First, let's define the difference between consumerism and materialism, because these two concepts are strongly associated but have very different meanings. Consumerism is essentially the preoccupation of goods in society. Materialism, on the other hand, is one's preoccupation with tangible items and physical comfort.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 by Chip Colwell 28 Nov 2023  I pulled into the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site, cutely known as Dads. I was part of a tour, arranged by a local reporter. Ten people gathered around our guide,Doc Nyir a Dads manager, middle-aged, with a studious, geeky demeanour. Nyiro began by telling us that Dads is open 24 hours a day, six days a week. Every day, 800 trucks arrive, culminating in about 2m tonnes of refuse a year. We watched the trucks pulling into the weigh station. “It just doesn’t slow down,” Nyiro said. “Truck after truck.” The result: a dry tomb of waste that will endure for millennia.Nyiro then led us to a tragically small area of Dads dedicated to gathering recyclable and compostable materials. At the final stop, we visited an electricity plant, with old train motors powered by methane released from decomposing trash. The plant produces enough electricity to power 2,500 homes a year.By the tour’s end, I couldn’t help but admire the landfill’s efficiency, the engineering that goes into managing so much waste. Dads enables the endless cycle of consumption of my city to go on uninterrupted while reducing the chances of immediate environmental harm. But not every place has the resources to manage such monumental waste. Ghana, for instance, imports around 15m items of secondhand clothing from countries including the UK, US and China every week. Many of these garments end up in informal dumps, which, after seasonal rains, wash out millions of rotting, tangled pieces of clothing onto local beaches. Just this one dump was a perpetual-motion machine to manage a ceaseless flow of abandoned things, like trying to manage the ocean’s tide. Mass consumption has brought numerous benefits: jobs and financial wealth, physical safety and security. 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.  There's a growing movement in many consumerist societies to live with less. There are those who refuse to bring more stuff into their lives. 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. The scale of this crisis mocks attempts such as my family’s to reduce the amount of waste – especially plastic – in the world. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans threw out nearly 51m tonnes of plastic in 2021, or about 140kg per person.                                                                                                                                                This was the conundrum buzzing in my head when I sat down to interview Marcus Eriksen. He wore dark jeans and a black fleece sweater; with glasses perched atop his salt-and-pepper hair, he had a professorial air. Although ascetics point to the question of individual responsibility for what we consume, Eriksen emphasises that our modern debate has been shaped by narratives created by some of the corporations most responsible for the crisis we find ourselves in.Eriksen believes the primary responsibility for solving the environmental crisis belongs to businesses and governments. Those who produce materials, and those responsible for overseeing it, can act at the scale necessary for real change. “We’re fooling ourselves if we think that individual actions are going to move the meter,” Anna Cummins, co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, a non-profit focusing on reducing plastic pollution, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “Every little bit helps, but public policy and corporations have to change.” Eriksen believes the overall strategy must involve moving from a “linear economy” to a “circular economy”. This is a shift from a single-use, throwaway economy, as he wrote in 2017, to a model “with end-of-life design, recovery, and remanufacture systems that keep synthetic materials like plastic in a closed loop”. Ideally, synthetic materials are increasingly replaced by less environmentally harmful and less wasteful substitutes. Businesses can develop innovative packaging and delivery systems, such as returnable and reusable boxes. Governments can pass laws that ban certain materials or products, and moderate planned obsolescence – for example, in the US, proposed right to repair legislation would support far more gadgets being repaired instead of replaced.Still others argue that the circular-economy idea merely reframes rather than rejects the corporate and capitalist assumptions that got us into this mess in the first place. Instead of challenging the goal of growth, circular economies create a new form of growth that is still in the hands of industrial corporations. The accusation is that the circular economy has become a corporate slogan that depoliticises our environmental crisis by seeing the answer as a technical one to be solved by industry, rather than tackling an unjust economic system that gives power and benefits to a few at the cost of the many.There are strong moral arguments that we have an obligation to reduce our consumption and its associated waste, because although our individual contributions to the environmental crisis may be infinitesimally small, our small sacrifices – buying less plastic, for example – do add up to meaningful change. Such sacrifices also express our values, which can inspire others around us to do their part. On the collective level, changes must be structural – new public policies, laws, international treaties, infrastructure, economic programmes, investments. No doubt, the idea of the circular economy has practical limitations and may be usurped by commercial interests. But I find it naive to imagine that the world can simply do away with capitalism and the global economy in time to save our planet. In practice, the circular economy is not one approach but many – a wide array of practices within certain industries, a way of thinking about engineering problems, a set of guidelines and aspirations for governments and corporations. Although this range of approaches in some measure fractures the movement into parts, it also means that we can look to these different experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. This moment of emergency requires immediate action, and for now that must mean collaborating with the companies that make our modern world. It does not mean acquiescence, however. This is an edited extract from Stuff: Humanity’s Epic Journey from Naked Ape to Nonstop Shopper, published by Hurst on 30 November and available at guardianbookshop.com                 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/28/too-much-stuff-can-we-solve-our-addiction-to-consumerism             

New Zealand MP's 'Absolutely Brilliant' 80-Second Takedown of GDP. "The squiggly line of GDP can go up but we also know full well that so too can homelessness; so too can the desecration of the environmental fundamentals that are necessary for life as we know it," she said. JESSICA CORBET Jan 12, 2024  A few weeks after Chlöe Swarbrick posted an 80-second video on Instagram, the Green Party member of the New Zealand was still winning praise on Friday for her brief and powerful takedown of gross domestic product."Watch Aotearoa New Zealand MP Chlöe Swarbrick deliver the most formidable summary of the 20th-century economic order—and how it ruined everything," said U.K.-based journalist Dave Vetter, sharing the clip on X, formerly Twitter. "I genuinely don't think I've seen—or read—a more concise and effective summary than this." "Greens' are portrayed by our media as pie-in-the-sky dreamers, while the besuited worshipers of an ideology wholly divorced from the observable universe are regarded as pragmatic geniuses," he added. "It's what you might call total reality inversion." "We don't live in a game of Monopoly," Swarbrick said in her mid-December remarks to Parliament about an economic bill. She referenced environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken's 2009 declaration that "we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product." Swarbrick also summarized the development of the modern concept of GDP—a measure of the value of goods and services produced in a country during a certain time period—for a U.S. congressional report nearly a century ago. She then said, "That baseline measure of just those transactions does not give us any meaningful insight into the value of those transactions, whether we actually want them in the first place, whether they actually benefit people and the planet, nor the distribution of those transactions—that is, who benefits from those transactions." "The squiggly line of GDP can go up but we also know full well that so too can homelessness; so too can the desecration of the environmental fundamentals that are necessary for life as we know it," she continued, arguing that "we can do this economy thing a lot better."https://www.commondreams.org/news/new-zealand-gdp?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=d516ece606-WEEKLY_2024_01_13_no_tracking&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-1b3e592a14-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D       

The awful American consumer. We want cheap stuff fast and don’t care who it hurts. Emily StewartThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  Apr 7, 2022, “In our( United States) culture, we have excessively high expectations,” said Robin Kowalski, a psychology professor at Clemson University who studies complaining. Not just high expectations, but specific ones, about how the economy should run and what we should get out of it. We want things to be cheap, we want things to be fast, we want things to be efficient. For decades, American customers have been told they’re always right. Naturally, they’ve come to believe it. People aren’t accustomed to having to really think about the trade-offs they make for the economy to run how it does, and when they do have to think about it, they don’t like it. Consumer-centric culture has made it easier for us to be destructive in ways big and small — to workers, to the environment, and to each other. Corporations have manufactured our high expectations, and it’s hard to reverse course.                                             Why we’re like this.....Consumer culture hasn’t always been this way, with expectations as high as they are, but we’ve gotten here over about the last century and a half. As Amanda Mull outlined last year in the Atlantic, merchants drew in buyers and trained them in a certain way — to believe that they’re guests, to get reassurance, to be told that they’re always right. Tipping culture emerged, tying a server’s pay to the whims of a consumer instead of a living wage. People’s identities became increasingly intertwined with consumerism and buying, with people comparing themselves to peers and consuming more in order to keep up. Mass manufacturing and mail-order delivery and merchandising and transportation have made it easier for people to get more and more stuff. As companies have competed for our business, and technology has made the consumer experience feel even more efficient, expectations have risen. Customers are constantly updating their expectations based on prior experiences, advertising, competition, or the economy in general, explained Jihoon Cho, an assistant professor of marketing at Kansas State University’s college of business administration. And how they evaluate a service is whether it’s better or worse than expected rather than the objective measure of the actual service.“ The way we evaluate things is a function of expectations,” said Deborah Small, a marketing professor of psychology at Wharton. “If we’re used to a level of customer service, which Americans are, and then things change, like prices go up or things slow down, the violation of that expectation is what causes disappointment anger, all of these sorts of things.” Thirty years ago, people were generally fine with whatever they ordered off of the television arriving in five to seven business days, because it was the status quo. Now, thanks to Amazon, even two days can feel like an eternity. David Mick, a professor of commerce at the University of Virginia, describes the situation as the “er” phenomenon, where people are led to believe that there is always something better ahead. “If you think about packaging or advertising, products across the spectrum are constantly positioning themselves as softer, sweeter, easier, smoother, quieter, longer-lasting, or just the big word, better,” he said. “We’re always being set up that whatever we’re looking at or considering to buy is better.”Once expectations rise, consumers have a hard time going back. We’re averse to loss......read on     https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23013102/american-consumers-expectations-anger-entitled

An end to infinite growth and blind consumerism.....Jonathon Porritt The last time we were going through a serious economic downturn (in the late 1980s and early 1990s), the environmental agenda was fairly frail. Energy and food prices were relatively low, and the idea that there were serious "limits to growth" in the offing was restricted to hardcore greenies. It's very different now. Years of accumulated evidence on a host of environmental issues leaves little if any room for doubt as to the need for rapid and radical change. This is reinforced by soaring energy and commodity prices. Nonetheless, most pundits are still persuaded that the current economic downturn will kill off today's heightened interest in the environment. They may be right, though the most recent Guardian/ICM poll showed that concern about climate change is still high, compared to concerns about the economy. However, if environmental issues do come off the boil, I believe it won't be because of the economic downturn but because our politicians refuse point blank to accept the true implications of today's converging environmental crises. Responses of mainstream politicians are geared entirely to carrying on doing what we do today but in "much less environmentally damaging ways". There is still no challenge to the dominant model of progress; no fundamental questioning of the idea of permanent economic growth; and no serious interrogation of the mounting societal and moral costs of debt-driven consumerism. These naked emperors would still have us believe that we can "decouple" the worst effects of permanently rising per capita income from the kind of environmental damage that it is causing. A mix of smart technology, resource efficiency and "responsible/ethical consumption" will somehow reduce emissions of CO2 by 80% by 2050, overcome resource shortages, prevent further damage to biodiversity, eliminate the build-up of toxic chemicals, and deliver all nine billion of us (by 2050) into a global green nirvana where we can all go on getting richer even as the environment gets greener. There is not a shred of evidence to support such a fatuous fiction. Exactly the opposite.    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climatesummit/story/0,,2290987,00.html