Annie Leonard - The Story of Stuff

In today’s society we are no longer defined by who we are as people, but by what we own. It doesn’t matter what’s on the inside you are judged and determined by the clothes you wear, the car you drive and the house you live in. “The Story of Stuff” is a short film by Annie Leonard that shows the underlying truth of the before and after stages of consumer products. As a consumer we go to the shop, buy a product, use it for a while and then throw it out. Basically, to break it into five categories’, this film shows the processes of the materials economy from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal. Although this may seem like a fool proof system, it has many flaws, the main flaw being it is a linear system for a finite planet, which arises the question, when are we going to run out of resources are ultimately destroy our planet.

The main problem with this system is that governments and large corporations are only looking at the money that comes out of consumer products and are always searching for the cheapest way to exploit these steps from extraction right up to disposal. They are not taking into account the interactions that each of these steps have with people, societies, cultures, economies and environments and they are fast reaching the limits of these processes and are running out of natural resources.

Governments and Large corporations run our societies, and if you don’t buy or own a lot of stuff, you don’t have any value to them and thus are not important, do not count. Even people that have sustained a happy life for generations and generations before consumerism are being forced into the ways of modern day society and are loosing the truth in them selves and their cultures to become another faceless body in the ever demanding rat race.

What I found to be an amazing statistic was that 99% of consumer products were trashed within 6 months of purchase. All products now days are put into two categories; Planned Obsolescence and Perceived Obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is when a product is made to break in a certain time frame and designers have been able to perfect this by creating the shortest amount of time for a product to break but still maintaining the consumer’s belief in the product to re-purchase a new one. Perceived Obsolescence is when something becomes no longer fashionable and there for will no longer have any use, all though it is still in perfect working condition. We are basically told these things were obsolete by market leaders and trend setters, and we then perceive these items to be as such. We like to consider ourselves as individuals, but our need for acceptance within our peer group which is the major contributing factor to Perceived Obsolescence.

Annie Leonard asks us to look at the big picture, and for people along the processes to get united and reclaim this linear system and transform it into something new, a system that doesn’t waste resources or people. We created the old system, so we can work towards making a new sustainable and renewable and closed loop production.