The Story of Stuff

Stuff. It simply bothers me. It never used to, a few years ago. The first time it felt plain dumb to have Stuff was when I had to downsize my apartment into two suitcases a couple of years ago. It took me a while to sell and give away things that I owned, so I could fit all my belongings in just two suitcases to move from San Francisco to Bangalore. While I managed to downsize, I also had a connecting flight to India from Singapore. There was no issue flying from San Francisco to Singapore. I travel happy in South east Asia and when I try hopping onto the plane to Bangalore, I am told I can only take half of what I have brought with me. Nightmare indeed.

Even though I had called Air India earlier about the weight limit, it was not helpful as the people in the airport told me a completely different number. The line was so long for the flight and and I am desperately to trying to figure out what to throw away from the suitcases. Clothes, books, tax documents, certificates, gifts. I thought I had already downsized to the most minimum, but still it was not good enough for Air India. Jet lagged, tired and had to make quick decisions at 2 am. In that frustrating moment, I decided that I would simply pick half the things except my certificates and leave it next to the trash bin. That is what I did and I did not want to own too many things from then on. I felt so stupid to own any of this and how much importance I had placed in owning all of that. After I unloaded half of the Stuff,  I never wanted to own too many things ever. All things feel like junk to me.

Recently, I picked up Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard from my library. I had seen the video couple of years back and I thought it was real good. The book is quite fantastic too, with some good advice as to how one can reduce owning Stuff. She says that one get off the work to shop treadmill lifestyle of the US and offers solutions for that.

The part that I enjoyed thoroughly was what happens in the landfill. Every week, when I put the trash out in San Francisco, I am always wondering what really happens. Do the things in the recycle bin really get recycled? I had never been sure. The author makes a good case for Zero waste and why recycle should be the last option on anyone’s mind. The first option must be to reduce, reuse and then recycle.

The other interesting part of the book is e-waste and how manufactures force people to constantly buy new things instead of fixing the existing ones. The interesting idea she proposes is that the manufacturers must take responsibility for the recycle and maintenance of the product. The packaging material for most Stuff is a nightmare at the landfills. The manufacturer must be made responsible for the packaging stuff too. I thought this idea is brilliant.

While I used to work at FreeGeek, I had heard about how countries like USA and Canada dump their toxic wastes, e-waste on poor unsuspecting countries in the disguise of donations or mix it in the fertilizer or some other loophole in the law. Annie Leonard tracks a company in Philadelphia that wants to dump tonnes and tonnes of toxic ash from the incinerator of landfill by a ship. As part of Greenpeace, Annie Leonard and her team makes it miserable for the ship to unload the ash in most ports of poor countries. The ship finally dumps a part of the ash in Haiti before Greenpeace gets a chance to alert Haiti. This turns out to be a nightmare for Haiti to return the garbage back to the US. It sure is easy is to consume here in the US and it has been made so easy to dump the toxic waste on such poor countries. It is quite sad indeed.

I enjoyed reading the book. Sure, it did make me think about what happens to Stuff that we buy here in the US.

Here’s the video that came out two years ago.

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