior quality -Rampant adulteration leading to health and hygiene problems -Improper services resulting in dissatisfaction and stress -Production of lots of waste leads to depletion of natural resources and environmental imbalance Suggestions for efficient consumerism: 1. Standards should be verified before buying or accepting a product from market. 2. In every possible way waste must be minimized. 3. Waste minerals have to be recycled. 4. Strict laws must be implemented. Another example of waste due to inefficient consumerism is the solid waste. Minimising the waste lead to sustainability and economy.

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Overconsumption and the environment: should we all stop shopping?

Over-consumption is at the root of the planet’s environmental crisis. One solution, proposed by author JB MacKinnon, is that we should simply buy less. But would that really work?

I fear I’m in JB MacKinnon’s bad books. Halfway through our Zoom interview, I tilt my camera to adjust to the setting sun – but from this new angle, an e-commerce box can be spotted over my shoulder. Its barcode glows in the fading light, a totem of 21st-century materialism presiding over our call.

MacKinnon is too polite to say anything, but he can’t be thrilled by my cardboard companion. After all, the Canadian bestselling author and journalist is on a mission to get us to buy a lot less stuff. The Day the World Stops Shopping , his new book, explores what might happen if the world transformed into a society that does not revolve around purchasing, one in which our primary role is not as consumers and our credit cards are not our most commonly deployed tools.

His “thought experiment” plays out like a Ridley Scott sci-fi epic – or perhaps a scene from the pandemic. On the hypothetical day the world stops shopping, carbon emissions plummet; the skies turn a deeper blue; and with no ads polluting smartphone screens our minds become as clear as the bottle-free oceans in which whales swim merrily. There’s also chaos. Shops shut, production lines grind to a halt and millions of factory workers lose their jobs. The global economy nosedives so severely it makes the 2008 recession seem like a blip. “It would be a shock so great that it would seem to bend time itself,” MacKinnon writes.

The only thing fantastical about his vision is the timeframe: rather than ceasing all shopping overnight he thinks we should, in reality, restructure society over several years to support a sustained reduction in the amount we consume.

He sees this as an obvious, if difficult, fix to a big problem. Consumption – of fast fashion, flights, Black Friday-discounted gadgets – has become the primary driver of ecological crisis. We are devouring the planet’s resources at a rate 1.7 times faster than it can regenerate. The US population is 60% larger than it was in 1970, but consumer spending is up 400% (adjusted for inflation) – and other rich nations, including the UK, aren’t much better. “Many people would like to see the world consume fewer resources, yet we constantly avoid the most obvious means of achieving that,” says MacKinnon. “When people buy less stuff, you get immediate drops in emissions, resource consumption and pollution, unlike anything we’ve achieved with green technology.” That’s not to mention the impact materialism has on our mental health, inducing feelings of inadequacy and envy, and encouraging a culture of overworking.

His is an impassioned call to arms, for the sake of our planet and our wellbeing. But how feasible is it for all the world’s citizens to swap Amazon baskets for a simple agrarian life? More pointedly, do we want to? Does MacKinnon’s vision represent an enlightened Shangri-La – or a primitive dystopia?

“This is the best opportunity in the past 30 years to bring consumption back to the centre of the political discourse,” says MacKinnon, speaking from his home in Vancouver. He’s pensive, with piercing blue eyes. Indeed, the pandemic has given people pause to think about “how they consume, what their relationship with stuff should look like and what is deeply valuable in their lives,” he says. “I don’t think anybody is going to say that having a bunch of home-workout gear was as satisfying as being able to have contact with friends, family and neighbours.”

Many of us still shopped – Amazon enjoyed record-breaking global revenues of $386bn in 2020 – but, stripped of opportunities for parading possessions in front of others, there was a widespread rethink in why we buy and wear things. “For women, particularly, the idea that they don’t constantly have to be messaging and positioning through their dress was interesting,” he says. “Women saying they’re never going to wear jeans or bras again – these are interesting individual reckonings.”

Nonetheless, as much of the world begins to reopen, there are rallying cries to boost the economy by opening our wallets. Shopping has been cast as a positive act, retail therapy a civic duty. “All the narratives are building around a new Roaring 20s, a hedonistic binge, taking revenge on the virus with our consumption,” says MacKinnon. “But I think a lot of us are going to feel uncomfortable and disquieted, to the point of despair, as we remember what the fully revved-up consumer culture looks like.”

He wants us to act on that discomfort. But he’s not suggesting we live entirely off the land. In his hypothetical model he applies a 25% reduction in consumption – a figure “modest enough to be possible, dramatic enough to be earth-shattering” – and while he won’t specify a figure when discussing what our real-world efforts should be in the coming years, something in this ballpark might well be the goal.

That doesn’t just mean fewer physical things; it’s also less electricity, travel and eating out. “Basically $1 spent is a consumption dollar; I’m not fussed whether it’s spent on a canoe or a powerboat,” he says. “If you want a rule of thumb for how much impact you’re having as a consumer, the best one is: how much money are you spending? If it’s increasing, you’re probably increasing your impact; if it’s lowering, you’re probably lowering your impact.”

How might a lower-consuming society look? Everything is reoriented because people, brands and governments are no longer striving for economic growth. Individuals are more self-sufficient, growing food, mending things and embracing wabi-sabi , the Japanese concept of imperfect aesthetics (think patched-up pockets or chipped ceramics). Brands produce fewer but better-quality goods, while governments ban planned obsolescence (the practice of producing items to only function for a set period of time), stick “durability” labels on items so shoppers can be assured of longevity, and introduce tax subsidies so it’s cheaper to repair something than to bin it and buy a new version.

Why has such an approach never before been attempted on a broad, society-wide scale? MacKinnon rejects my suggestion that perhaps consumerism is hard-wired into human nature, but says it is “deeply ingrained” in society and it’s “much easier for us to think, ‘Let’s make all these cars run on solar power instead of gas,’ rather than, ‘How do we end up with fewer cars?’” Plus, he says, “to some extent there was a point where we gave in to the idea that lowering consumption could not be a solution, because it inevitably results in economic collapse.”

Well, doesn’t it? Were we all to stop shopping overnight it would be disastrous, he admits, but if we built a new system, it could support a surprisingly robust economy. “If you’re producing durable goods, you still need considerable labour. Then there’s the secondhand market, the repair of products, taking items back in and recomposing them into new products,” he says. “Whether it adds up to an economy the size of the one we have today, I doubt it,” he continues, adding, with a wry smile: “I mean, I don’t see a lot of billion-dollar IPOs coming out of the drive towards a lower-consuming society.” But that’s kind of the point. “It would be a problem if it generated as much wealth – because ultimately, the reason we feel we need to be awash in wealth is to consume. Otherwise, what’s it for?”

Although MacKinnon imagines most of us will still be employed in the cash economy, in the new world order the hours will be shorter and the work often more satisfying because we’ll be “participating in the production of higher-quality goods.” With a smaller pot of jobs and money, some people will choose not to work and governments will provide universal basic income and/or services. Although MacKinnon avoids referencing specific anti-capitalist political systems, when pushed he agrees it looks like socialism – although “there’s probably all kinds of different ways you can organise society around principles of lower consumption, none of which I think necessarily exists right now.”

Most importantly, being freed from the corporate rat-race means our work-life balance shifts. We compare ourselves less to others and have more time away from screens. This change, rather than concern for the environment (“‘Saving the planet’ has always been a bit abstract”), is what he thinks will be most compelling to most people. We participate in communal activities, such as tending public gardens, engage in social movements and take care of children and elders. “It’s the balance most of us seem to want, right? More time to engage with friends and family and to have long conversations. There are lots of opportunities, I think, for people to genuinely feel they have a higher quality of life.”

Over the decades various communities have practised “voluntary simplicity,” whether by choice or necessity. For the book, MacKinnon visited, among other places, sleepy Sado Island in the Sea of Japan; a farming community outside Tokyo; and the suburbs of Seattle where, since the 1990s, many folks have embraced “downshifting” in reaction to the city’s conquest by the moneyed tech crowd (the most widespread rejection of consumer culture in recent times).

In general, these people buy few clothes, read library books, walk or catch buses, avoid social media and rarely listen to music or watch TV. When I ask MacKinnon whether he noticed anything distinctive about them his face lights up. “Talking to somebody working in corporate America versus somebody who’s been practising voluntary simplicity for three decades is night and day, in terms of the kind of human being they are. It makes you want to be the voluntary simplicity person very much,” he says. “They make time for people and have more depth and generosity of spirit. At times, it did feel like I was talking to a more evolved being.”

Such lifestyles sound very worthy, I say, but also a tad… unfun? Needless to say, I am not an evolved being and I cringe as I realise how shallow I sound. Yet in my former job as a fashion editor, I have seen consumerism at its most seductive. And the first place I visited once lockdown lifted was Selfridges – possibly London’s shiniest temple to materialism – to marvel at the displays. It’s undeniable that consumerism brings bright lights, dazzling outfits and lively nights out.

MacKinnon gamely fields the query. “I think there’s a grain of truth in it,” he says. “That’s the reality we need to confront, to some extent. We’re certainly not talking about a return to the Stone Age, but maybe we have to accept that a lower-consuming society isn’t an endless parade of distractions like the society we have today.”

Getting people to believe that this can be a satisfying existence will be the biggest hurdle. “When what you’ve known throughout your lifetime is what satisfaction you can draw from a consumeristic materialistic society, it’s very hard to imagine there’s an alternative that’s going to work as well or better,” he says. “But there is.”

He points to an uplifting case study from London. In Barking and Dagenham, one of the city’s poorest boroughs, the “Every One. Every Day” initiative brings together locals to cook, partake in poetry, craft and hair-braiding sessions, and spruce up common areas, all of it free. “For many of the people participating, it’s deeply engaging and profoundly affecting,” he says. “In a lot of places, if you don’t have the cash to consume, there’s nothing to do; the closest I came to tears in researching this book was watching people who were feeling isolated and excluded from consumer culture have an alternative put in front of them. That points towards the potential.”

Although a “cloak-and-dagger” culture still enshrouds talk about reducing consumption in most corporate environments – various interviewees would only speak to MacKinnon anonymously – there are some promising signs. Trailblazing brands such as Patagonia and Levi’s have made impressive strides in encouraging customers to question throwaway culture and “buy less but better” is becoming a more common refrain in parts of the fashion industry (even as the industry continues to grow exponentially).

Perhaps the book’s most startling comment comes from Abdullah al Maher, the CEO of a Bangladesh knitwear firm that produces for fast-fashion giants including H&M and Zara. He admits that transitioning to a lower-consuming society would be painful for his country: its 6,000 clothing factories would probably halve. But in this new system, the factories would provide better wages, pollute less and compete on quality instead of speed. “There’ll be no ratrace then,” Maher says, adding: “You know, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

It’s a striking statement from a powerful businessman in a nation that is a factory for the world. And it’s the sort of comment that gives MacKinnon confidence. “I’m hopeful that, coming out of the pandemic, people are going to have discussions that start to move the idea of reducing consumption back into the public discourse, from the fringes where it’s been for three decades,” he says.

Such conversations will involve tossing up whether we’re prepared to give up our vibrant, high-velocity, acquisitive lives in order to calm our minds and save the earth. Although we might not like the answer, and change is always uncomfortable, it’s tough to argue that there’s even a contest.

The Day the World Stops Shopping by JB MacKinnon is published by Bodley Head at £20. Order it for £17.40 at guardianbookshop.com

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Impact of Consumerism on the Environment: Putting Consumers’ Behaviours at the Center of the Climate Change Debate

• Post author: Patricia Namakula
• Post published: March 9, 2021
• Post category: Articles
• Post comments: 2 Comments
• Post published: 6,229 views

Scientific evidence is creating a consensus that economic growth has placed an unsustainable burden on the physical environment. Over-consumption, resource use and the generation of pollution and waste are degrading environmental systems which people depend on either directly or indirectly for their survival and wellbeing. In the case of the most pressing environmental challenge, preventing or responding to disruptive climate change has significant implications for the global economy. Research shows that unless 2% of the global GDP is invested in responding to climate change, the negative effects are likely to affect the global economy by 20% by 2035.

The need to move to a lower carbon economy is therefore a pressing strategic challenge widely acknowledged by both policy makers and businesses. Moving towards a lower carbon economy requires a range of possible levers to be employed including technological innovation, regulation, investment, financial incentives, organizational and behavioural change. Carbon emissions are also strongly linked to the consumption of households and the choices and behaviours of individuals.

Research shows that the consumption behaviours of households account for 72% of global carbon emissions, therefore, consumers are key actors in ensuring that the 1.5 °C goal under the Paris Agreement is achieved. This is not to downplay the pressure currently placed on corporations and national governments but to highlight the fact that the possible contribution of households in climate policies is not well understood and neither are households given high priority in the current climate policy strategies.

In a highly capitalistic and globalized world, motivating consumers to adopt more sustainable consumption behaviours is an important policy goal and a source of new opportunities. Capitalism reinforces consumerism, a socio-economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. While globalization is a phenomenon driven by technology and the movement of ideas, people, and goods. And the rules of the game under globalization don’t draw clear lines between production methods that instinctively satisfy people’s needs and production manipulated for the sake of making profits for the few. Through advertising especially online, shrewd businessmen and women have accumulated great amount of wealth by producing “things” people are led to believe they want. This has been exacerbated by online shopping where buying a new product or service is just a click away. This behavior of people buying goods/services not because they need them but because they can afford them, coupled with poor waste disposal habits harms the environment.

Research on models of environmental behaviour found that environmental knowledge together with personal values, perceived control and emotional response determined environmental behavior. However, there is a gap between how households/individuals perceive their responsibility and ability to mitigate climate change and the responsibilities and roles communicated by climate policies. Addressing this gap requires that policy measures are selected that would materialize consumption changes using either market-based or command and control approaches. Driving changes in attitudes, norms, or practices can shape consumption habits and therefore, create motives for further voluntary changes.

Very steep reductions in emissions are needed if the global community is to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, which translate into a reduction of emissions from 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2020 to 5 gigatons in 2050, and eventually reach a level of “net zero” by the end of the century. These stringent targets in climate change mitigation will require changes in households and their lifestyles especially in the developed world. And for households to adapt, it will require behavioural change at individual, household and community levels.

Through behavioural change, it’s possible to mend our broken relationship with mother nature and it starts with individuals, businesses and governments knowing their impact on the environment and coming up with viable solutions to this catastrophe. When all stakeholders are made aware that climate change effects vary from food security to human security, to national and global economy, and have been a cause of conflict in many parts of the world, then maybe there will be positive response. Environmental consciousness will also require both producers and consumers to move from a narrative of production and consumption toward one of sharing and caring. Globalization has produced both winners and losers and winners have got to make a conscious decision to care for the losers. This in the long-run will address the inequality problems.

It’s high time consumers realized the power they have since they can influence the practices and policies of companies, they therefore, bare responsibility for inaction. However, this kind of approach is highly dependent on the availability of relevant information. The consumerism behavior for many people and households is due to ignorance of their carbon footprint. The growing mobilization on climate change by climate activists around the globe is good but until this activism moves beyond the streets and extends to people’s homes to influence their consumption behavior, a lot still remains to be done. Consumers have the power to force businesses and governments to stick to their commitments in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord through their consumption behavior and the vote respectively.

As concern about climate change increases especially among the young people, there is an opportunity for climate policy debates to focus on behavioural change. The international climate policy debate puts emphasis on technology and economic incentives, leaving behavioural change as an afterthought, rather than having it at the center stage. While climate change has become a key policy issue both at national and global level partly because climate activists have used securitization and positioned climate change as an existential threat. This global movement by young people if sustained is likely to force politicians and corporations to listen and act appropriately.

Promoting pro-environmental behaviours like recycling, energy saving, reduction in travel and meat consumption must be intentional and the message ought to reach all classes of people around the globe. Information on the causes and dangers of climate change should be clear and accessible such that people make climate conscious decisions in their daily lives. National governments and the international community need to put consumers’ behaviour at the heart of policy and discourses on climate change. It’s high time governments and businesses understood what can motivate households to adopt low-carbon lifestyles and technologies. If done in a proactive manner, it will put households and consumers at the center of driving the much-needed change.

By Patricia Namakula,

Head of Research and PR

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Hi, I’m Yvette. I was wondering if you would be willing to participate in an interview via ZOOM for the completion of an assignment that I have for Journalism. The assignment is related to the effect of consumerism on the environment. I have some questions prepared to ask about this topic. I believe that this interview will require at most 30 – 40 minutes of your time. My availability is Monday through Sunday from 12 pm – 5 pm. Please Let me know if you would be interested and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Hello Yvette, Can you explain a little more the main purpose of the assignment/interview, in regard to your journalism. You can communicate to us officially at: [email protected] Regards, Moses

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Home — Essay Samples — Economics — Consumerism — Consumerism: a Review on a Waste Product

Consumerism: a Review on a Waste Product

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Published: Jul 17, 2018

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What's the environmental impact each time we hit 'buy now,' and can we change course?

Mary Louise Kelly

Elena Burnett

Courtney Dorning

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with author J.B. MacKinnon about the impact of American consumerism on the environment, and how pulling back could positively affect the planet.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

We're spending some time this week thinking about how much Americans buy. All year round, the American economy is driven by consumption. Buying things is 70% of the gross domestic product. Now that we're in the middle of the holiday season, we are buying even more. But what do we do with all that stuff? And what does all that stuff do to a rapidly warming planet? Those are things we're going to talk about with journalist J.B. MacKinnon. He is author of "The Day The World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves The Environment And Ourselves."

J.B. MacKinnon, welcome.

J B MACKINNON: Thanks so much. Glad to be here.

KELLY: Glad to have you with us. It occurs to me, as I say it out loud, that the subtitle of your book is probably a pretty good place to start. Give us a few examples of how what we buy affects the environment.

MACKINNON: Well, it affects every environmental crisis that we face. In fact, at this point, according to the U.N. panel that studies global natural resources, consumption is the leading driver of our environmental problems around the world today, surpassing even the growth of the human population on the planet. So you name it, it drives it - deforestation, toxic pollution, climate change, mining, even fisheries, even the extinction of species is tied in tightly to our consumption.

KELLY: Can you give, like, one concrete example that would drive one of those home?

MACKINNON: Sure. Well, one of the issues that I looked at that I thought was most surprising was the way that consumer culture is now affecting whales. We thought that we had saved the whales by ceasing to hunt them. But now things like the search for minerals and fossil fuels on the sea floor is creating noise pollution that's having a profound effect on whales' ability to communicate with each other. And one of the most common ways that North Atlantic right whales, an endangered species in the United States, actually end up dying is being struck by the cargo ships that bring us our things. One whale conservationist said to me, you know, every time you hit that buy now button on Amazon, you're helping power up the ships that are running down endangered whales off the East Coast of the United States.

KELLY: You're talking about the environmental impact of all of the buying that we do. Did we have something of a trial for how we might do better, how we might do this differently towards the beginning of the pandemic?

MACKINNON: Yeah. In the early weeks and months of the pandemic, when much of the world was really, you know, quite literally, locked out of consumer culture, we saw a really dramatic effect on the environment. We really saw how just lifting that hand of human pressure off can have immediate impacts in terms of environmental problems of a variety of kinds. So we - many people will remember how there were these bluer-than-blue skies in cities around the world. And some of the most dramatic changes in the skies occurred in those Asian cities that produce a lot of the world's consumer goods and which were some of the most air-polluted cities on the planet.

KELLY: It was just factory smokestacks not operating for a few weeks. yeah.

MACKINNON: That's absolutely right. And we saw the biggest and deepest drop in carbon emissions ever recorded through that global slowdown in that production and consumption system. We saw the resurgence of the natural world, especially in those places where mass tourism had retreated. And again, you know, mass tourism is very much a part of the consumer lifestyle today.

KELLY: I suppose the challenge is nobody wants to stay in the moment that was the early days of the pandemic. So what is sustainable if we were to try to wean ourselves off some of the just - more, more, more, more, more buying?

MACKINNON: One of the things that was really driven home to me while working on this book was the fact that if we want to reduce consumption, we really have to do so in a managed way by making changes in the system itself. We live in a consumer society, and we have built an economy that depends on more and more consumption by all of us every year. So if we simply slow down, then we know what the effects of that are. It drives an economic crisis. It's a different kind of system that we need.

KELLY: You reminded me of something that our guests on this subject said yesterday. I'm going to let you listen and then respond.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

LIZABETH COHEN: Seventy percent of GDP is dependent on consumption, which really does lead to a great dilemma around our growing awareness of environmental degradation that comes with this high level of private consumption. And, you know, on the one hand, we can say that we're living in a world with too much waste, of overconsumption. On the other hand, what is the solution going to be to keeping the economy going?

KELLY: That is Harvard professor Lizabeth Cohen speaking. And to her point, she's getting right at this push-pull that what's good for the environment can be not so good for the economy and vice versa. How do you struggle to reconcile that? What is the answer?

MACKINNON: I think what I look to is companies that are making this shift themselves - so companies like Patagonia, and I think maybe more importantly, just because of its global recognizability, the Levi's brand. And both of those companies are moving towards models where they will be making the sale of new products a smaller part of their model and the sale of recouping and reselling second hand their own products a larger part of their model, as well as the repair and maintenance and alteration of their products as part of their income stream as well. So when we see companies like that moving in that direction, and when you see a company like Levi's - which earlier this year acknowledged that the apparel industry is built on overconsumption - I think we see that business seems to be prepared to move in this direction.

KELLY: So you're saying that the strategy boils down to don't buy so many pairs of jeans with the expectation that you'll get tired of them or they'll wear out; spend more, but less frequently, and get a really good pair that you're going to keep repairing and keep wearing for year after year after year?

MACKINNON: That's right. It's been referred to by some people as the model of fewer better things or buy less, buy better. And it extends not only to goods, but also to things like services and even consumer experiences. So, for example, we can travel less but travel in a more engaged way and might potentially even find that considerably more satisfying.

KELLY: Fewer but better has not been the American shopping mantra in recent decades. Do you really think it can be done?

MACKINNON: Sure. I mean, I don't think that we have very much choice. I mean, when people say that we are caught in this dilemma, we're not really caught in a dilemma. It is true that the planet needs us to stop shopping. The economy needs us to keep shopping. But ultimately, it's the planet that has the priority here. We cannot continue to expand the amount of consumption that each individual person on the planet does in perpetuity. So the answers have to be found, I think, in what kind of changes can we make to the economic system?

KELLY: That is journalist J.B. MacKinnon. He's author of "The Day The World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves The Environment And Ourselves."

MACKINNON: Thanks so much.

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• ENVIRONMENT

About 1.7 billion people belong to the global "consumer class."

Americans and Western Europeans have had a lock on unsustainable over- consumption for decades. But now developing countries are catching up rapidly, to the detriment of the environment, health, and happiness, according to the Worldwatch Institute in its annual report, State of the World 2004.

Perfectly timed after the excesses of the holiday season, the report put out by the Washington, D.C.-based research organization focuses this year on consumerism run amuck.

Approximately 1.7 billion people worldwide now belong to the "consumer class"—the group of people characterized by diets of highly processed food, desire for bigger houses, more and bigger cars, higher levels of debt, and lifestyles devoted to the accumulation of non-essential goods.

Today nearly half of global consumers reside in developing countries, including 240 million in China and 120 million in India—markets with the most potential for expansion.

"Rising consumption has helped meet basic needs and create jobs," Christopher Flavin, president of Worldwatch Institute said in a statement to the press. "But as we enter a new century, this unprecedented consumer appetite is undermining the natural systems we all depend on, and making it even harder for the world's poor to meet their basic needs."

The report addresses the devastating toll on the Earth's water supplies, natural resources, and ecosystems exacted by a plethora of disposable cameras, plastic garbage bags, and other cheaply made goods with built in product-obsolescence, and cheaply made manufactured goods that lead to a "throw away" mentality.

"Most of the environmental issues we see today can be linked to consumption," said Gary Gardner, director of research for Worldwatch. "As just one small example, there was a story in the newspaper just the other day saying that 37 percent of species could become extinct due to climate change, which is very directly related to consumption."

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From luxuries to necessities.

Globalization is a driving factor in making goods and services previously out of reach in developing countries much more available. Items that at one point in time were considered luxuries—televisions, cell phones, computers, air conditioning—are now viewed as necessities.

China provides a snapshot of changing realities. For years, the streets of China's major cities were characterized by a virtual sea of people on bicycles, and 25 years ago there were barely any private cars in China. By 2000, 5 million cars moved people and goods; the number is expected to reach 24 million by the end of next year.

In the United States, there are more cars on the road than licensed drivers.

Increased reliance on automobiles means more pollution, more traffic, more use of fossil fuels. Cars and other forms of transportation account for nearly 30 percent of world energy use and 95 percent of global oil consumption.

Changing diet, with a growing emphasis on meat, illustrates the environmental and societal toll exacted by unbridled consumption.

To provide enough beef, chicken, and pork to meet the demand, the livestock industry has moved to factory farming. Producing eight ounces of beef requires 6,600 gallons (25,000 liters) of water; 95 percent of world soybean crops are consumed by farm animals, and 16 percent of the world's methane, a destructive greenhouse gas, is produced by belching, flatulent livestock. The enormous quantities of manure produced at factory farms becomes toxic waste rather than fertilizer, and runoff threatens nearby streams, bays, and estuaries.

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Chickens at a typical farm are kept in cages with about nine square inches (about 60 square centimeters) of space per bird. To force them to lay more eggs, they are often starved. Chickens slaughtered for meat are first fattened up with hormones, sometimes to the point where their legs can no longer support their weight.

Crowded conditions can lead to the rapid spread of disease among the animals. To prevent this, antibiotics are included in their feed. The World Health Organization reports that the widespread use of these drugs in the livestock industry is helping breed antibiotic-resistant microbes, complicating the treatment of disease in both animals and people.

Inroads are being made. In 2002, McDonald's announced it would stop buying eggs from suppliers who keep chickens confined in battery cages and that are forced to lay additional eggs through starvation. By 2004, the fast-food chain will require chicken suppliers to stop giving birds antibiotics to promote growth. Wendy's, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken have all hired animal welfare specialists to devise new animal care standards.

The World Bank has also rethought its policy of funding livestock factory farming. In 2001, a World Bank report concluded "there is a significant danger that the poor are being crowded out, the environment eroded, and global food safety and security threatened."

Not Much Happier

The increase in prosperity is not making humans happier or healthier, according to several studies. Findings from a survey of life satisfaction in more than 65 countries indicate that income and happiness tend to track well until about $13,000 of annual income per person (in 1995 dollars). After that, additional income appears to produce only modest increments in self-reported happiness.

Increased consumerism evidently comes at a steep price.

People are incurring debt and working longer hours to pay for the high-consumption lifestyle, consequently spending less time with family, friends, and community organizations.

"Excess consumption can be counterproductive," said Gardner. "The irony is that lower levels of consumption can actually cure some of these problems."

Diets of highly processed food and the sedentary lifestyle that goes with heavy reliance on automobiles have led to a worldwide epidemic of obesity. In the United States, an estimated 65 percent of adults are overweight or obese, and the country has the highest rate of obesity among teenagers in the world. Soaring rates of heart disease and diabetes, surging health care costs, and a lower quality of day-to-day life are the result.

Related: Here Are the Happiest Countries

Some aspects of rampant consumerism have resulted in startling anomalies. Worldwatch reports that worldwide annual expenditures for cosmetics total U.S. $18 billion; the estimate for annual expenditures required to eliminate hunger and malnutrition is $19 billion. Expenditures on pet food in the United States and Europe total $17 billion a year; the estimated cost of immunizing every child, providing clean drinking water for all, and achieving universal literacy is $16.3 billion.

There is, of course, no easy solution to the problem. The authors call for green taxes (to reflect the true environmental costs of a product), take-back programs that require manufacturers to recycle packaging or goods, and consumer education and awareness programs.

But first and foremost we need to reorient our way of thinking, says Gardner.

"The goal is to focus not so much on sacrifice, but on how to provide a higher quality of life using the lowest amount of raw materials," he said. "We need to change the way we produce goods and the way we consume them."

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International Journal of Applied Sociology

p-ISSN: 2169-9704    e-ISSN: 2169-9739

2013;  3(2): 19-27

doi:10.5923/j.ijas.20130302.02

Consumers, Waste and the ‘Throwaway Society’ Thesis: Some Observations on the Evidence

Martin O’Brien

School of Education and Social Science, University of Central LancashirePreston PR1 2HE,UK

Copyright © 2012 Scientific & Academic Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

The ‘throwaway society’ thesis – invariably attributed to Vance Packard (1967) – is widespread in social commentary on post-war social change.It represents, simultaneously, a sociological analysis and a moral critique of recent social development. In this article I take a brief look at the core of the ‘throwaway society’ thesis and make some comment on its modern origins before presenting and discussing data on household waste in Britain across the twentieth century.I conclude that there is nothing peculiarly post-war about dumping huge quantities of unwanted stuff and then lambasting the waste that it represents.When the historical evidence on household waste disposal is investigated, together with the historical social commentary on household wastefulness, it appears that the ‘throwaway society’ is a great deal older than Packard’s analysis has been taken to suggest.

Keywords: Consumerism, Waste, Crisis, Throwaway Society, History

Cite this paper: Martin O’Brien, Consumers, Waste and the ‘Throwaway Society’ Thesis: Some Observations on the Evidence, International Journal of Applied Sociology , Vol. 3 No. 2, 2013, pp. 19-27. doi: 10.5923/j.ijas.20130302.02.

Article Outline

1. introduction, 2. ‘the great curse of gluttony’, 3. disposable history, 4. concluding remarks.

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Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All

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• https://www.globalissues.org/print/article/238

Richard Robbins is worth quoting at length on the impact of consumption on the environment and on people.

William Rees, an urban planner at the University of British Columbia, estimated that it requires four to six hectares of land to maintain the consumption level of the average person from a high-consumption country. The problem is that in 1990, worldwide there were only 1.7 hectares of ecologically productive land for each person. He concluded that the deficit is made up in core countries by drawing down the natural resources of their own countries and expropriating the resources, through trade, of peripheral countries. In other words, someone has to pay for our consumption levels . [Emphasis Added] … Our consumption of goods obviously is a function of our culture. Only by producing and selling things and services does capitalism in its present form work, and the more that is produced and the more that is purchased the more we have progress and prosperity. The single most important measure of economic growth is, after all, the gross national product (GNP), the sum total of goods and services produced by a given society in a given year. It is a measure of the success of a consumer society, obviously, to consume. However, the production, processing, and consumption, of commodities requires the extraction and use of natural resources (wood, ore, fossil fuels, and water); it requires the creation of factories and factory complexes whose operation creates toxic byproducts, while the use of commodities themselves (e.g. automobiles) creates pollutants and waste. Yet of the three factors environmentalists often point to as responsible for environmental pollution — population, technology, and consumption — consumption seems to get the least attention. One reason, no doubt, is that it may be the most difficult to change; our consumption patterns are so much a part of our lives that to change them would require a massive cultural overhaul, not to mention severe economic dislocation. A drop in demand for products, as economists note, brings on economic recession or even depression, along with massive unemployment.

As hinted above, within the current economic system of perpetual growth , we risk being locked into a mode of development that is:

• destructive, in the long run, to the environment
• a contributing factor to poverty around the world
• a contributing factor to hunger amongst such immense wealth
• and numerous other social and ecological problems

Furthermore, as also hinted above, as consumption increases (in a wasteful way, which we shall see a bit later), the resource base has to expand to meet growth and related demands. If the resource base expands to other people’s lands, then those people don’t necessarily get to use those resources either. This is also quite bluntly captured in this following cartoon image:

On this page:

Misuse of land and resources, exporting pollution and waste from rich countries to poor countries, obesity due to excessive consumption, a cycle of waste, disparities and poverty, some examples/case studies.

How land is used to produce food etc. can have enormous impacts on the environment and its sustainability. (This can sometimes challenge assumptions on the instinct and common belief that we are overpopulated by sheer numbers and that this is the major cause of environmental degradation. While populations can burden the environment, the most populous regions in the world use far less resources than the wealthiest nations, and so the issue is more about how resources are used and for what purpose.) Take the following as an example:

Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups in the United States and other developed countries because of their environmental impact. Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all. … Overall, animal farms use nearly 40 percent of the world’s total grain production. In the United States, nearly 70 percent of grain production is fed to livestock.

Because industrial agriculture is using more monocultures, rather than a diversity of crops, the loss of biodiversity is leading to more resource usage, as described above. This as well as other political situations such as the motives for dumping surplus food on to developing countries to undersell the local farmers, leads to further hunger around the world. For more information on that aspect, refer to this web site’s section on food dumping .

Consumption patterns in wealthier countries increases demand for various foods, flowers, textiles, coffee, etc. Combined with more harmful products such as tobacco and illicit drugs, and with input-intensive agricultural practices (including using herbicides and pesticides) the diversion of and misuse of land and the associated environmental damage in unsustainable methods adds up. For additional examples and information on misuse of land, refer to this web site’s look at causes of hunger .

As land ownership has become more concentrated in the hands of fewer owners, larger companies, larger agribusinesses etc, and as things like food dumping, mentioned above, increases hunger and drives rural workers out of jobs, there is an increase in urban migration as people move to the cities in hope for a better chance. This then places additional stress on the larger cities to provide for more people. It also results in more slum areas, health problems, increasing crime, over-crowding, and so on.

But cities aren’t the only places that the landless move to. Some, being pushed off their own lands, will move to less arable land to hope to farm that, which may conflict with wildlife. In other cases, others may move into forested areas, clearing them with a hope to make a living form farming that cleared land. Destruction of old forests in particular can also mean loss of habitat for many wildlife. In yet other cases, many may try to immigrate to other parts of the world if they feel there is no choice left in their own country. In yet other situations, economic growth can also lead to more urban migration. Sometimes this growth of cities can go in hand with decline in the rural areas.

Due to these and a multitude of other complex socioeconomic and political factors, in different parts of the world, there are different proportions of people in urban and rural areas. For example, the World Bank reported in a 1999/2000 report that 74% of poor in Latin America and Caribbean lived in urban areas, while in Europe and Central Asia it was 67%. In the Middle East and North Africa it was 58%. In East Asia and Pacific, 33% while in Sub-Saharan Africa it was 32%. In South Asia it was 27%. (For more details see the World Bank’s World Development Report 1999/2000 , Table A.2. The World Bank didn’t explicitly categorize North and Central America for some reason, which have approximately 76% and 50% urban populations, respectively. Full country breakdowns are available in the report.)

It is not always the case that, as commonly held, the poor are the ones that end up stripping natural resource to survive. Many communities described as poor (materially) have traditions and practices that encourage protection of their environment because they understand their mutual dependency. In addition, land ownership for the poor provides mechanisms to ensure sustainable and efficient use, because of the need to care for it for their survival, as detailed for example, by Vandana Shiva, in her book Stolen Harvest (South End Press, 2000). Peter Rosset also shows that smaller farms are more efficient when it comes to ensuring a productive yet healthy ecosystem.

Economic policies of the wealthier nations and their consumption demands mean that more land is therefore used to grow cash crops (bananas, sugar, coffee, tea etc) for export to wealthier countries (primarily), while other land is diverted for non-productive uses (tobacco, flowers etc). Additional land is also cleared and used to grow things like cattle for beef exports. In the quantities that some of the products of these exports are consumed, it could be argued that a lot of this production is wasteful and unnecessary. The cost to the environment and local populations is borne not by the consumers of the products, but local people instead. [These economic policies that encourage this pattern are often imposed upon the poorer nations, through things like Structural Adjustment (SAPs) etc.]

And because food is a commodity, then it is those who can afford to pay, that will get food. The following is worth quoting at length (bulleting and spacing formatting is mine, text is original):

To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy. Food is a commodity. … Much of the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are marginally nutritious, but for which there is a large market. Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries. More than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed. … The problem, of course, is that people who don’t have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don’t count in the food equation. In other words, if you don’t have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you. Put yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, you would not expect ADM ( Supermarket to the World ) to produce food for them. What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a market demand for food.

When the best agricultural land is used up to produce these cash crops, more marginal land is used for food and subsistence farming. This can also lead to clearing parts of rainforests, or other forms of encroachment on other ecosystems.

It’s not just food crops. Other uses of the world’s resources by the wealthier nations include metals and other raw minerals to produce automobiles, planes and so on. As nations such as China begin to rise, their appetite for these resources are quite large. However, while there is some concern raised at the amount of environmental resources such nations will eventually require, little is raised about how for decades richer nations have been consuming in further excess and waste. For more details on this, see Richard H. Robbins, as quoted above.

Many wonder why the poor cannot follow the example of the rich and get out of poverty themselves. Numerous mainstream commentators suggest that the poor should follow the example of the rich and that globalization (in its current form) provides the answer. Some may say this because they or their society has followed this ideology to get out of poverty and it worked for them, so it should work for others. Yet, often missed is where the resource base to support the increase in wealth has typically come from. If it comes from other regions then it can (not always) mean that for one society’s gain, others may not. This was apparent in imperial and colonial times where vast amounts of the world’s wealth was plundered and accumulated in the imperial centers in Europe. Yet, the consumption inequalities of today and the regions of immense wealth and immense poverty, on a global scale shows a similar pattern to those of previous decades and centuries. The U.N. resource consumption statistic mentioned at the start of this section (of 86 percent of the world’s resources being consumed by just the world’s top 20 percent) is testimony to this.

Hence, the resource base, from which to get out of economic poverty is lacking and so the same process that may have made today’s wealthy richer, is not necessarily the best way for all people.

Furthermore, if today’s poor attempted to reclaim those resources for their own use and for sustainable development, it will naturally be seen as a threat to the way of life for those who currently use those resources. As described in the poverty section of this web site, wars throughout history have been because of this control of resources. World War II and the resulting Cold War were also such battles. Yet because in the mainstream this is not acknowledged it is easy to just see this as a threat and act on it, without really understanding why it has become a threat. ( Side Note As a side note, it is interesting to note that there are books and insights popping up that predict future wars will be a new kind of war; resource wars. Yet, this is what it has typically been throughout history, but fortified with ideologies and religions. Ideologies and religions offer different ways to live, and hence different ways to use resources. )

This YouTube video from Journeyman Pictures explains some of the imbalances of power that results from resource exploitation:

The wealthier consume precisely because others are poor — the rich consume at the expense of the poor. Such global inequality is very wasteful of resources, as further resources are expended maintaining this unequal balance of power (be it through military, political, social or other means). As Robbins was quoted above, someone has to pay for our consumption levels . (The causes of these imbalances are discussed throughout this web site, as well as later on in this section on consumption and consumerism.)

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Pollution is also related to increased consumption. That is, the consumption itself, plus the production and waste of products used in consumption. Automobiles are a clear example. Other examples include industrial waste (especially when just dumped into the rivers and oceans), waste from the tourist industry (including cruise liners, air travel, etc.), waste from industrial agriculture, consumer waste such as household waste, excessive product packaging, our throw-away culture, and so on.

While pollution is increasing in poorer countries as well, it is not solely due to rising populations, because, as the U.N. points out, and as mentioned earlier, 86% of the world’s resources are consumed by the world’s wealthiest 20%. Hence, even if pollution is occurring in poor countries, a large portion of it is to meet this consumer demand. In its September 2008 issue, the journal Energy Policy found that around 1/3rd of Chinese carbon dioxide emissions were due to the production of exports and that it is mostly the developed world consuming these.

And long before the fears that the Kyoto Climate Change protocol would encourage western businesses to move dirty industry to poorer countries that were exempt from emissions reduction targets, multinational businesses were already looking for places with lower standards.

In 1991, then Chief Economist for the World Bank Larry Summers, (and US Treasury Secretary, in the Clinton Administration, until George Bush and the Republican party came into power), had been a strong backer of IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Policies, which have proved to be so disastrous to the developing world. He wrote in an internal memo (leaked to the Economist in 1992) that is very revealing:

Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?… The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that… Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City… The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand.

Summers was talking about migrating industries. That is, moving them elsewhere, but to still serve their original purpose — produce for consumption by wealthier nations and people. So instead of expensive changes to factories to deal with environmental and other issues that the public and society demand, they have had the ability to move elsewhere and continue on without making these costly changes. As a result, we may see a relatively cleaner environment in the industrialized world, but it is not all explainable by using newer technologies, being more efficient, etc (which are no doubt certainly part of the explanations).

This is a partial explanation of why some of the wealthier countries have cleaner air, water and so on, compared to poorer countries that are facing more pollution, even though they consume a fraction of what wealthier nations consume. Consumption in richer countries can come at a high price for those in poorer countries as well then. (See Robbins, cited above, for a more detailed discussion of this paradox , who also points out for example, that the core countries already ship 20 million tons of waste annually to the periphery , or poor, countries (p.235).)

Another trend is to also export waste to other regions of the world. As one example, hazardous electronic waste, such as old computers, old computer monitors, etc primarily from wealthier nations, are also being exported to places like China, India and Pakistan, where they are processed in operations that are extremely harmful to human health and the environment. However, minimal or non-existent environmental and working standards and regulations, old technologies for recycling and processing, etc. is putting a lot of people and surrounding environment at risk due to the sheer amount of waste to be processed.

Environmental News Service quotes Jim Puckett, coordinator of Basel Action Network , and one of the authors of a report titled Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia :

They call this recycling, but it’s really dumping by another name, added Puckett. Yet to our horror, we further discovered that rather than banning it, the United States government is actually encouraging this ugly trade in order to avoid finding real solutions to the massive tide of obsolete computer waste generated in the U.S. daily. Puckett referred to the fact that the United States is the only developed country in the world that has failed to ratify the Basel Convention, a United Nations environmental treaty which has adopted a global ban on the export of hazardous wastes from the worlds most developed countries to developing countries. The U.S. has exempted electronic wastes from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and the nation’s export laws, because the material was claimed to be destined for recycling.

Please note this sub-section on obesity has moved to its own new page . You can also continue reading on below and see how the issue of obesity is introduced in context to consumption.

Poverty, land control and ownership, pollution and so on, are largely parts of economic and ideological systems too. As exemplified by the Lawrence Summers quote above, a value is placed on the environment, on life, on different cultures and so on.

This is so ingrained into the cultures of the wealthy nations, that the thought of massive adjustment of lifestyles and economic systems to a more sustainable consumption seems too much to consider. Instead the system is continued and maintained. Built into the system itself are mechanisms that encourage this, without realizing the costs.

For example, a population where health is generally getting worse may result in more sales of medicines or a growth in private healthcare and other knock-on industries. Instead of these always being seen as a cost, they are seen as providing more jobs and creating wealth, and as a result it counts towards GDP and other indicators of economic health! It then looks like the economy is dealing with this fine, without realizing that even more resources are used to support these jobs and industries that may not be needed in as much intensity.

It is easy to blame consumers from wealthy countries as the sole cause of these problems elsewhere though. However, as mentioned in the initial pages on this section, much of this mass consumerism culture in the north has not been based solely on natural demand, but a created demand. That is, from large businesses and industry wanting to sell more products and make more profits. Politically this has also been encouraged as it helps create a more conforming populous satisfied by material needs. As an effect of this, as such businesses also strive to eliminate competition by becoming bigger and bigger, this has become more destructive than what we might actually realize, and on a wider scale.

Even as the United States began to feel the onset of a recession (due to crisis of overproduction) coming on in the middle of 2001, the economic and political leaders respond by attempting to encourage people to spend more. The Economist is worth quoting to highlight that:

SHOPPING: it’s long been one of America’s favourite pastimes, but more recently it has taken centre stage in the battle to prevent the world’s biggest economy from sliding into recession. As share prices have plunged along with profits, and layoffs have soared, it has sometimes seemed this year as if the American consumer’s addiction to retail therapy was incurable. That’s just as well, because consumer spending has been the main reason the economy has not dipped into recession this year. But now there are signs that even America’s heroic spendthrifts may be losing heart.

This over-production and over-capacity (due to over-estimating the expected demands) partly due to under consumption leads to dominant companies attempting to consolidate losses and maintaining profits via things like mergers and layoffs etc. However, even in wealthier nations, it cannot be a guaranteed success.

Yet poor countries suffer immensely. For example, when the financial crisis hit Asia around 1997, at a time of enormous production, collapse meant that western corporations were able to pick up almost entire industries on the cheap. This helped destroy growing competition, as the situation was getting so competitive and fierce, that the best way (for those who can) to ride through this was to buy out others, merge or consolidate. While capital fled to the West and there was a temporary boom, as exemplified by the hi-tech sector in the U.S., overproduction was likely to catch up, as it seems to have now. Hence the West were consuming on borrowed time and resources from the poor. As Robbins said, someone has to pay.

Another way then, for industries to continue growth and profitability etc, is to try and create demand. Markets may have to be created where there were none before. But, as a result, the following effects can occur:

• Demands need to be created where there may have been none previously, or may be minimally.
• Luxuries can therefore be encouraged to become necessities.
• The commodification of food, the impact of policies such as structural adjustment policies and conditionalities have led to mass production of the same commodities from many regions, mostly exported to the wealthy nations.
• But the huge price war leads to price depressions.
• Mass consumption increases in the wealthy nations that receive these exports at cheap prices and demands are further increased.
• Poor producers are further marginalized as the wealthy export producers use even more resources for the drive for further profits to meet this demand.
• Additional requirements are made on the environment to produce even more.
• During booms, there is more consumption in wealthy areas, and from poorer areas there are more people migrating towards rich countries.
• During busts, further poverty, increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric, and in poor countries especially, pushing the already marginalized onto additional lands because the best lands are already owned and controlled. In worse cases, conflicts can also result.

(Of course, there are many other complex factors, both causes and effects. For more examples, see various sections within the causes of poverty part of this web site.)

When looking at the destruction of rain forests in Central America, a similar pattern to what is mentioned above was observed by John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto, in their book Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Truth About Rain Forest Destruction , (Food First, 1995), and also highlighted by editor Douglas H. Boucher, The Paradox of Plenty; Hunger in a Bountiful World , (Food First, 1999), pp. 86—87. Summarizing that here:

The patterns of inter-related issues that would affect forest destruction could be seen in many different areas, such as banana production, citrus and other fruits, rubber tree plantations, and other commodities. Yet, these were similar politically if quite distinct biologically , and would typically include the following stages:

• Visionary capitalists identify an economic opportunity for the market expansion of an agricultural product
• They purchase (or steal, or bribe into a government concession) some land, including land that may contain rain forest, which is promptly cut down.
• They import workers to produce products
• After a period of boom the product goes bust on the world market which leads to cut backs, layoffs, etc.
• Those laid off must seek other means to survive, and in poor countries and rural areas that may mean growing subsistence crops on marginal lands
• The only place the now unemployed workers can find land no one will kick them off of is in the forest, which means yet more forest is converted to agriculture.

They continue to point out the flaws in the accepted Malthusian theories of population growth placing demands on natural resources. An environmental group in India, Centre for Science and Environment, captures this in a simple cartoon graphic:

(See also this web site’s population section for more on population debates, and this site’s section on biodiversity for more about deforestation and other issues around biodiversity and its importance.)

There are many products and industries where one can identify such patterns. We will look at some of these next.

Tobacco and obesity are, in a way, simpler examples that many can see being related to the more negative aspects of consumption encouraged by corporate capitalism. These two are looked at first.

On the pages after that, we then look at two stark examples that we may not often think about: sugar and beef consumption.

• The consumption of these have not historically been as high as they are today.
• Yet, sugar plantations during colonial times, for example, was a major employer of slaves and continues to be a major contributor to environmental degradation, poverty, health costs and all manner of wasted and diverted wealth.
• Cattle raising has often led to clearing of rainforests, such as parts of the Amazon — not to feed local people however, but for fast food restaurants, such as McDonalds. Such demands then serve to meet the needs of producers.

The example of bananas discussed earlier, and how that has affected forests, environmental sustainability, economies of entire regions, etc. is also discussed in more depth after sugar and beef.

There are also numerous examples of how conflict and war can be fueled partly because of demands placed on resources, the want to maintain a certain way of life, even if it is wasteful, etc. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• various conflicts in Africa (such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, etc) for resources to be exported to the west, such as diamonds, wood, coltan (without which computer chips can’t work),
• the historic domination and influence of the Middle East for oil,
• for the support of dictatorships by the west, such as previously in Indonesia to support massacres and invasion of East Timor (also for oil and other resources)
• of oil multinationals being accused for killing local and indigenous people,
• Even the Cold War (which we often just dismiss away as an ideological battle, but behind the ideology was access to resources) was such a battle.
• Many of these are already presented in other contexts throughout this site and links to these are provided at the end of this site’s section on consumption.

These are not complete examples, and of course, over time more will be added here and throughout the site.

Looking at some of these examples next will further highlight how in various ways there is enormous waste structured within our system of the current form of corporate capitalism.

Author and Page Information

• Created: Friday, September 07, 2001
• Last updated: Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Document revision history

Alternatives for broken links.

Sometimes links to other sites may break beyond my control. Where possible, alternative links are provided to backups or reposted versions here.

Actual link:

• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V2W-4T1SFRC-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=88a8cd29065080bdfcd25a0827f2f239

Alternatives:

• http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10001150-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
• http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19826612.900-editorial-the-blamechina-syndrome.html
• Jim Puckett et al., 'Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia', The Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), February 25, 2002 http://svtc.etoxics.org/site/DocServer/technotrash.pdf?docID=123

Alternative:

• http://www.ban.org/E-waste/technotrashfinalcomp.pdf

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Consumer Awareness of Plastic: an Overview of Different Research Areas

• Original Paper
• Published: 25 March 2023
• Volume 3 , pages 2083–2107, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Fabiula Danielli Bastos de Sousa   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5776-2247 1 , 2  

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Plastic makes our society more practical and safer. It is hard to consider eliminating plastic in some sectors, such as the medical field. However, after use, plastic waste becomes a global problem without precedents, and when not properly disposed of, it can cause several socio-environmental problems. Some possible solutions are recycling, the circular economy, proper waste management, and consumer awareness. Consumers play a crucial role in preventing problems caused by plastic. In this work, consumer awareness of plastic is discussed according to the point of view of the research areas—environmental science, engineering, and materials science—based on the analysis of the main authors’ keywords obtained in a literature search in the Scopus database. Bibliometrix analyzed the Scopus search results. The results showed that each area presents different concerns and priorities. The current scenario, including the main hotspots, trends, emerging topics, and deficiencies, was obtained. On the contrary, the concerns from the literature and those of the daily lives of consumers do not seem to fit in, which creates a gap. By reducing this gap, the distance between consumers awareness and their behavior will be smaller.

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Introduction

The correct management of plastic waste is a complex and delicate task. Several characters are involved but the consumer has a relevant role, being responsible for segregating and discarding all the waste they produce.

The greater the economic prosperity of a region is, the greater its municipal solid waste (MSW) composition complexity [ 1 ]. More available products and services for citizens occur as countries and cities become more prosperous and more populated [ 2 ]. In high-income countries and cities, packing wastes, especially plastics, are predominant among all the waste produced [ 3 ]. Consequently, the higher the MSW composition complexity, the greater the difficulty of managing it, especially the correct management of plastic. Plastic is ubiquitous in our lives and modern society, being a massive increase in the production of fibers and resins, from 2 Mt in 1950 to around 380 Mt in 2015 [ 4 ].

Plastic plays a unique socioeconomic role. Worldwide, thousands of jobs are generated, whether in the production or recycling of plastic [ 5 ]. Thus, in addition to contributing to the economy, it plays a tremendous social role. Employment can be defined as a source of income and also a link of its identity over individual attributions introduced by its achievement of the task [ 6 ]. In addition, employment means social integration, allowing contact among people, insertion, and the feeling of belonging to a group [ 7 ].

However, even with a tremendously positive influence on society [ 5 ], plastic pollution outperforms it, making plastic a major polluter. Over the years, people have accompanied a significant increase in the pollution of water bodies by plastic, reaching up to 53 Mt per year by 2030 [ 8 ]. According to Geyer et al. [ 4 ], around 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated up to 2015, being recycled only about 9% of this amount.

Even with legal procedures, regulations, and levies regarding the reduction of single-use plastic [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ], knowing that the circular economy is crucial to reduce plastic pollution [ 15 , 16 ], and knowing all the problems that plastic can cause when improperly disposed of, some consumers do not fulfill their role regarding the correct segregation and the final disposal of plastic waste that they produce. Some authors consider consumers as a primary source of plastic pollution [ 17 ] due to their lack of awareness or contribution to dealing with plastic. Besides, consumers may not want to put information into practice on individual actions relative to environmental and economic benefits [ 17 ].

Bibliometric analysis is an important instrument used to have an overview of different knowledge areas. Using specific software programs, the data of the publications collected from a search in a given database can be analyzed from a quantitative point of view. Among the possible data to be analyzed, the investigation of the keywords is essential to determine the research trend, identify gaps in the discussion concerning a given subject/research area, and identify the fields that can be interesting as future research areas [ 18 ]. The obtained results are relevant to influence new researchers to achieve progress in a given research area.

Considering the distinct role of consumers in the correct management of plastic waste and all the consequences that its incorrect management is likely to result in, consumer awareness of plastic was discussed, according to the literature of the last two decades. The analysis was based on the analysis of the main authors’ keywords obtained from a search in the Scopus database. Deepening the discussion, the point of view of the research areas—environmental science, engineering, and materials science—was also studied. The primary purpose was to comprehend the contribution of each area in developing consumer awareness of plastic. The results have shown that each area has different concerns and priorities. The current scenario was obtained by including the main hotspots, trends, emerging topics, and deficiencies.

Literature Review

Awareness is the knowledge that something exists or the understanding of a situation or subject based on information or experience [ 19 ]. Thus, within the scope of this work, although consumers know the problems that the incorrect disposal of plastic waste causes and the possible actions to mitigate existing problems, they do not collaborate positively.

Thomas [ 20 ] categorized four dynamic and ever-changing forms of non-recognition or unawareness, trying to elucidate why pollution is ignored:

Recognized unawareness: An individual perceives that pollution can cause negative effects but believes that the information is insufficient.

False awareness: An individual trusts to have all the information and that it is accessible, even having insufficient, outdated, or misunderstood information.

Deliberate unawareness: People do not consider as significant an environmental topic and then do not search for further information on it.

Concealed awareness: Information is omitted by an actor who is unable or does not feel like sharing it with others. There can be financial motivation issues or a benevolent effort to secure the public.

In the circular economy, waste is a raw material. Waste is a resource continually circulated within the economy [ 21 ]. It is a valuable material. The consumer is responsible for making available correctly the recyclable waste they produce for selective collection. The consumer is responsible for reintroducing the plastic waste to the cycle again (Fig.  1 item 3). Then, the plastic waste is collected, separated, and washed, i. e., it is prepared for recycling (Fig.  1 item 4). Plastic is recycled (Fig.  1 item 5), becoming a raw material for producing new items. In the sequence, it is transformed into other items (Fig.  1 item 1). After, the items made of recycled plastic go to consumer markets (Fig.  1 item 2), and then, consumed again (Fig.  1 item 3), closing the cycle (considering the mechanical recycling). This cycle constitutes the circular economy (Fig.  1 ). However, the role of the consumer regarding plastic does not end at that point—it goes far beyond. Some authors [ 22 ] have identified 14 critical roles of the consumers in reducing plastic pollutants, as follows:

Support plastic-free brands and supermarkets;

Take initiatives to limit plastic littering;

Ensure proximity of waste disposal bins;

Contribute to municipal services;

Comply with regulations;

Demand for sustainable and biodegradable product options;

Reduce reliance on single-use of plastic;

Plan green purchasing;

Positive attitude towards responsible consumption and reuse of plastic;

Clear perception of the adverse environmental effects of plastic pollution;

Emphasize proper recycling practices;

Conversion of plastic source into a resource;

Promote green packaging preferences;

Motivate to opt for the green lifestyle.

Summarized circular economy of plastic. The photo in the center shows a Magellanic Penguin found dead with a face mask in its stomach. The use of the photo was authorized by Instituto Argonauta [ 23 ]

The lack of consumer awareness plays a crucial role in recycling rates. In some countries, such as Brazil, recycling rates are meager—only about 4%. Even worse, it causes plastic pollution, mainly in water bodies (as aforementioned), which causes negative impacts on the environment, fauna, and human health.

Plastic is found in several sizes in different water bodies around the globe, but the most common are microplastics [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ], fragments of polymeric origin with dimensions between 1 and 1000 μm [ 30 ]. Some products, such as wet wipes [ 27 ], sanitary towels [ 27 ], and face masks [ 31 , 32 , 33 ], are sources of microplastics in water bodies when improperly disposed of.

Microplastics in water bodies damage different organisms as they cannot distinguish them from food [ 34 ]. The accumulation of plastic in their organisms hinders digestion and the absorption of nutrients, reducing the reserve of energy available and leading to premature death [ 35 ]. As a shocking example, news addressed a Magellanic Penguin found dead on a beach in the city of São Sebastião, on the north coast of São Paulo (Brazil). During its necropsy, a face mask (made of plastic) was found in its stomach (photo in the center of Fig.  1 ), the cause of its death [ 36 ].

Microplastics can be easily ingested by aquatic animals and by humans due to their small size. Additionally, microplastics can adsorb different contaminants, increasing their toxicity. It is estimated that humans ingest up to 5 g of microplastics per week [ 37 ]. The literature points to inflammation as the major impact of microplastics on human health [ 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 ]. Recently, microplastics were detected in breast milk for the first time [ 52 ].

Methodology

The methodology used in this work is described by de Sousa [ 53 ]. The bibliographic data inputs were obtained through a Scopus search on 12 August 2021. The keywords used were (consumer*) AND (awareness OR consciousness) AND (plastic* OR polymer*). Reviews and articles in English were considered from 2001 to 2020.

From Scopus, a scopus.bib file containing the data was taken, and a bibliometric analysis using the Bibliometrix (an R-package) was performed.

Next, from the Scopus search, the results obtained were limited to environmental science, engineering, and materials science research areas. For each area investigated, a scopus.bib file with the data was recorded and used to analyze the authors’ keywords.

The word cloud contains the 50 most frequent authors’ keywords. Five keywords per year with a minimum frequency of occurrence of 3 were analyzed for the evolution of the main terms.

Results and Discussion

The Scopus search obtained a total of 191 publications, with 156 articles and 35 reviews in English. The number of publications per year and area is presented in Fig.  2 .

Number of publications per year ( a ) and per area ( b )

The results show a growth in the number of publications over the period, with an annual growth rate of 15.39% (according to Bibliometrix). Even with a trend of increase in this figure, the number of annual publications is still low given the great relevance of the subject, and also demonstrates a real possibility of growth and improvement in the area, with ample space for research and development [ 54 ].

By analyzing the authors’ keywords, it is possible to obtain a panorama of the research field [ 55 ], as well as the hotspots and future trends. Authors use keywords to communicate their wishes to readers and the scientific community [ 56 ]. Some authors [ 54 ] explain that “keywords are the core of the paper, which indicates the research direction of the field by abstracting and summarizing the research content of the academic paper.” Given the importance of analyzing the authors’ keywords, they will be discussed in the present work.

The research area of consumer awareness of plastic (encompassing all the involved research areas) will be analyzed in the sequence.

All the Research Areas

From the 191 publications, a total of 720 authors’ keywords were obtained. The most relevant are as follows (number of occurrences in parenthesis): waste management (9), recycling (8), sustainability (7), plastic waste (6), packaging (5), consumer behavior (4), microplastics (4), pollution (4), and biopolymers (3). These keywords are hotspots concerning consumer awareness of plastic, especially waste management [ 57 , 58 ].

Figure  3 presents the word cloud containing the 50 more frequently observed authors’ keywords in the results of the Scopus search about consumer awareness of plastic and the trending topic. The word cloud analysis can provide an overview of the current literature about consumer awareness of plastic. The size of the letters represents the frequency of the keyword. The word cloud contains the authors’ keywords that are more relevant in the field. Therefore, as a panorama is provided, the discussion can be deepened.

( a ) Word cloud containing the 50 principal authors’ keywords. ( b ) Evolution of the main terms

Based on the authors’ keywords with the highest frequency and the word cloud, a concern from the literature about the problems that plastic (“plastic waste,” “packaging”) can cause/aggravate in the environment can be observed (“pollution,” “microplastics”), as well as the possible solutions to mitigate them (“consumer behavior,” “waste management,” “recycling,” and use of “biopolymers” and “biodegradable polymers”). This result also demonstrates the vital role of consumers in the plastics recycling chain through their pro-environmental behavior (“consumer behavior”).

Some possibilities to mitigate plastic pollution include the correct “management of plastic,” “recycling,”  “levies,” and “consumer behavior.”

Other concerns depicted in the word cloud are the management of “e-waste” [ 59 ] and “food safety” [ 24 , 58 ].

Single-use plastic is a massive concern in consumer awareness of plastic research. Around 49% of the global production of plastic is constituted by single-use items [ 60 ]. The point to be considered is that single-use plastic has a very short lifetime, being discarded just after use and consequently becoming responsible for enhancing the environmental damages and concerns caused by plastic waste. According to Forbes [ 61 ], around 160,000 plastic bags are used per second worldwide, and only less than 3% of this amount is effectively recycled. The literature [ 62 ] describes a more negative perception towards single-use plastic and relatively high awareness of the environmental impacts they cause, as observed in the word cloud due to the keywords “plastic straws” and “plastic bags.” Negative discernments of single-use plastic consumption are linked to higher levels of environmental awareness [ 63 , 64 ]. On the other hand, even knowing the negative impact of plastic, some consumers still use them indistinctly [ 65 ].

According to Winton et al. [ 64 ], the most found macroplastics in freshwater environments in Europe are single-use short-term food acquisitions. Single-use plastics contribute to 60–95% of global marine plastic pollution [ 9 ]. So, abolishing all single-use products can effectively protect the environment and the world’s oceans [ 63 ].

Consumers can decide to reduce single-use plastic bags (SUPBs) in their daily life and engage in pro-environmental behavior [ 63 ]. In Chile, an informal and uncoordinated alliance of different sectors, including science, media, the general public, government agencies, schools, and universities, promoted the demise of SUPBs [ 63 ].

The literature points out to the circular economy and recycling as possible solutions for plastic waste management. The commitment of consumers, government, and companies (through the extended producer responsibility [ 66 ]), as part of the circular economy, is essential for reducing/solving the massive problem of plastic management since each sector is co-responsible for the environmental problems generated by plastic [ 55 ].

According to Fig.  3 b, the evolution of the main terms can be visualized. Some terms have been kept in evidence in the literature for an extended period, such as “mechanical properties,” “consumer behavior,” and “food safety.” However, they have lost their evidence to other terms, such as “packaging,” “sustainability,” “marine debris,” “microplastics,” and “plastic waste.” The terms with the highest frequency are the most popular authors’ keywords, as depicted before. The term “waste management” has been kept in evidence from 2012 to 2020. It has the highest frequency, corroborating Fig.  3 a. The terms with the highest frequencies, as mentioned previously, are currently in evidence, being considered hotspots in the research field of consumer awareness of plastic.

Regarding the authors’ keywords, 584 are from articles, and 136 are from reviews.

Based on the analysis of the authors’ keywords, emerging topics and trends are obtained. Trends or, in other words, subjects highly investigated, are present in reviews, whereas emerging topics are present in articles [ 67 ].

Table  1 presents the most frequent authors’ keywords in articles and reviews. The minimum number of occurrences for each keyword is 2. The keywords were separated into the following categories: actor, source, problem, mitigation, consequence, and policy. The main problem was plastic pollution (“microplastics,” “marine debris,” etc.). The actor is responsible for the problem, i.e., “consumer behavior.” The sources are the ones that produce plastic pollution, such as “plastic waste.” The consequences are the effects of plastic pollution. Mitigations lessen the consequences of plastic pollution. Furthermore, a policy is a rule to be followed by the population, such as a ban on a given plastic item. Plastic packages act as a barrier, protecting food against damage (food safety), and reducing food waste. However, some additives in the plastic can migrate to food in contact with the package, resulting in health impacts. So, the authors’ keywords “food safety,” “food contact material,” and “food waste” were categorized into a consequence.

Table  1 shows that reviews focus on human health impacts caused by plastic pollution, some sources, consequences, and mitigations. Conversely, in articles, authors focus on the mitigations of plastic pollution.

Some of the most frequent authors’ keywords are from articles (Fig.  3 a); so, a high contribution of articles in the current literature can be observed, such as the concerns expressed by authors considered emerging trends [ 67 ].

Directions can be obtained through the divergences among the keywords in articles and reviews [ 67 ]. Based on Table  1 , some mismatches are observed, such as actors, mitigations, and policies. These discrepancies are considered deficiencies on which the literature should be focused. So, themes contemplated in these categories can be attractive for future research. Thus, future works can focus on the abovementioned themes to mitigate plastic pollution caused mainly by the need for more consumer awareness [ 68 , 69 ].

“A large proportion of the plastic waste is caused due to consumerism” [ 68 ]. In general, the incorrect disposal of plastic waste is caused, in large part, by the lack of awareness of consumers or, in other words, by the “throwaway behavior” of consumers [ 68 ].

Consumer awareness can change consumer behavior. However, if changes do not happen, negative consequences can occur due to wrong political and entrepreneurial strategies because of a lack of information about consumer awareness [ 70 ]. Based on this, consumer awareness of plastic must be understood in depth to achieve a change in consumer habits for the common good. Most studies focus on environmental concerns and the disposition of consumers to purchase alternative products [ 68 , 71 ]. On the other hand, consumer awareness of plastic does not involve only environmental aspects, evidenced by the numerous research areas with publications on the subject (Fig.  2 b). Literature is constructed from the contribution of many different knowledge areas.

To better understand the interests and concerns of some of the different research areas, the literature on the areas of environmental science, engineering, and materials science (some of the areas with the highest number of publications) will be briefly analyzed, focusing on the analysis of the authors’ keywords of these research areas. Based on this, the contribution of each area in developing consumer awareness about plastic can be understood.

Environmental Science

The Scopus search about consumer awareness of plastic limited to the environmental science area (68 publications—60 articles and 8 reviews) obtained a total of 286 authors’ keywords. The most relevant are as follows (number of occurrences in parenthesis): waste management (7), plastic waste (5), recycling (5), consumer behavior (4), microplastics (4), marine debris (3), plastic bag levy (3), plastic pollution (3), and pollution (3).

The word cloud containing the 50 more frequently observed authors’ keywords in the publications of the environmental science area is shown in Fig.  4 .

Word cloud containing the 50 main authors’ keywords of the environmental science area

The role of consumers is evidenced through the keywords “awareness of consequences” [ 72 ], “consumer preferences” [ 73 , 74 ], “attitude,” “theory of planned behavior” [ 75 ], “beliefs,” “behavior-based solutions,” “behavior change” [ 76 ], “anti-consumption behavior” [ 77 ], “awareness” [ 68 , 78 ], “choice experiment” [ 74 ], “behavior,” “consumer behavior” [ 62 , 64 ], “pro-environmental behavior,” and “willingness to pay” [ 79 ]. Some keywords present a minor frequency. The high number of keywords concerning the behavior of consumers shows that the environmental science area focuses on consumers. Their behavior and consumption are responsible for environmental problems caused/aggravated by plastic. As aforementioned, consumers also play an essential role in correctly managing plastic and its recycling [ 75 ] (Fig.  1 ).

Other possible solutions to mitigate the problems that plastic can cause are posed by the environmental science area, such as the use of “bioplastic bottles,” “bio-based packaging” [ 80 ], “biodegradable plastic bottles” (in substitution for conventional plastic bottles [ 81 ]), “bio-based plastic,” the correct “management of plastic waste” [ 63 ], “recycling” [ 75 ], and “plastic bag levies” [ 77 , 79 , 82 ].

Habits, norms, and situational factors predict the behavior of consumers. Despite a pronounced awareness of the associated problems that plastic can cause, consumers keep on appreciating and using it [ 65 ]. In Taiwan, some authors [ 1 ] demonstrated that the plastic and glass waste generation rate declined when economic activities expanded, mainly due to the strict enforcement of recycling policies accompanied by marketing campaigns encouraging recycling and enhancing the green awareness of consumers. Accordingly, an opportunity to increase consumer awareness is to encourage the opening of zero-packaging grocery stores, improving the social and environmental impacts of the food supply chain [ 78 ]. Another example of the importance of consumer behavior is the ban on SUPBs in Chile [ 63 ], which was driven by a broad concern among the general public, and led to a bottom-up movement culminating in the national government taking stakes in the issue.

Literature also analyzed the consumer perceptions of microplastics in “personal care products” [ 83 ], of using “compostable carrier bags” [ 84 ], and “plastic water bottles” [ 81 ]. Orset et al. [ 81 ] analyzed the perception and behavior of consumers of plastic water bottles, which depend on the viewpoint (i.e., consumer, producer, and social welfare). From the consumer point of view, the authors recommended the organic policy with subsidy, the three tools of the recycling policy, and the biodegradable policy with subsidy. Concerning the compostable carrier bags [ 84 ], a greater awareness was observed regarding the use of these bags and the recognition of the importance of green products, which are gaining space in the market and in the routine of consumers. Furthermore, about microplastics in personal care products [ 83 ], participants of the survey perceived the use of microbeads in such products as unnatural and unnecessary.

Engineering

From the Scopus search about consumer awareness of plastic limited to the engineering area, a total of 131 authors’ keywords were obtained in the 33 publications (24 articles and 9 reviews). The most frequently used keywords by the authors of the engineering area are as follow (frequency of occurrence in parenthesis): mechanical properties (3), bio-based plastic (2), composites (2), consumer preferences (2), and food waste (2). All the other keywords present the same frequency.

The word cloud containing the 50 more frequently found authors’ keywords in the results of the Scopus search of the engineering area is shown in Fig.  5 .

Word cloud containing the 50 principal authors’ keywords of the engineering area

Based on the analysis of the authors’ keywords, the engineering area demonstrates some options to mitigate the impacts that plastic pollution can cause; options such as the “circular economy,” “e-waste management,” the use of “biodegradable polymers” [ 85 ], “bio-based plastic” [ 73 ], “composites” [ 86 ], “chitosan” [ 87 ], “eco-friendly plastic,” “bioplastic,” “bamboo” [ 88 ], “alginate” [ 87 ], “biobased” and “biodegradable” [ 89 , 90 , 91 ], “bio nanocomposites” [ 92 ], “CO 2 -derived products” [ 93 ], and “filler” materials. All these materials are possible options for producing materials that are more environmentally friendly.

As an example of using biobased/biodegradable polymer, some authors [ 91 ] studied the feasibility of biobased/biodegradable films for in-package thermal pasteurization made of polylactic acid (PLA) and polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT). The results indicated that selected PLA and PBAT-based films are suitable for in-package pasteurization and can replace polyethylene for ≤ 10 days of shelf life at 4 °C.

This area focuses on economic aspects to encourage the use of materials that cause less environmental impacts, such as “demonetization”  and a “cashless economy”  since financial encouragement is considered an effective way to reduce plastic debris [ 76 ]. “Credible alternative actions and products offered by businesses or through legislation at competitive costs can produce positive behavior changes that eventually reduce plastic pollution” [ 17 ].

The area also alerts people to a material that causes a substantial environmental impact, the ‘Brazil coffee-in-capsules’ [ 94 ]. According to the authors [ 94 ], coffee consumers have a dominant role in helping turn coffee capsule waste into a financial resource or supporting other efforts toward circular practice, emphasizing the behavior and awareness of consumers.

This attitude also raises an alert of possible problems to human health caused/aggravated by the use of plastics with the presence of the keywords “endocrine disruption,” “carcinogenesis,” “allergen,” and “biogenic toys” [ 74 ] (to avoid “children contamination” [ 95 ]). These keywords express some consumer concerns about the use of plastics.

Even knowing that packages act as a kind of barrier protecting food against damage, extending the lifetime of foods [ 5 , 33 ], and reducing food waste [ 78 , 96 ] (another keyword present in the word cloud), additives contained in plastic can migrate from packaging to the food due to diffusion processes (keyword “food contact material,” also shown in the word cloud). As an example of the diffusion process, the release of bisphenol A (BPA), a monomer used in the manufacture of epoxy resins, from polycarbonate products such as plastic baby bottles, baby bottle liners, and reusable drinking bottles is proven by literature [ 97 , 98 , 99 ]. BPA (endocrine-disrupting chemical) is toxic and can cause several health problems, from cancer to the development of problems in the formation of sexual organs of babies and children, depending on the contamination level [ 98 ]. Additionally, additives can contaminate soil, air, water, and food [ 100 , 101 ].

The research area also demonstrates the critical role of consumers regarding plastic use and its environmental impact through the keywords “consumer preferences” and “awareness” [ 78 , 102 ].

Materials Science

From the Scopus search about consumer awareness of plastic limited to materials science, 72 authors’ keywords were obtained in the 28 publications (20 articles and 8 reviews). The most frequently used keywords by the authors of the materials science area are as follow (frequency of occurrence in parenthesis): recycling (3), antibacterial (2), and mechanical properties (2). All the other keywords presented the same frequency. The smallest frequency of the keywords of the engineering and materials science compared to the environmental science area is due to the smaller number of publications and authors’ keywords.

The word cloud containing the 50 more frequently found authors’ keywords in the results of the Scopus search of the materials science area is shown in Fig.  6 .

Word cloud containing the 50 main authors’ keywords of the materials science area

The keywords of the materials science area seem to show more significant concerns about the materials that compose the plastic, such as “high-density polyethylene” (HDPE) [ 103 ], “aliphatic polyesters” [ 90 ], “PET” (polyethylene terephthalate) [ 104 , 105 ], “additives” [ 106 ], “antioxidants,” “kenaf fiber” [ 107 ], “antifogs” [ 106 ], “bamboo” [ 88 ], “dyes/pigments” [ 108 ], “bamboo rayon” [ 109 ], “copper nanoparticles,” and “biodegradable polymers” [ 89 , 90 ]. Some of these keywords express the search for more environmentally friendly materials (for instance, the use of “natural fibers” [ 110 ] and “biodegradable polymers” [ 89 , 90 ]), aiming at reducing environmental impacts caused by plastic.

Concerning materials, a meaningful example is the one by Stoll et al. [ 108 ], which analyzed the use of carotenoid extracts as natural colorants in PLA films. According to the authors, using carotenoids as colorants for polymeric materials represents an environmentally friendly way of obtaining colored packaging. Beyond the environmental advantages, this natural colorant reduced the oxygen permeability and presented a lubricant effect, increasing the film elasticity up to 50%. Some authors [ 110 ] investigated the processing of natural fibers in an internal mixer to be used for thermoplastic lightweight materials, which means a good alternative for the automotive industry.

The primary possibility to solve the problem of plastic waste posed by the area is “recycling” and others, such as the use of plastic residues in the production of “lightweight concrete” [ 111 ], “construction materials,” “composites,” and in “3D printing” [ 104 ]. 3D printing is an option for the recycling process of post-used plastics, as in the example of using PET [ 104 ].

Biodegradable polymers can be considered an option to reduce solid waste disposal problems and reduce the dependence on petroleum-based plastics for packaging materials [ 90 ]. However, some authors [ 89 ] detected some problems, namely, cost control, in-depth development of functions and applications, materials source extension, enhancement of environmental protection awareness and regulations, and systematical assessment of environmental compatibility of the biodegradable polymers.

All these possibilities should present the necessary mechanical properties for their specific final applications, demonstrated by the keywords “mechanical properties,” “compliance,” and “durability.” Also, the keywords “finite element analysis,” “kinetics,” “computational fluid dynamics” [ 112 ], and “package design” indicate some possibilities for analyzing the properties of a given material and design. Computational fluid dynamics (the “finite volume method”) was used to analyze the airflow and the heat transfer performances in the design and performance evaluation of fresh fruit ventilated distribution packaging by Mukama et al. [ 112 ], being that the vent-hole design affects cooling and strength requirements.

Some health impacts of plastic and some benefits are also presented, such as “heavy metal testing” [ 105 ], “antimicrobial” [ 113 , 114 ], “antibacterial” [ 109 ], “exposure” [ 115 ], and “antimicrobial fruit quality.” The research area does not demonstrate the role of consumers in the problems that plastic can cause. However, it presents some possibilities for consumers to act actively and consciously through the presence of keywords “chemical education research” [ 116 ], “evaluation strategies,” and “environmental protection.”

Concerning the use of recycled polymers, some authors [ 117 ] analyzed the removal of the odor from HDPE by using a modified recycling process. Removing this type of contamination is considered a challenge in the industry and vital to establishing viable concepts for a circular economy for post-consumer HDPE packaging.

Based on the analysis of the authors’ keywords, the materials science area is more focused on solving environmental problems caused by plastic through designing and producing materials that cause a lower environmental impact and are more environmentally friendly options. It is also a way to make consumers more aware of their role when using plastics, providing consumers with options that cause less environmental impact.

The work of Rhein and Schmid [ 68 ], which verified the real concerns of consumers regarding plastic packaging from a quantitative analysis based on consumers interviews, showed that consumer awareness involves the following five different aspects:

Awareness of environmental pollution: consumer awareness of the damage that plastic pollution causes to the environment and the oceans, knowing the necessity of environmental protection.

Awareness of the intensive use of plastic: consumers who are aware of the problems that plastic can cause but, even so, still use it unreasonably.

Awareness of consumers’ influence: even being aware, these consumers are concerned about companies and the influence caused by them.

Awareness of consumers’ powerlessness: consumers do not know how to contribute to the reduction of plastic pollution.

Awareness of the need for using plastic: consumer awareness of the positive characteristics of plastic making it essential in their daily lives, such as a hygienic way of storage.

According to the authors [ 68 ], “the different types of awareness strongly reflect how consumers think about problems associated with plastic and whether they feel that they are responsible and, therefore, able to change the current situation.”

As stated before, consumers may not want to put information into practice on individual actions relative to environmental and economic benefits [ 17 ]. In other words, many consumers have the information they need to dispose of plastic waste correctly and would rather avoid cooperating. So, consumers have a crucial role in the correct segregation and final disposal of plastic waste, but, unfortunately, some do not fulfill their role (Fig.  1 ), and consequently, several socio-environmental problems caused by plastic are aggravated. An example that can be observed daily is the significant increase in the number of face masks improperly disposed of on the streets during the COVID-19 pandemic. They end up going into water bodies and can kill animals (Fig.  1 ). These masks are degraded and release plastic microparticles [ 23 , 33 , 118 ].

Behavior changes can be blocked by psychological and practical barriers, turning the awareness raising into tortuous action [ 119 ]. Plastic-related behavioral change is not very successful if the focus is only on information and raising awareness [ 65 ]. Stakeholders interviewed by Steinhorst and Beyerl [ 120 ] agreed that consumers are not the most responsible agents of change but rather partners of producers, retailers, politicians, and disposal agencies, in which producers and retailers are considered the main agents. Private and public sector initiatives, well-enforced policies, and evidence-based media reporting can provide new norms and practices that are socially accepted [ 17 ]. According to Parashar and Hait [ 69 ], the primary drivers of plastic misconduct are the lack of awareness and attitude of consumers and their irresponsible behavior, as well as the stress on waste management infrastructure in terms of collection, operation, and financial constraints.

The impact of COVID-19 on people’s consumption behavior worldwide was studied [ 121 ], having the following as main results:

Increased the consumption of packed food and food delivery (i.e., increased the number of packages consumed) during the pandemic (45–48% of the respondents)

Increased waste generation during the lockdown period, being the highest increase observed for plastic packaging (53%) and food waste (45%) (55% of the respondents)

Efforts increasing to segregate waste properly during the lockdown (32% of the respondents)

The need to use less packaging through new product design (66% of the respondents) or to increase recyclability (61% of the respondents)

These results reveal the increase in the production of recyclable materials in homes and the lack of environmental awareness of most of the respondents. Contradictorily, just 32% segregated the waste they produced but demonstrated concern about the new design of packaging containing less plastic.

Likewise, Rhein and Schmid [ 68 ] demonstrated a similar profile of consumers and their awareness of the use of plastic. At the same time, some consumers are willing to pay more for other options that cause less pollution, citing concern for families and especially grandchildren. They claim that plastic pollution is the fault of Africa, Asia, and the Americas (i.e., outside Europe, where the research was performed). They know that the amount of plastic used in packages is large and sometimes unnecessary, such as plastic in shell fruits. However, these consumers cannot help change and assign responsibility to companies. A particular sort of laziness and a wish to buy goods without restrictions override the consciousness that the existing plastic system would, in principle, be changed. Some consumers are conscious of the use of plastic and know the problems they cause to the environment but agree that plastic is practical, unwilling to alter their consumption behavior. That is, “others” are responsible for pollution, not “me.”

Considering consumers’ daily consumption, hygiene, food safety, and practicality of use are more important than the environmental impact [ 122 ]. In the review of Heidbreder et al. [ 65 ], in which 187 studies were analyzed, people appreciate and regularly use plastic despite a noticeable awareness of related problems. Also, Nguyen [ 123 ] analyzed factors that affect Vietnamese consumers’ intention and behavior to bring their shopping bags (BYOB). The results illustrated a modest relationship between intent and authentic behavior concerning BYOB.

So, the literature shows a gap between consumer awareness and behavior. The literature needs to be focused on reducing this gap. According to Ali et al. [ 22 ], there is a lack of literature about the explicit roles of consumers, corroborating with the present work. The interrelationships among the consumer’s roles were identified by the authors, which provided action plans for decreasing plastic pollution.

According to the obtained results, each knowledge area has its concerns and priorities regarding consumer awareness of plastic. Nevertheless, such concerns and priorities are not in line with the ones of consumers in everyday life. Thus, by reducing this gap, literature can be a strong partner, for example, in the decision-making of authorities, such as in the creation of laws and norms aimed at reducing the real problem of the final disposal of plastic waste. “Consumers-citizens can greatly contribute to solving the plastic pollution problem and can be used as a stepping stone for further interdisciplinary research” [ 17 ].

As an example of the magnitude of the literature, Wang et al. [ 124 ] systematically reviewed and compared the publications related to plastic pollution before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the main results, the authors observed that the total number of publications during the COVID-19 pandemic has been much higher than before, and this increase happened in a short period, demonstrating increasing attention to research on plastic pollution worldwide promoted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Another relevant case is Contact From the Future , a digital game on plastic pollution for children created by Panagiotopoulou et al. [ 125 ], which proposed to construct awareness and motivate pro-environmental behaviors.

As stated before by some authors [ 68 ], in the literature, consumer awareness of plastic is, in general, intrinsically linked to the consumers’ environmental awareness. The results from this work show that consumer awareness of plastic is broader, not limited to environmental consciousness, and each knowledge area has its concerns. These results align with Rhein and Schmid [ 68 ], which depicted that “the term awareness cannot automatically be equated with environmental concerns”.

Based on the analysis of the authors’ keywords, the environmental area is prone to concerns; engineering is focused on the solutions, and materials science in the materials that compose the plastic and the development of alternative materials. All of them are intrinsically connected in an attempt to mitigate the pollution caused by plastic. In other words, consumer awareness of plastic is a much broader issue, not just an environmental concern. Even knowing the importance of all the areas analyzed in the search for the growth of consumer awareness of plastic, it is perceived that the literature is not aligned with consumer awareness in their daily life. Literature needs, in addition to focusing on addressing deficiencies described above, meet the real requests of the population in the search for awareness and behavior change for the well-being of society. A schema is shown in Fig.  7 .

Schema shows that even if the various areas of knowledge about consumer awareness of plastic have several concerns, these do not seem to align with the population’s concerns

So, after all, how to raise consumer awareness of plastic? The literature has provided an outstanding contribution to this.

Integrated plastic waste management is a very complex issue and requires engagement at all levels, including producer, consumer, and government. The government is mainly responsible for establishing laws aimed at the common good and supervision so that they are fulfilled. As an example of Law Nº 12,305 in Brazil [ 126 ], laws addressing waste management highlight the shared responsibility in which consumers have an essential role.

Public policies are relevant, mainly in cases of consumers who, even knowing their role in the circular economy, do nothing for laziness, selfishness, or lack of awareness. They must change consumer habits through impositions when they do not collaborate. Some consumers contribute from a stimulus, a “currency of exchange,” collaborating only from some advantage. In this sense, it is up to the industries responsible for the reverse logistics of their products to encourage consumers in some way that seems feasible for them to contribute to reverse logistics and the circular economy.

Some authors [ 127 ] compared the result of focus group sessions in India with literature about sustainable packages for Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). Higher environmental awareness was observed in groups with higher levels of schooling. Young generations, especially those still attending school, have shown more awareness and concern about making sustainable choices, while older generations have shown a significant lack of awareness. Conversely, price is one of the most significant factors deterring purchase. Also, a lack of knowledge about the benefits offered by sustainable products makes consumers indifferent toward them.

Similar behavior was observed by Molloy et al. [ 128 ], which examined the perception of legislative actions on single-use plastics through surveys and interviews in four Atlantic provinces of Canada. Young generations, students, and high-level school people support the plastic ban. A higher percentage of females support the plastic ban. Men have less probability of contributing to environmentally friendly activities, such as carrying reusable bags.

In Islamabad Capital Territory of Pakistan [ 129 ], people who support the plastic bag ban are those with a high education level, health, and environmental awareness. According to the authors, to increase the effectiveness of Islamabad’s plastic bag ban, increasing public understanding of the effects of plastic pollution needs to receive more focus by investing money in awareness programs and campaigns, education investment, and proper implementation machinery.

In Ecuador [ 130 ], reusable bags are more likely to be used by the head of household with a high-education level and the rural population. On the other hand, the probability of using these bags reduces when the head of household participates in social organizations.

In Turkey, the use of free-of-charge plastic bags was banned. After this, some authors observed that, among the Istanbul population, women, married people, and high-income groups are more prone to consume plastic bags [ 131 ]. These groups should be considered the focal point when designing policies. Based on the authors, “policymakers and environmental organizations should provide the necessary campaigns and training to reignite the tendency to reduce plastic bag consumption as part of environmental awareness.”

There are also cases where the consumer does not contribute to the circular economy due to a lack of knowledge. For example, the survey results found that university students are unaware of the consequences of beverage packaging material choices on environmental sustainability [ 132 ]. They do not know how to contribute effectively in their day-by-day activities to the sustainability goal.

More environmentally conscious people are more prone to join environmental initiatives [ 128 , 129 , 133 ]. “Information is one of the most widely used means to promote pro-environmental behavior change” [ 134 ] and, consequently, make consumers aware of plastic and its impacts. So, education is an effective way to raise consumer awareness of plastic.

The Internet can improve consumers’ pro-environmental behavior [ 135 ]. The Internet has the leading role in providing environmental information, making environmental knowledge popular, and enhancing energy use and social relationships [ 135 ]. Moreover, communication through mass media as TV channels open to the public is essential means of information about plastic pollution. Additionally, shocking images, messages of victims of plastic waste, and emotive images are effective in developing consumer awareness since they attract the consumers’ attention and produce a debate on plastic use [ 136 , 137 ]. “The media has a critical role in educating the public and policymakers on the current environmental concerns regarding plastic pollution” [ 22 ].

Last but not least, the plastic importance must be clear to everyone, no matter the way.

Conclusions

It is common in different areas of knowledge to have distinct interests. In an interdisciplinary area such as consumer awareness of plastic consumption and its paramount importance to society, it would be ideal for interests to converge for the well-being of society.

It was possible to observe that each area (environmental science, engineering, and materials science) presents different strategies to reduce the negative impact of plastic on human health and the environment. Each area contributes on its area in developing consumer awareness of plastic:

The environmental science area seems to be focused on consumer accountability for problems that plastic can cause.

Engineering seems to analyze the plastic problem in a more broadly way, depicting some causes, problems that plastic can cause, and possible solutions to solve them.

Materials science seems to be focused on the materials that compose the plastic, bringing some opportunities for materials that cause less impact on the environment, such as the ones from renewable sources.

Concerning the analysis of the authors’ keywords:

The main hotspots are waste management, recycling, sustainability, plastic waste, packaging, consumer behavior, microplastics, pollution, and biopolymers.

The main trends are biopolymers, recycling, sustainability, waste management, food safety, health impact, mechanical properties, microplastics, and packaging.

The main emerging topics are plastic waste, sustainability, waste management, recycling, microplastics, and pollution.

The primary deficiencies or gaps in the literature are in the following categories: actors, mitigations, and policies.

So, the authors’ keywords analysis can describe the current scenario of consumer awareness of plastic literature and depict the main concerns of the authors. The analysis can also help outline the future of the research area based on filling in identified deficiencies.

However, all these concerns are not aligned with the ones of the consumer’s habit. It is a severe gap in which literature needs to turn, reducing the “distance” between consumer awareness and behavior.

Data Availability

Not applicable.

Code Availability

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de Sousa, F.D.B. Consumer Awareness of Plastic: an Overview of Different Research Areas. Circ.Econ.Sust. 3 , 2083–2107 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43615-023-00263-4

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Essay About Consumerism: Top 5 Examples Plus Prompts

Consumerism is the child of capitalism; Here is a list of essay about consumerism examples and prompts you can read to further your understanding.

The word consumerism can seem daunting to some, but it’s pretty simple. It is defined as “a preoccupation with and an inclination toward the buying of consumer goods.” In the consumerist theory, people’s spending on goods and services drives economic growth- their spending preferences and habits determine the direction a company will go next.

Many businesses practice consumerism. It is a common belief that you must adopt a consumerist approach to succeed in your trade. Consumerism refers to people’s prioritization of spending on goods and services. They have the drive to purchase more items continuously.

If you are writing an essay about consumerism, you can get started by reading these essay examples.

1. What You Need To Know About Consumerism by Mark Scott

2. long essay on consumerism by prasanna, 3. consumerism: want and new pair shoes by tony richardson, 4. my thoughts on being a blogger & consumerism by anna newton, 5. consumerism and its discontents by tori deagelis, 1. does consumerism affect your decisions , 2. opposing consumerism, 3. how does consumerism negatively affect mental health, 4. how does consumerism positively affect mental health, 5. do you agree with consumerism.

“Although consumerism drives economic growth and boosts innovation, it comes with a fair share of problems ranging from environmental and moral degradation to higher debt levels and mental health problems..”

Scott gives readers an overview of consumerism in economic and social terms. He then briefly discusses consumerism’s history, benefits, and disadvantages driving economic growth and innovation. It also raises debt, harms the environment, and shifts society’s values toward worldly possessions rather than other people. Scott believes it is perhaps most healthy to find a balance between love for others and material things. 

“Consumerism helps the consumers to seek redressal for their grievances against the unfair policies of the companies. It teaches the consumers about their rights and duties and helps them get better quality of products and services.”

In this essay, author Prasanna writes about the history of consumerism and its applications in India. First, it helps protect consumers from companies’ “unethical marketing practices.” For example, she cites policies put in place by the government to inspect food items, ensuring they are of good quality and prepared per sanitation standards. When used appropriately, consumerism serves the benefit of all. 

“Anything people see they buy without thinking twice and knowing that they already have brand new pair shoes they have not worn because there to focused on buying and buying till they see they no longer have space in their closet to put new shoes in.”

Richardson takes a personal approach to consumerism, recalling several of his friends’ hobbies of collecting expensive shoes. Advertisements and the pressure to conform play a big role in their consumerism, enticing them to buy more and more items. Richardson believes that consumerism blinds people to the fact that their standards and desires just keep increasing and that they buy shoes for unjustified reasons. Instead, society should be more responsible and remind itself that it needs to take importance above all.

“Take online creators out of the way for a minute, because the pressure to buy is everywhere and has been since the dawn of the dime. The floorplan of stores are set out in a way that makes you stomp around the whole thing and ultimately purchase more, ads on the TV, radio, billboards, in magazines discounts and promotions – it’s endless..”

In her blog The Anna Edit , Newton explains the relationship between blogging and consumerism. Bloggers and influencers may need to purchase more things, not only for self-enjoyment but to produce new content. However, she feels this lifestyle is unsustainable and needs to be moderated. Her attitude is to balance success with her stability and well-being by limiting the number of things she buys and putting less value on material possessions. 

“In a 2002 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research (Vol. 29, No. 3), the team first gauged people’s levels of stress, materialistic values and prosocial values in the domains of family, religion and community–in keeping with the theory of psychologist Shalom Schwartz, PhD, that some values unavoidably conflict with one another. ”

DeAngelis first states that it is widely believed that more desire for material wealth likely leads to more discontent: it prioritizes material things over quality time, self-reflection, and relationships. Increasing one’s wealth can help solve this problem, but it is only a short-term fix. However, a 2002 study revealed that the life satisfaction of more materialistic and less materialistic people is not different. 

Prompts on Essay about Consumerism

This is not something people think about daily, but it impacts many of us. In this essay, write about how you are influenced by the pressure to buy items you don’t need. Discuss advertising and whether you feel influenced to purchase more from a convincing advertisement. Use statistics and interview data to support your opinions for an engaging argumentative essay.

Consumerism has been criticized by economists , academics , and environmental advocates alike. First, research the disadvantages of consumerism and write your essay about why there has been a recent surge of its critics. Then, conduct a critical analysis of the data in your research, and create a compelling analytical essay.

Consumerism is believed to impact mental health negatively. Research these effects and write about how consumerism affects a person’s mental health. Be sure to support your ideas with ample evidence, including interviews, research data such as statistics, and scientific research papers.

Consumerism often gets a bad reputation. For an interesting argumentative essay, take the opposite stance and argue how consumerism can positively impact mental health. Take a look at the arguments from both sides and research the potential positive effects of consumerism. Perhaps you can look into endorphins from purchases, happiness in owning items, or even the rush of owning a unique item. 

In this essay, take your stance. Choose a side of the argument – does consumerism help or hinder human life? Use research to support both sides of the argument and pitch your stance. You can argue your case through key research and create an exciting argumentative essay.

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining what is persuasive writing ?

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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News from the Columbia Climate School

How Buying Stuff Drives Climate Change

Did you know that Americans produce 25 percent more waste than usual between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, sending an additional one million tons a week to landfills? This COVID-19 holiday season, with online shopping the preferred gift giving method for many, we will likely generate even more waste mailing packages all over the country. In addition, over two billion Christmas cards are mailed every year, with enough paper to fill a football field 10 stories high. More than 38,000 miles of ribbon are thrown away and usually end up in landfills. Over the holidays, Americans discard half their total yearly paper waste, mostly holiday wrapping and decorations—about nine billion tons. And each person wastes almost 100 pounds of food.

What’s all this got to do with climate change?

In fact, our consumer habits are actually driving climate change. A 2015 study found that the production and use of household goods and services was responsible for 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, wealthy countries have the most per capita impact. A new U.N. report found that the richest one percent of the global population emit more than twice the amount than the poorest 50 percent; moreover, the wealthier people become, the more energy they use. A typical American’s yearly carbon emissions are five times that of the world’s average person. In 2009, U.S. consumers with more than $100,000 in yearly household income made up 22.3 percent of the population, yet produced almost one-third of all U.S. households’ total carbon emissions.

As more people around the world enter the middle class and become affluent, the problem is worsening.

After basic needs are met, consumers begin buying items for social status; as people try to acquire more and more status, more and more expensive status products are needed. Producing all these things generates climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact, across its life cycle, the average product results in carbon emissions of 6.3 times its own weight, according to a study  done by Christoph Meinrenken, associate research scientist at the Earth Institute’s Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management.

Technology can provide energy efficiency measures that help combat climate change, but “consumption (and to a lesser extent population) growth have mostly outrun any beneficial effects of changes in technology over the past few decades,” according to a June paper . The research concluded that it is not enough simply to “green” consumption by buying more sustainably produced goods—it is essential to reduce consumption. This is because 45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions comes solely from the production of the things we use and buy every day.

The problem with stuff

While large oil companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, we consumers are complicit. We demand the products and energy made from the fossil fuels they provide. One scientist found that 90 percent  of fossil fuel companies’ emissions are a result of the products made from fossil fuels.

The accepted wisdom about the economy has been that consumption is essential to economic growth, since our demand for things makes companies profitable and provides employment.

To keep this engine running, companies intentionally plan obsolescence of their products by changing how they look, such as in the fashion industry, or updating the design or software of products and discontinuing support for older models. Prices are kept artificially low to encourage us to buy because the real costs of their creation—which should include their environmental and social justice impacts—are not figured in. So we keep buying, and as a result, only one percent of “stuff” is still in use six months from its purchase, according to Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff , the iconic 2007 film.

The psychology of consumption

After World War II, consumer spending was encouraged because the U.S. economy needed to rebuild. People splurged on new appliances such as washing machines, refrigerators, and televisions and cars.

Advertisers perfected strategies to keep people buying by exploiting our emotions, such as fears of what would happen if we didn’t buy a product, our need not to miss out, or our desire to be more attractive. By 1960, Vance Packard wrote in his classic book, The Wastemakers , “The lives of most Americans have become so intermeshed with acts of consumption that they tend to gain their feelings of significance in life from these acts of consumption rather than from their meditations, achievements, inquiries, personal worth, and service to others.”

For many today, leisure time is often spent shopping, but the pleasure it provides — getting a thrill from newness or a bargain, escaping one’s problems, or reveling in the status of owning the latest thing — is fleeting. This is because it is linked to the act of buying, not the product itself. If we really loved the products we purchased, we would take better care of them and not want to replace them.

Becoming more conscientious consumers

COVID-19, with its enforced restrictions on our usual activities, is showing many people that it’s possible to live happier, simpler and less materialistic lives. According to one Vox reporter’s survey , the number one change people said they wanted to maintain after the pandemic was to reduce their consumerism.

To help change consumption habits, Sandra Goldmark, director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action at Barnard College and theater professor, has adapted Michael Pollan’s advice about food (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”) to stuff: “Have good stuff (not too much), mostly reclaimed. Care for it. Pass it on.”

The tools people employ to change any habits, such as food or exercise, can be applied to consumption. Goldmark recommends starting small and setting realistic goals. “I always think that it helps to show people that they’re already engaging in a lot of these kinds of ‘healthy stuff’ activities,” she said. “For example, a lot of people already love buying used items in certain categories. So if you can just explain to them the incredible impact of shifting your ‘stuff diet’ from new to used, they might be like, ‘Wow, I’m already doing that.’ And then it becomes a question of turning up the volume on certain behaviors and turning down the volume on other behaviors.” Recognizing that one is already practicing some good habits makes expanding them feel achievable.

People can be motivated to change their consumption habits for different reasons. For some, awareness of environmental impacts might be key, such as the pushback that occurred after the environmental impacts of fast fashion were exposed. For others, it might be saving money—for example, the ability to get a great deal on outdoor gear. “There are people whom I’ve spoken to about those used gear sites that are super excited, because they know they can get expensive high quality Patagonia or REI gear at a really low price,” said Goldmark. “They don’t really care so much about the environmental part, or for them, that’s just a bonus.”

When making purchases, she recommends looking for good materials and design, and repairability. In her new book, Fixation , Goldmark, wrote, “Good stuff is well designed for a long life cycle, made of the right materials, has parts that are easily available and replaceable, and was produced in a socially and environmentally ethical process.”

And when buying a new appliance or device that claims to be more energy efficient, take into account the energy that was embodied in its production — consider the life cycle carbon implications of goods.

Meinrenken’s study found that 45 percent of a product’s total carbon emissions occurs upstream in the supply chain — in other words, from the sourcing of and type of raw materials that go into the product. The Carbon Catalogue he helped create provides a side-by-side comparison of the carbon footprints of 866 products made in 28 countries. When shopping for certain types of items, you can compare carbon emissions. For example, a pair of Levi Strauss Rigid Tank jeans produces 7.7kg of carbon emissions equivalent over its life cycle, whereas Levi Strauss Tumble Rigid jeans produce 16 kg.

What government policies could help?

Some products are designed to be difficult or impossible to repair when they break, either because they are glued together or contain proprietary parts that require a special tool to make repairs. These constraints mean that when the product breaks, it is almost always destined for a landfill. To avoid this, Goldmark says that a policy requiring the repairability of products would be a good start. She noted that in 2021, France will introduce a repairability index that indicates how easy certain consumer products are to repair.

She also would like to see repair providers get tax rebates and “pay as you throw waste collection” which would enable people to feel the cost of their consumption. But ultimately, she said, “Until people are being paid a living wage to make our products, the prices are going to be artificially depressed, and the circular economy is going to have a hard time keeping up with the new goods economy. So international wage standards would be huge.”

Better holiday traditions

A recent IBM survey  found that 54 percent of consumers polled are willing to change their holiday purchasing habits to reduce environmental impacts and 44 percent reported that they would take sustainability into consideration while shopping. Here are some ideas for more sustainable gift giving.

Remember that many electronics, toys and clothing include plastics. Plastic is difficult to fix if it breaks, and plastic waste is likely to wind up in the ocean, where it is consumed by marine animals, or littering beaches in even the most remote places on Earth. Microplastics can expose living beings to harmful chemicals, some of which have been linked to health problems including cancers. Electronics also contain rare metals that often end up in landfills. So before you buy a product, think about its environmental impact.

Consider giving gifts made of bamboo, glass, metal or something edible made from local foods.

Give a gift that is useful and always supply gift receipts. If doing Secret Santa, let people know exactly what you want so there’s no waste. Handmade gifts, locally made gifts, experiential gifts, such as tickets to a Zoom event, or a gift of your time and skill are also good alternatives. Regift something someone gave you to a friend who’d appreciate it more. Or make a donation on someone’s behalf.

Avoid online shopping if possible because the packaging and delivery generate added carbon emissions. Instead, go to the store yourself, and preferably support your local merchants.

Use brown paper bags, newspaper, maps, colorful pages from catalogs, or kids’ artwork as wrapping. Avoid shiny gift wrap — it is usually not recyclable because it includes foil, heavy ink, or glitter, which is usually made of microplastics.

Wrap presents with old pieces of fabric with Japanese Furoshiki techniques.

Instead of ribbon or tape, use recycled string. Make bows out of colorful magazine pages. Cut up old holiday cards to make gift tags.

Holiday gatherings

This year, because we should avoid unnecessary travel, most celebrations are likely to be small family affairs. Cook local foods or host a potluck. Instead of dinner, just serve dessert and provide reusable containers for people to take home leftovers.

Your actions count

Individuals sometimes feel that their actions are too insignificant to make a dent in climate change, but individual actions can become social trends that make a difference. In Fixation , Goldmark wrote, “Together, our individual actions add up to collective actions — to our culture. And the choices we make in our daily lives influence the choices we make as families, as communities, and ultimately, influence the choices we make at the ballot box, where we can come together to scale and multiply those many individual choices.”

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This article is all true and all good, thank you! But honestly, mainstream America mostly rolls its eyes at this topic (notwithstanding the great Vox survey of 100 people). If we’re going to reach past the beloved choir, how about a strategy that doesn’t trigger the public’s automatic defensiveness about their consumerism? Postconsumers.com seeks to spread just one open-ended question for America to consider, no matter what the responses are: “Do I have enough stuff for now?”

To be honest, I figure this the real reason for continuous global restrictions and lockdowns. 2020 is the strategy to change course

I would like to see the indirect climate costs of all the purchases I make – sortof like the calories breakdown for a Big Mac at McDonalds. This would make me, the consumer conscious of the impact of my choices and the producers more pressure to comply to a green economy.

Excellent idea. Some will take heed. Most unfortunately will not. PHAMPLETS could be dropped in all stores; in libraries and aeroplane pouches. SCHOOLS. BOOKSTORES. LIBRARIES.

I have some ideas of carbon emission of climate change.Climate always changes and nothing is forever and what humans need to do is how to control the change. Now the weather is going to the extreme of hot because humans like shopping and spending. It needs a lot of resources to make the products for them. It will need a lot of fossil fuel and produce a lot of CO2 but also cut down many many forests so not much CO2 can be converted to Oxygen. Companies, for economic reasons, provide as much as products to be chosen and make humans become spoiled. It can be from cloth, food, home appliances and journey equipment. Actually we only need 20 % of the products on the market to satisfy ours and 80% are wasted.

For example in fashion industry, they provide a range of colour of clothes to be chosen but there is only 1 or 2 colours of cloth that will sell well in each session. So if companies provide 1 or 2 colours of cloth for customers then carbon emission will be reduced a lot.

Information on the real cost of products should be included in policies and labels. News that the levels of greenhouse gases are back to “normal” after declining in 2020 (due to covid) should alert policy makers on the total costs of many goods.

i clicked into the 2015 article – the 60% ghgs includes housing and transport, not just hard goods like clothing. The first part of this article is phrased in a misleading or confusing way.

Today I see an article in NYTIME that says that “ buying fewer things” only have “small” effect on the greenhouse gas reduction.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/15/opinion/how-reduce-carbon-footprint-climate-change.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Please tell me they are wrong and possibly write a rebuttal to NYT on this misinformation.

More humans = more stuff = more CO2

Less stuff = less production = less CO2 = lower economic growth = more unemployment = more unhappy people = more fearful politicians = more growth efforts

One big circle until you get rid of about 3 billion humans.

When I was born in 1946 there were less than 3 billion humans on earth. Now we are at 8 billion. All of this “what if” fine tuning is meaningless until you reduce the number of humans. Even the pandemic deaths did not have much of an impact. Humans will keep the accelerator on the floor board right up until they are facing doomsday. That is the nature of invasive species.

that is a sacrifice i am willing to make

I know only that my pc and phone start lagging after 5 years so i must replace them, there is no other choice, i would like to have it 30 years, but stupid organizations that make them affect climate change in that case, not me, so who is wrong there? And also shoes are made to last 1 year, in time of Tito yugoslovenian marshal, shoes were lasted for 10 years.

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Take Me Out to the Gift Shop

For a lot of fans at the new Mets team store, game day is all about the shopping.

By Alyson Krueger

On Friday morning, at 11:40 on the dot, hundreds of Mets fans flooded into the new team store at Citi Field in Queens. It was the opening day of baseball season, and they were the first ones into the new space, located in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, the grand entryway to the ballpark.

Susan Wiedeman, 65, from Riverdale, N.J., who has attended Mets opening day with her husband for the last 40 years, was giddy with the experience. “We were just about the first ones in,” she said. “That was really cool.”

At 10,000 square feet, the store is twice the size of its previous iteration and filled with new technology, art and merchandise. There are vastly higher ceilings — “Last year I could adjust a lightbulb myself if I needed,” said James Benesh, the executive director of consumer products for the Mets — and a hanging sculpture by Michael Murphy, an artist in Brooklyn. The orange sculpture has the Mets logo intertwined in different cityscapes.

Part of the new store’s appeal is the sheer size of its inventory. “There is a lot of stuff in here,” said Janet Conlon, 75, who lives in Hillsborough, N.J., and is a school bus driver. She already has a closet full of Mets apparel at home, including more than 40 baseball hats. On opening day she wore three layers of Mets clothes — “I don’t like to be cold,” she said — and carried a branded bag and blanket. Still, the store offered bountiful new options.

“I’ve never seen a lot of this stuff before,” she said, laughing. “It’s amazing.”

In the space where 12 T-shirts used to be on display, there are now 52, according to Mr. Benesh. There are also more than 3,000 baseballs on the shelves at any given time. And the store has 40 staff members, double the size that was previously needed.

But the Mets organization has also raised its game in terms of what it is selling, especially to female fans.

“We’ve been getting feedback for a few years now that female fans don’t necessarily want a man’s shirt turned into pink,” Mr. Benesh said.

The team is restricted to selling items from approved M.L.B. vendors, and it has tapped some of the licensed newcomers to make capsule collections sold exclusively at Citi Field. For instance, rather than ceding the market for vintage sportswear to Etsy or vintage stores, the Mets are offering those items in-house. Refried Apparel, a company that makes new clothes from salvageable old items, has a line of jean jackets with vintage Mets logos and numbers that are sold at the team store.

“There is a lot of waste within our industry,” said Joanna Mingo, who is the consumer products coordinator for the Mets. “We have players who get traded, and then we can’t sell their jersey. Now we can send them to this cool company, and they make something that looks like you would find it on Etsy made by a girl in her college dorm.”

Other smaller brands offer bedazzled bomber jackets, corduroy hats, sequined crop tops and satin windbreakers. Personalized jerseys and limited-edition merchandise are also sold, but exclusively to V.I.P. ticket holders.

“This is stuff I can wear out on a walk or to brunch, not just to games,” said Hannah O’Neill, 26, a nurse from Rockville Centre, N.Y., who was shopping the collection on opening day. “Two years ago, you wouldn’t be able to get any of this stuff.” She had her eye on a hat covered in flowers.

Others were frankly mesmerized by the new RFID self-checkout system. Shoppers dump their purchases into a bucket, and a computer reads a RFID price tag attached to the item. The items pop up on a screen, and the buyers tap their cards to pay. “There is no scanning,” Mr. Benesh said. “It goes much faster.”

Still, there were a few growing pains. Some shoppers called over store associates to help them navigate the system.

“I’ve heard a lot of people in line complaining about it, but I’m young and love self-checkout,” said Dani Wasserman, 27, who is studying for a graduate degree in film in Boulder, Colo., and whose dad grew up on Long Island. They bought a Francisco Alvarez jersey.

It was only the first day of a long shopping season for Mets fans, as Mr. Benesh reminded the store staff in a meeting just before the gates opened. “If you hear any feedback, bring it to us,” he said. “We have 79 more games to go after today.”

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