Things Are Not Made to Last

You may hear older people say this from time to time, but it is actually true.  Companies don't make nearly as much money if they make things to last.  We have become a consumerist, throw-away society, but it was not always this way.  Check out the Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard for some eye-opening statistics and the real cost of our consumerism culture.  I will summarize the story here.  

• In the United States, we only have 5% of the world's population, but use up 30% of its resources and produce 30% of the world's waste.  
  
• Each person in this country produces 4.5 pounds of trash per day, twice the amount we produced 30 years ago.  
  
• 99% of the materials that go into making the stuff that we buy are trashed in less than 6 months. 
• For every 1 garbage can we produce, the manufacturers are producing 70 garbage cans.
  

Things were not always this way.  After World War II, corporations actively sought out a way to make more money.  Consumerism was the key.  This would help explain why the average person consumes twice as much today than they did 50 years ago, or the fact that the average house size has doubled since the 1970's.  Each person in this country gets targeted with 3,000 advertisements per day, more than people used to encounter in their entire lifetime.  

But money cannot buy you happiness.  National happiness has been steadily declining since the 1950's (when it peaked).  Is it coincidence that this was the beginning of our consumer-driven era?  Why would people want to work so hard just to buy stuff that they never really needed or wanted in the first place?  

Over the past three decades, one-third of the planet's natural resource space has been consumed.  In the US, we have only 4% of our original forests left, and 40% of our waterways are undrinkable. Industries here admit to releasing over 4 Billion pounds of toxic chemicals per year. Climate change is the consequence of our actions.  It is too late to stop it from happening, but we could keep it from getting worse.