One problem I’m sure we all are dealing with is how to make our private jets more sustainable. (I hope you realize I’m joking here.) I say this, because it has a hint of ridiculousness to it, and I think that sort of irreverent attitude is helpful in approaching this topic, of the things we want and the things we need.
A colleague of mine and I once did some consumer research, and one of the many things we found is that generally, most people would buy more, and more expensive, things if they had the money to do so. At least in some product categories that were important to them. We occasionally came across a person that said, no, I’m satisfied with what I have with this particular product, even though I could afford the nicer thing and I see significant benefit in having it. What I have is enough, they told us.
With that in mind, I do worry that this essay will fall on deaf ears. Heck, I, too, am not immune to the pulls of consumerism myself. Perhaps that makes me less qualified to write about this topic, but maybe it makes me even more qualified to write about it, too.
So back to the private jets. If that example doesn’t resonate with you or put you in an open enough state of mind, let’s try this one: the selfie toaster. (If you were a student in my circular economy class, you’ve seen this.)
The way it works is that you would send a picture of yourself – or your dog or your favorite sustainability guru – to the company, and they would cut out a metal plate that could be inserted into this special toaster. And whatever that image was would be burned into your toast every morning. The product is no longer available for purchase – sorry/not sorry.
I’m using these two examples as things that we might want, but are clearly in the category of things we don’t need. While those two examples might be obvious, there are plenty of things we might not all agree on at all as to which category they go into. (And of course, there are also the things we know we don’t need but we buy them anyway, but that’s a topic for another time.)
The difficult reality is that the circular economy doesn’t promise us freedom from collectively needing to consume less – even if we are able to produce and consume differently. There are plenty of interesting theories about how to accomplish this (governments taxing extraction of materials, etc.), but here I want to talk about how this manifests in our own lives.
There are things that I personally hope that for the most part will become the selfie toasters of the world (i.e. not needed and no longer produced), including privately-owned vehicles and disposable water bottles.
But these things only go away if we make the choice to make them go away. I don’t mean this as some sort of guilt or shaming thing – after all, as I mentioned I’m very much an unconscious consumer at times, too. But here on the so-called “Black Friday” in the US, it may behoove us to think about the things that should indeed go away.