The Secret Life of Stuff by
Julie Hill
Why this book? Because I was tired of feeling guilty every time I went shopping. Because I worked in the environmental movement trying to influence government policy, but started to lack the energy to continually seek ‘eco-friendly’ goods on a personal basis. And most of all, because I wanted to understand ‘stuff’, and whether stuff is really a problem.
There are plenty of books on the perils of climate change. There are a few books on the way we treat (or rather mistreat) water. There is an irritating number of tomes exhorting us to live cleaner, greener lives. But I searched in vain for books that spelt out the varied qualities and consequences of materials, their pros and cons, their heroes and villains. I wanted something to answer those continual conundrums – is paper better than plastic? Should we burn wood not oil? Is my magazine pulped rainforest? Does it matter that the average Brit uses 110 loo rolls a year, or that the average woman has 14 garments in her wardrobe that she hasn’t worn in the last year, and probably won’t bother to recycle? It seemed to me that writing a book about materials, products and waste would help me to settle these questions once and for all.
Far from it. The answer to all these questions, as for many worthwhile questions, is ‘it depends’. It depends on where the stuff has come from, and where it ends up. On how it is designed, marketed, used and disposed of. The overwhelming message is that all of it has the potential be either good or bad. The way we design products – in other words, the way we select and combine materials – has a massive influence on their environmental profile, as does their ‘end of life’ treatment. So recycled paper is better than virgin paper, except where the latter results in a chemical ‘co-product’ that can be used to fuel the plant. Plastic comes from a non-renewable resource (oil) and has generally ephemeral use, but the polymers that it comprises are readily recyclable and durable if used for the right products. Textiles are increasingly low quality, compromising the second hand market, and they are the most difficult products to recycle because we mix up natural and synthetic fibres and anyway don’t collect them very efficiently. And what about the energy questions? An e-mail uses a 60th of the carbon (for which read energy) as a letter, but we send many more e-mails than letters, and we don’t always take account of the energy and materials used to produce and recover the electronic gadgets.
How on earth are we to know what to choose in the face of all this? My case in The Secret Life of Stuff is that the notion of the ‘green consumer’ has been important over the last twenty years in changing attitudes inside some businesses, but sadly has not been sufficiently forceful or consistent to change products across the board, or even to give us enough information to make better choices. Worse, it may have let some businesses off the hook by providing niche products. We need some new design ‘rules’ that change products before they even hit the shelves, so that their environmental credentials can be taken for granted and we can all relax a bit when shopping.
Redesigning products will take us a certain way towards a better material world. What it won’t do is tell us how much consumption is too much. From a scientific perspective, I found reasonable consensus that there may be ‘limits to growth’. How much we need to curb our appetite for stuff to stay within those limits remains an open question, but until we get a better grip on the varied consequences of our consumption, we won’t come anywhere near answering it.
The Secret Life of Stuff by Julie Hill is available in Vintage paperback and ebook.