A Note on "The Story of Stuff"

We, the entire humankind, should and ought to work in unity.

“The Story of Stuff”, written and performed by Annie Leonard, fundamentally portrays the notions of sustainable production and consumption.

In this regard, we come across five procedures, namely, extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal, none of which can really run our planet without people. Although, we utter that every government is of the people, for the people and by the people, the basic truth lying underneath is that of utmost exhibition and contamination of atmosphere.

The word ‘extraction’ may be interpreted to be a fancy term for trashing the Earth. Actually, it is quite difficult and miserable to imagine that one third of the planet’s natural resources and eighty per cent of its original forests are “gone”, while forty per cent of water is undrinkable now-a-days.

Thereafter, the raw materials are moved to productive factories, which, every now and then, emit toxic chemicals, like Brominated Flame Retardants (BFR), i.e., ‘toxic’ input always gives that kind of ‘toxic’ output.

Broadly speaking, since each woman is encompassed with a large amount of toxins, their babies also fall victims to ‘toxic’ breast-feeding. Apart from that, most of the people look forward to working in cities; some of them dwell in the slums; this definitely creates a great impact on the planet’s environment in terms of pollution.

Distribution refers to selling, sometimes at externalized costs, sometimes by means of export and import (EXIM), like petroleum from Iraq, plastic from China and so on. It is, however, indeed ludicrous to think that we do no more know how to grieve, pray and hope; we rather know well how to shop, even if 99% of the consumed goods become trash in just six months in the USA and we know the fact pretty well. Perhaps, the ultimate purpose of the USA is to grow more consumer goods, and this will not take enough time to become a custom worldwide.

On one hand, planned obsolescence implies the idea that each and every product is designed for the dump, like a computer of this year will not perfectly stay usable in the following year to come, since it is redesigned again and again, while on the other hand, perceived obsolescence means that something is made obsolete by making the purchasers perceive the advertisement, like staying in vogue wearing skinny heels.

Disposal is being made in the dumping ground, where four and a half pound of disposed garbage per day is burnt, giving off toxins like Dioxin. Sometimes, we endeavor to recycle, but we must always keep in mind that recycling is not enough, primarily for a couple of reasons - one is that our domestic trash is nothing but the tip of an iceberg, while the other is our incompetence to identify the proper segment where we are supposed to drop the garbage, like we cannot make out where to throw a juice-pack—plastic, metal or paper part for the recycling.

To conclude, it seems mandatory to say that if all the people of the system are harmonized, a new world can be innovated in order to cease the national happiness get decreased gradually.