Can't Spell Consumers w/o Con
why spending our money isn't helping the planet
Everyone with a bit of sense knows that our environment is fucked. It is evident that humans have pillaged the planet for our own short-term gains at the expense of our climate, other living things, and our own ability to survive in this barren, unpredictable wasteland we’ve created. You can tell this knowledge is fully mainstream because of the sheer number of climate-coded ads during the Super Bowl last weekend. The forever charming Kate McKinnon pushed mayo as the solution to food waste on behalf of super polluter Unilever, Volkswagen flashed it’s new electric vehicle while weirdly reminding us of their origin in Hitler’s Germany, and cruelty-free beauty brand E.L.F ran multiple ads despite their recently discovered ties to the NXIVM sex cult. Commentators bent themselves over backwards to remind us that this Super Bowl ran on solar power. Climate anxiety is at an all-time high and the powers that be didn’t want it ruining their bread and circuses. These massive corporations want us to think that we are making a difference when we purchase their products instead of taking responsibility for the harm they cause in their never-ending quest for profits. In fact, even our beloved commercials are a problem.
“Programmatic ad platform Good-Loop estimates that in 2021, Super Bowl advertisers generated around 2m tonnes of CO2 through digital advertising. For context, that’s the same amount of carbon emissions produced by around 100,000 Americans in one year.”
Yup, same old story. We can recycle, compost, and drink through disintegrating straws all damn day and one stupid commercial will wipe out the efforts of 100,000 of us in a year. All we can really do it stop buying shit.
Corporations know that we want them to do their part, but they are committed to doing the least. Look what happened when California passed their plastic bag ban back in 2014. Instead of encouraging customers to just bring their own bags, stores began selling thick, plastic bags at checkout for a dime. By 2022, California had INCREASED its tonnage of discarded plastic bags by 47%. This loophole is a loss for the environment and consumers but gave a little extra cash to retailers while making it seem like it’s our problem to fix, not theirs. Legislators are busy trying close this loophole but the bags keep piling up in the meantime. No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.
Even current reusable It-Girl Stanley is really stretching the concept of reusable. A durable, long lasting, steel mug meant to replace single use cups and plastic bottles has morphed into cash cow for the brand as they roll out endless, hyped-up colorways and special edition collabs. This new marketing and brand strategy can be seen all over social media like TikTok and took Stanley from $100 million in sales in 2020 to over $750 million in 2023. You can’t make astronomical profits if your customers buy your product once, you must keep them coming back again and again. Steel production comes at a huge cost to the environment and recycled steel can be hard to come by. In fact, only 23% of Stanley’s products are made from recycled steel. So how many mugs do we really need?
Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of the US GDP, around $14 trillion annually, and corporations will do anything to get that money from us. They know that we want environmentally friendly products. When surveyed 78% of US consumers say a sustainable lifestyle is important to them and 60% say they’d pay more for products with sustainable packaging. So they’ll pretend as much as they can to extract those dollars from our wallets without making any of the changes that consumers expect. We can’t shop our way out of this but we can stop shopping. Like so many of us, I spent 2020 online shopping. I hoped my next purchase was going to change my life, heal my heart, and turn me into the kind of person who didn’t fall short, who didn’t feel so fucking sad. But of course, there’s no amount of clothes, kitchen gadgets, or workout equipment that was going to fix what was broken.
wrote about product worship and Stanleys in her newsletter and hit the nail right on the head:“Products and companies will never be able to replace genuine purpose and community. Devoting ourselves to those things won’t bring us any closer to enlightenment - no purchase will.”
We’ve all been sad for a while now. Our national pastime of spending our hard-earned money has only made shit worse. We can’t trust the corporations to mean what they say but we can remove our wallets from the conversation. This year, let’s try to buy only what we need, keep our money in our communities as much as possible, and not let greenwashing lead us back onto the hyper consumerism hamster wheel. We can’t buy ourselves a better planet, but we can stop funding the shittification of this one.
Hungry for more? Here are some recipes to get you through the week while you focus on buying only what you need:
White Bean and Green Chili Stew
Tomorrow, paid subscribers will get another delicious, one pot recipe to make dinners a little easier: baked “fried” rice. It’s endlessly customizable and only takes about 15 minutes of active cooking. What could be better than that?
Thanks again for supporting my work here at Stir the Pot. It means a lot.
xoxo
Michelle
Because we can solar power the Super Bowl but we can’t make solar panels more affordable for people to put on their homes. Cool cool cool.
I literally had something waiting for me in my cart, something that I have enough of already in my bathroom closet. Thank you for waking me up this morning!