The Story of Stuff

Posted by Mark Maddalina

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of
Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Visiting the Dump

If you haven’t been to a landfill, I highly recommend it.  Transfer stations, where garbage is transferred from smaller trucks to bigger ones, and Materials Recovery Facilities, or MRFs, where some recyclables are pulled out of the trash before it is dumped, are also really interesting. Seeing the often-hidden back end of our materials economy can be a transformative, or at least a very thought provoking –if smelly – experience.

It was a trip to the landfill on Staten Island in New York City that first sparked my fascination with the way we make, use and throw away all the stuff in our lives. Ever since then, I’ve visited dumps whenever I visit a new city, all over the world. It is a great way to get insight into what is going on in a place, what the community values, how the people live.

If you visit one of these facilities in the U.S., you’ll see pretty quickly that we are humungous waste makers in this country. Nationally, we generate over 250 million tons of garbage each year, and that is only the municipal waste – or garbage – which doesn’t even include the much larger amounts of waste from industries, mining, and construction. We make enough garbage each year in the U.S. to fill  a convoy of 10-ton trucks long enough to wrap around the earth six times!  That’s a huge amount and it’s still increasing. In 1980, each of us in the U.S., on average, made about 3.6 pounds  (1.6 kg) of garbage per day; by 2007, this had increased to more than 4.6 pounds (2.1 kg).  It is an amazing thing to watch these gigantic trucks, sometimes lined up by the dozens, waiting to dump or move ever more garbage. It just goes on and on.

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Courtesy of: Story of Stuff