The story of stuff with Annie Leonard

I was very much surprised (and disappointed) when I found out that product designers played a deliberate and direct role in trashing the planet.
The textbook explanation of materials economy is indeed very misleading.
Personally I feel that we are obligated to design products that seek not only the best interest of people but our planet as well. So therefore we are responsible to design products using environmentally friendly materials and production methods.
There are 4 issues in this system that greatly interests me

1. We are running out of resources - We are using too much stuff!
In the past 30 years one third of the earths have been consumed and even today we are consuming our resources at an accelerating rate. So it will be in less than 60years time before we completely use up all the earth’s resources. And the scary thing is that, that is actually within my life time! (If I live to be 80).

2. Third world – our stuff that somehow got onto someone else’s land
So even tho a country (in this case America) doesn’t have enough materials within their land to provide their needs, they go and take someone else’s and trash their lands as well! Deforestation, pollution of water ways and dumping of rubbish on someone else’s land obviously does not make a good living environment for ANYONE.
I found this really ironic as that we are the ones that are stealing their stuff and causing problems such as health endangerment and child labour and yet we think we are being the bigger man donating to them what is essentially already theirs.

3. Toxic materials- toxics in, toxics out. We get what we give
When my kitchen goes on fire, I’m going to put it out with my pillow....that sounds very practical indeed.
These toxins affect everyone in at least one way or another. Factory workers, mothers and babies, and these toxins become super toxic after its incinerated and is released into the atmosphere where we all breath it in.

4. Material satisfaction – are you satisfied?
It has become typical in this generation and generations to come for us to seek happiness and confidence in material goods, but this wasn’t always the case. It was designed for this to happen:
“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life , that we convert the buying and the use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in consumption, we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.” - Victor Lebow economist and retail analyst in 1950’s
BUT! Statistic shows that our national happiness is actually declining (base on statistics in America). As Annie Leonard addressed, we have more stuff but we have less time for the things that really makes us happy. We are so engrossed on our material life that we have forgotten the simple way of life where human interaction was all that mattered.

It is indeed a system in crisis

The existing systems were created by people. as a future industrial designer, i believe we have the power to change