Consumerism & Growth - Haggard Earth

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Consumerism & Growth; Hits: 235

Ad industry grapples with role selling consumption in the climate crisis. Does being an effective agency mean helping sell more products or can it mean helping mitigate climate emergency? Guardian Amy Westervelt Tue 21 Nov 2023 After all, advertising drives consumption – a fact of which the industry is intensely proud. The UK’s Advertising Association likes to brag that every pound spent on advertising returns six pounds to GDP. The US Advertising Coalition finds that every dollar of ad spend drives about $21 in sales. “The fundamental question is: is the advertising industry going to help or hinder society in its attempt to reach net zero?” said Jonathan Wise, a co-founder of the nonprofit group Purpose Disruptors, which aims to shift the industry away from high-consumption advertising. “At the moment, on balance of evidence, the decision is to hinder. It’s advertising driving consumption upward.” The industry disputes this. “Our research shows the goal of most advertising is to help brands, products, and services grow sales at the expense of their competitors,” a spokesperson for the Advertising Association said. “This leads to substitution rather than increased consumption overall.” Unsurprisingly, the sector knows the importance of sending out encouraging messages about the work they are doing.

In 2020 the Advertising Association, along with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers created Ad Net Zero, and billed it as the global advertising industry’s response to climate change. The action plan, however, focuses primarily on reducing the emissions of agencies’ own operations as opposed to those associated with the products they sell.There is increasing agreement that although individual behaviour should not be the primary focus for change, some individuals’ behaviour – namely that of the world’s wealthiest people – has a much bigger impact not only on global emissions but also on broader economic and political trends. But how should the advertising and PR industries grapple with the overconsumption of the top 10%? There has been a push within the industry to get advertising to shift towards more sustainable products, for example electric vehicles rather than combustion engine cars, or plant-based foods as opposed to beef. This is seen by the industry as one of the critical ways they can have an impact, and such shifts do deliver reductions in emissions. But Wise worries that simply replacing emissions-intensive consumption with a lower-emissions version isn’t enough to decarbonise the economy. And while a handful of agencies are looking to sell greener options, the actions of the industry as a whole seem to show a resistance to considering such things as their responsibility.

The transportation sector, identified as probably the most significant area of consumption for the top 10% by Julia Steinberger, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne and the author of a 2020 paper on the topic, is a good example. “The categories of consumption that the wealthiest people over consume or overspend on and that constitute the big difference in their emissions is really flying longer distances, and driving bigger cars longer distances, so transportation is really the big one,” Steinberger said. Data on ad spend from the data service Media Radar shows that advertisers in those categories drive that precise overconsumption. US automakers are spending at least twice as much to push their largest models of electric vehicles – SUVs, trucks and sedans that require extra large batteries, or in some cases two batteries – versus more compact options that would reduce the need for not only rare earth minerals but also steel, iron and plastic. In some cases the chasm between what is spent to push larger versus smaller EVs is even larger. From October 2022 to October 2023, General Motors spent more than $96m (£76m) to advertise its electric Hummer and Blazer models (not including agency creative fees). It spent just over $5m to advertise its compact Bolt option over the same time period. Ford spent $61.2m (£48.7m) to advertise its electric F150 , and around $9m to advertise its mid-size electric Mustang. Among the top automotive advertisers, only BMW and Hyundai are spending as much or more to market their more efficient EVs. Similar trends are evident in the air travel industry. More than half of Delta Air Lines’ approximately $151m ad spend from October 2022 to October 2023, for example, was spent advertising long-haul flights, encouraging travellers to rack up air miles to use for more travel, and pushing upgrades to premium classes, although the airline also spent tens of millions of dollars to advertise its commitment to “sustainable aviation fuels”......read on...... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/21/ad-industry-grapples-with-role-selling-consumption-in-climate-crisis

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George Monbiot- Extreme wealth has a deadening effect on the super-rich – and that threatens us all. Guardian Wed 24 Jul 2024 On a calm and beautiful morning off the coast of south Devon last week, I was watching a small pod of dolphins from my kayak. I had spotted them from half a mile away, feeding and playing on the surface. They were heading my way, so I sat on the water and waited. But from round the headland, at top speed, came a giant twin-engined maritime wankpanzer. Though the dolphins were highly visible and it had plenty of time either to stop or avoid them, it ploughed towards them at full throttle. As it passed, missing them by a few metres, the driver turned and glanced at them, but never checked his speed. The dolphins dived. They briefly reappeared much farther from the coast, after which I didn’t see them again. I could hear the boat long after it disappeared: it sounded like a jetliner. God knows what distress it might have caused the dolphins, which are highly sensitive to sound. I was overwhelmed by two sensations. One, obviously, was disgust. The other was puzzlement: where’s the joy? If there is one thing that almost everyone loves and – if they’re lucky enough – delights in seeing, it’s dolphins. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t stop and watch. Though I’ve experienced this good fortune dozens of times, because I’m so often at sea, I never cease to find it thrilling. The elation stays with me for weeks.But to the driver of that boat, it seemed, the sea was just a highway on which to race towards the horizon. It reminded me of something I’ve seen many times: the deadening effect of wealth. To own and run a 35ft boat of that kind, you need to be extremely rich. It retails at about £300,000, on top of which are the extraordinary costs of mooring, winter storage, maintenance and fuel. Isn’t money of that kind supposed to buy you pleasure? If not, what’s the point?

Extreme wealth can severely hamper enjoyment. As Michael Mechanic documents in his book, Jackpot, there are two groups of people who have to think about money all the time: the very poor and the very rich. Immense wealth possesses you just as much as you possess it: managing it becomes a full-time job. You don’t know whom to trust; you can start to imagine your friends aren’t friends at all; it can dominate and poison your family relationships. It can hollow you out, socially, intellectually and morally.But I think there might be a further corroding aspect of wealth that hasn’t been widely discussed. Great wealth flattens the world. If you can go anywhere and do anything, everything is over the horizon. You speed past the local and the particular, towards an endlessly escalating ideal of luxury: the better marina, the bigger yacht, the private jet, the super-home. The satisfaction horizon can retreat before you. Place has no meaning, other than as a setting that might impress the friends you no longer trust. But anyone who is impressed by money is not worth impressing. There also seems to be a connection between speed, noise and ego. There must be something unresolved about a person who feels the need to fill the sky with noise and capture the attention of everyone he passes, whether he is on the road or the water. And yes, it is almost always a “he”. Studies show an association between traditional concepts of masculinity, speed and dangerous driving. It’s unsurprising that attempts to restrain driving behaviour, such as speed cameras and low-traffic neighbourhoods, have become such potent themes in the culture wars, animated by perceived threats to traditional gender roles and power relations.

Travelling by kayak, I cover less sea and must stay closer to the coast than the people racing past in powerboats. But I have an intimacy of connection with the places and living systems that surround me, with the sounds of nature, with signs too subtle to see at speed – sandeels stippling the surface, the dorsal fins of bass pursuing them, holographic sea gooseberries suspended in the water column, cowries eating star ascidians on the rocks exposed at low water – of which they are likely to be deprived. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/24/extreme-wealth-super-rich-devon-society-planet

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Too much stuff: can we solve our addiction to consumerism? Alarmed by the rising tide of waste we are all creating, my family and I decided to try to make do with much less. But while individual behaviour is important, real change will require action on a far bigger scale Guardian Chip Colwell Tue 28 Nov 2023 Mass consumption has brought numerous benefits: jobs and financial wealth, physical safety and security. New ways of connecting, talking and thinking. Easy travel to nearly anywhere in the world. Lights that keep the dark nights at bay. Music is constantly available.But the costs have also been staggering. Economic inequality and wars over non-renewable resources have killed untold numbers. The steep increase in products in recent decades has accelerated pollutant emissions, deforestation and climate breakdown. It has depleted water supplies and contributed to the rapid extinction of animals. There are vast “garbage patches” floating across the world’s oceans, with infinite bits of microplastics working their way into food webs. Even if we accept the positives of mass consumption to date, we must acknowledge that the situation is unsustainable. And yet, we can’t seem to stop ourselves. [Opposing this ominous trend there's a growing minimalist movement in many consumerist societies to live with less. There are those who refuse to bring more stuff into their lives. Elizabeth Chai, a 40-year-old in Portland, Oregon, got rid of 2,020 possessions and didn’t buy anything in 2020 except food, drink and toiletries. Others refuse to buy certain things, such as anything made of plastic. Others may give up single-use gadgets or fast fashion or things that just seem wasteful, such as paper plates. Then there are individuals committed to the ethic of reuse, who throw away less and save items that would otherwise be tossed. In recent years, the app Nextdoor has gained popularity: neighbours use it borrow tools, trade items and give away things headed to landfill. Nextdoor reports that it is used in 11 countries and in nearly one in three US households. Similarly, Buy Nothing – a social network group founded in 2013 and dedicated to the “gift economy” of sharing and loaning items that would otherwise be bought or tossed – has a massively popular app. Creative reuse is also central to Singer and others seeking a “zero-waste lifestyle”, which requires reusing items (such as cloth grocery bags), borrowing others’ items (such as wine glasses from a neighbour for a party), and repurposing or “upcycling” an item (such as turning wine corks into a countertop). Finally, there are those who reduce, as with my family’s (author) attempt at a slow-buy year. Some have reduced their possessions to just 100 things. The 2021 Netflix documentary The Minimalists: Less Is Now challenges viewers to consider getting rid of one thing in the first month, two things in the second, three things in the third, and so on – selling, giving away or trashing the items. Another version is the rise of a kind of “heirloom materialism”, in which people try to purchase only items that will endure for many years – planned perseverance instead of planned obsolescence. My family’s attempt to slow-buy for a year fell into this last category.......my initial panic endured for a week. I kept coming across things that I “needed” to buy – sunglasses, a bouncy ball to play with my daughter after our favourite one got a hole, a new book, a gift for a friend who had a baby. Let it be said: I resisted all these temptations. I reminded myself to be grateful for what we had, and I found ways to make do. But then the pandemic hit, and suddenly, our small house became my office, gym and vacation spot – the place where our family spent almost every moment of our lives. Hesitantly, we started house-hunting.

When our slow-buy year was on the brink of failure after just six months, I came across a harsh but hilarious screed against minimalism, written by Chelsea Fagan of the Financial Diet blog. Fagan levels multiple arguments against all forms of minimalism. She writes that it is classist, a fad for the rich, because people in real poverty don’t have to worry about what not to buy, and because of how expensive “sustainable” and “heirloom” items often are. “‘Stop wasting money on all that Ikea nonsense!’” Fagan imagined a minimalist saying. “‘With this $4,000 dining table hand-whittled by a failed novelist in Scandinavia, you will never need another piece of furniture!’ – which really just points to having enough disposable income to ‘invest’ in your wardrobe and surroundings.” Furthermore, she derides the idea that a simple aesthetic and decluttering equals moral worth, a “faux spiritualism”. Every form of minimalism, Fagan concludes, “is just another form of conspicuous consumption, a way of saying to the world, ‘Look at me! Look at all of the things I have refused to buy, and the incredibly expensive, sparse items I have deemed worthy instead!’” While these arguments against minimalism – particularly in its most extreme forms – struck me as worryingly true, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/28/too-much-stuff-can-we-solve-our-addiction-to-consumerism

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The Fast Fashion Epidemic- Unsustainable consumption of fashion. The fast fashion model that exists today is inherently unsustainable. It manufactures insecurity for the sake of profit and produces cheap clothes that won’t last, destined for landfill. Following the weather, there used to be four fashion seasons now there are 52 micro-seasons.

This needless mass-consumption of clothing comes at a cost. Fast fashion is an environmental and ethical crisis. The destructive dumping of fast fashion. Each year, tens of thousands of tons of unsold, unworn clothes are sent to a Chilean Atacama desert to slowly degrade, releasing methane emissions. While deserts may appear desolate and empty, they are ecosystems that — like any other — host a wide array of biodiversity when healthy.

A similar story of destructive dumping plays out across many other parts of the globe. Fashion dumping burdens poor communities. TheKantamanto markets in Accra, Ghana, sees an estimated 15 million garments flow through it each week. These clothes are mostly from fast fashion brands, thrown out or donated to op-shops by people largely in the West. Here, many of these clothes are skilfully refurbished by local people and businesses.“Despite the best efforts of Kantamanto’s entrepreneurs, 40 percent of the clothing leaves the market as waste. Accra lacks the landfill space for this clothing waste, so much of it is burned in the open air, swept into the gutter from where it eventually makes its way to the sea, or dumped in informal settlements where Accra’s most vulnerable citizens live.” This is another case of environmental racism in fashion, where wealthy white people, brands and systems export their problems to those a part of the Global Majority, and those who are poorer.........read on https://www.collectivefashionjustice.org/

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Consumerism & Growth; Hits: 217

FASHION FOR THE EARTH......WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE FASHION? Fast fashion has completely revolutionized the apparel industry, but not for the better. Behind every piece of clothing in a store, there is an industry stripping the Earth of its limited resources and exploiting the labor force that works in its garment factories. Tremendous waste characterizes this industry as it depletes healthy soil, contaminates fresh water sources, pollutes the air we breathe, defiles our oceans, destroys forests and damages ecosystems and the health of their biodiversity.

GET THE FACTS.......The fashion industry produces 100 billion garments a year and 87% (40 million tons) end up in a landfill where they smolder and pollute the air or an incinerator. Only //emf.thirdlight.com/link/kccf8o3ldtmd-y7i1fx/@/preview/1?o" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204); font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px; border-style: solid;">1% of all discarded clothing is actually recycled. The average person today buys 60 percent more items of clothing than they did 15 years ago, but keep them for only half as long. The average garment may be worn as few as ten times before disposal. The apparel industry is responsible for 4% of greenhouse gas emissions – the same as the countries of Germany, France and the U.K. combined. Unchecked, fashion production would account for 26% of all carbon emissions by 2050. Fashion is one of the most polluting of all industries. Clothing is manufactured with highly toxic dyes and heavy metals that are flushed into clean water streams, rivers and aquifers where they sicken people and animals, harm ecosystems, and cause biodiversity loss. The industry razes 150 million trees for cellulosic fabrics. Cattle grazing has contributed to deforestation in the Amazon and the leather produced from that region has been traced to global fashion brands’ shoes and bags. Non-organic cotton farming heavily depletes and degrades soil. It is one of the world’s most pesticide intensive crops. These affect the health of farmers and populations nearby. The toxic farm runoff contaminates fresh waters, wetlands and aquifers and threatens biodiversity and ecosystems. 69% of all clothing is made partially or entirely of synthetic fibers such as polyester which is a crude oil derivative. Petroleum is a non-renewable resource with significant negative impacts on the earth. Up to 40% of fashion’s carbon emissions are from the production of polyester and polyester production is expected to grow by 47% over the next 10 years.

Washing our synthetic clothing accounts for 35% of all microplastics in the ocean making them the largest source of microplastic pollution in the world’s oceans. Microplastics infiltrate the food chain and, in a study in the Netherlands in March 2022, microplastics were found in the blood of 80% of those tested, half of which were PET (polyethylene terephthalate), the plastic material found in clothing. Clothing production has doubled since 2000 and with a shifting population and consumption patterns, the fast fashion industry is expected to continue to grow. By 2030, one estimate suggests that clothing consumption will grow 63% along with a rise since 2015 of 2.4 billion people into the global middle class, and a recent report estimated the world is on track to triple clothing production by 2050. The true cost of fast fashion’s cheap clothing is extracted from the industry’s factory garment workers. Workers are paid less than the minimum wage in countries in the global south which does not nearly constitute a “living” wage. In order for true recycling to take place, clothing must be collected, sorted and distributed to recyclers. These systems are in their infancy. Sorting is still done by hand. And while there are innovative technologies that can break down the fabric of used garments to make new clothing, many await business investment to scale their systems to the colossal size necessary. Fully scaled, however, these technologies could drive 80% circularity in the fashion industry. Most major industries are highly regulated. But the fashion industry, one of the largest manufacturing industries on the planet, is almost entirely unregulated.

WHAT YOU CAN DO.....Consumers have the power to change the trajectory of fast fashion. Here are a few important things you can do....Educate yourself about sustainable clothing.........Buy less and shop for quality over quantity. .........Choose natural materials – organic cotton, linen, or hemp.......Buy 100% recycled fabrics – 100% recycled polyester, viscose (rayon), etc. and there's seven more things you can do.....and much, much more to explore. https://www.earthday.org/campaign/sustainable-fashion/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjws560BhCuARIsAHMqE0HSvm7EQAmj3RzzAfdlqx8ULr04NreT4X7uoSefZLblq9mjKVIU080aAvjyEALw_wcB

Ad Industry Grapples with role Selling Consumption in the Climate Crisis.

George Monbiot- Extreme Wealth has a Deadening Effect on the Super-rich – and that Threatens Us All

Too Much Stuff: can we Solve our Addiction to Consumerism?

The Fast Fashion Epidemic- Unsustainable Consumption of Fashion.

FASHION FOR THE EARTH......WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE FASHION?

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