I’m afraid these next words will not help you score the best deal this coming holiday season. In fact, I’m hoping they do quite the opposite. I’m hoping these provide you with a conscious approach to consumerism so that you can make more informed choices.
At the end of the month, the official start of the Holiday Season begins with blaring deals and screaming discounts. The mass crowds and frenzied shopping says everything you need to know about America (and globally)- we are a consumer culture that is out to score the best deal. So much so, the average spend is expected to increase between 3% and 22% compared to 2022, a BCG country survey shows.
What the 25% discount on that screen T.V., or the two for one sale on those vacuums, or any undeniably deal you can’t turn down, leave out is the devastating cost that the consumption of those goods has on our planet. Everytime we buy something, the cost isn’t just monetary, there is the environmental cost of the materials it takes to produce, ship, maintain, and dispose of the product.
Black Friday has become an integral part of the global shopping calendar, ~95% of consumers know it. Can the same statistics be said about the Planetary Boundaries?
Of course, we know this. We know this conceptually, in broad, lazy terms, but few consumers actually know the extent of what their product requires or know what it really means for us in the very near future.
Let’s imagine, Costco on the eve of Black Friday, aisles of discounted flat screen T.V.s with flashy deals. Well, each tv was built in a manufacturing plant, they all take up land use which means trees had to be cut down. In addition, there is the use of energy and water to power the facility to make the products. Once the product is built, then we have to package it and ship it.
Per Canopy, 3 billion trees are pulped every year to produce 241 million tons of shipping cartons annually. Of the 86 million tons of plastic packaging produced globally every year, not even 14% is recycled.
Now lets add the GHG emissions caused by shipping, in 2020, 37% of the total GHG emissions were accounted to the shipping and return of products. The GHG caused by the manufacturing plant, the various modes of transportation, and the use of the TV will lead to greater concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus creating a thicker ‘blanket’ and increasing our earth’s temperature.
The earth’s rising temperature will increase the natural disasters we’ve seen over the years, such as forest fires caused by increased temperatures during summer or floods during the rainy season.
So, that new flat-screen TV may cost you an additional air purifier (or two) during summer because of all the smoke in the air caused by the forest fires and either a pair of heavy-duty rain boots or moving out of the lower/basement apartment unit in New York.
Let's take it a step further. What will happen if we continue increasing spending on incentivized consumerism, waste generation, and mass production? Will it cost our future generations a lake damaged by soil erosions?
Is the 25% off Black Friday deal still worth it?
Even if the tremendous environmental costs are unpacked, we have yet to find way to quantify the cost so that the reality of what consumer culture is doing to our planet actually changes the way America thinks about the way it shops.
But what if we decided to include the environmental cost of the product in the final sale? What if each product factored in how much it would cost to offset the carbon it required to ship, the cost it would take to recycle, the cost of weather disaster relief and so on and so forth. Would America still be obsessed with consuming? Or would our priorities start to shift?
But changing our societal consumerist goal is not an easy thing to do. So, where do we begin? Our consumerist society is a system composed of multiple parts: the consumers, products, companies, marketing, online shopping, physical stores, supply chain, etc. The way to change a system, is to use the leverage points and find ways to alter the goal. I believe we being with highlighint Donella Meadow’s Leverage Point #6: The Structure of Information Flow.
Companies can report to consumers the entire environmental impact it took to create a product, and, also the impact it has after the products inevitable lifecycle. Thus creating a more aware consumer, armed with knowledge otherwise not made available to them. And so, going back to Donella Meadow’s Leverage Points, we know the most effective way to make change to a system, is to alter its goal.
For a consumer obsessed globe, this most likely looks like making products sustainably rather than baking the environmental cost into the product. If companies start priortizing and disclaiming our environmental rights, rather than our capitalist ones, they may be saving consumers around the globe the money they will be spending on reacting to the upcoming environmental disasters.
So, perhaps after reading this, you will be called to a different kind of consumer season. Perhaps you will begin to demand your favorite brands to shed a light on theri environmental impact.
Consider environmentally friendly and sustainble companies that invest in our Earth rather than a flashy deal. If their products cost more, well, then they are probably doing something right.
Author: Eduardo Cuadra, Student of MBA Sustainability Management Class 1 (2023-2025)