#13 - Consumer's Licence

Driving is dangerous, not only for the driver and his passengers, by also for passersby and their property. One mistake is enough to kill. And the fact there was no intention to harm does not make it less painful. But driving cannot be forbidden: our need for transportation is real. Hence, pretty much anywhere in the world, one needs a license to take the wheel.

I would argue consuming is even more dangerous ! Everything we buy has an impact on the environment and the communities living in this environment. And this at every stage of the products lifecycle: during the mining of the necessary resources, during fabrication, during the usage phase and after its “life” once it has become waste.

The sum of these harmful impacts kills people faraway. People we have never heard of and people we will never see. Just like driving, the fact that there is no intention to harm does not make it less painful for the victims. And our need for things is just as real. But if we have learned to drive, most of us never learned to buy, except for flashing our credit cards. How can we reduce the risks associated with our consumption?

Shared responsibility

I hear the argument that attributes the responsibility of those "negative externalities" to the producers. After all, they are supposed to be more knowledgeable and can influence how things are designed and made. That is partially true, but consumers also have influence: on what they buy and how products are used and discarded.

But anyway, producing and consuming are two sides of the same coin. Consumers buy what is available (and sometimes force-fed by advertising) while producers make what we are willing to buy. And usually, we are the same individuals producing something and buying something else.

Consumers and producers have a shared responsibility.

The impact of our Christmas gifts

I am publishing this letter just before Christmas when most of us are on a buying spree. So what can we do as consumers to reduce the harm?

Question and seek answers to understand the consequences of our purchases. We know what will happen if we drive our car into a bus station. We should know what will happen when we buy carts full of gifts:

• We participate in greenhouse gas emissions: those items have been made from materials extracted using energy, mostly fossil fuels and they may contain plastics, i.e. more fossil fuels. The manufacturing processes also required energy, more fossil fuel. Transportation around the world required energy, more fossil fuel. Maybe using this item will require even more energy and emit more greenhouse gas? And by the way, if you are told the item is clean because it is electric, ask how much of the overall energy footprint is electrified and where this electricity comes from!
• We also participate in resources depletion: the mines from which the materials were taken are being depleted very fast as shown by the ever lower average tenures of metals per ton of materials extracted. Did you know an average smartphone requires 200kg of minerals for which 4,5t of materials have been extracted from the mines? Pretty much all of it is wasted since you only hold 150g in your hand. And then, we will keep the phone 2 years on average… even 10 years would not be enough!
• We also participate in water pollution: not only through the 500 litres irreversibly polluted to mine the metals of your smartphone, but also the 10 000 litres used to make your favorite T-shirt or pair of jeans. The Aral Sea is dead and others are drying up fast. By the way, did you know our total water consumption is around 5 000 litres per capita a day? Most of it is invisible, but water is used everywhere, even to pump oil out of the grounds.
• We may also participate in social dramas: directly if those gifts have been made in terrible sweatshops, indirectly where communities suffer the consequences of climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, etc. On the issue of sweatshops, the information is rarely publicised for obvious reasons. But when prices are too good to be true, ask yourself how the workers could have made a decent living. By the way, sweatshops are not only a monopoly of the Chinese Uighur region... many brands have been found guilty of exploitation in the US, the UK, and pretty much everywhere in the world. Indirect harm is even less visible for the consumer but can be even more dramatic: for example, pollution and the loss of biodiversity may render soils infertile and impact the livelihoods of whole communities. And as mentioned in my previous letter, already over twenty millions of individuals are displaced every year by global warming. Men, women, children... that lose everything.
• Unfortunately, the list could go on...

My point here is not to say we should not consume; that would be totally unrealistic. But we can try to gauge the negative effects embedded into the lifecycle of an item versus the service it renders. A kid might enjoy this plastic fire truck with the flashing red lights and alarm; but he may enjoy just as much the wooden one with the bell. And the latter will last longer with no batteries to change...

Understanding the lifecycles of everything we buy might seem like a daunting task and it would not be very realistic to ask everyone to become experts on all these environmental and social topics. Solving all these problems is difficult because we are facing a systemic issue where everything is linked: the metal needed to manufacture a battery requires energy to be mined and water and pollutants to be extracted and purified. But there is also a good side to all issues being interlinked:

We only need to look at two dimensions to get a good grasp of the consequences of a particular purchase.

For example, one can ask about the energy and water consumption across the lifecycle of a product; someone else might look at the resources used and social impacts of the same product. And both will probably arrive at very similar conclusions.

So all we need is to be curious about the two topics we are most sensitive to! We do not need to know everything: 20% of the information is usually enough to understand 80% of the negative effects. Make it a habit to learn, be like a detective, take it as a game and become a wiser consumer.

What do you think? Should we actually pass an examination to get our consumer's license? And more seriously, what are the two dimensions you would like to explore? More and more, I personally tend to look at materials and water usage in my consumption...