More consumption means more sales and more profits. This grows economies, which creates jobs and prosperity. How could this be a problem? Besides, more consumption is necessary to feed, clothe, and house a fast-rising world population. Right?
The consequences of consumption, however, are far more complicated and multifaceted than this common narrative suggests. Much of today’s global consumption is excessive and wasteful, with the degree of excess highly unequal across cultures and individuals. Consumption by the rich has been rising steadily over the past half-century, casting increasingly intense shadows of harm onto distant lands and future generations as food, natural resources, and waste zigzag through the world economy. Meanwhile, billions of people do not have adequate nutrition, potable water, or shelter, with degraded rural areas depopulating and urban slums growing increasingly crowded.
Corporate sustainability rarely ever reduces excessive, wasteful, or unequal consumption. Nor does it do much to lighten the shadows of consumption – and at times even makes things worse. On occasion, a CEO of big business may mention a need for less consumption, but always with a wink. “Our primary goal is to reduce our consumption,” Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger said when explaining his company’s sustainability strategy, “but we don’t feel guilty about growing as a company.”1
Three reasons stand out for the failure of corporate sustainability to make any real progress toward resolving the problem of consumption. First, as advertising and sales division spur consumption of all sorts, the CSR and sustainability units tend to shrug off profligate consumption as an unavoidable byproduct of affluence. Second, big-box retailers and brand manufacturers are reinvesting the savings from corporate sustainability to spur even higher levels of consumption globally, which in turn drives demand for the cheap energy and natural resources of transnational oil and mining companies. Third, the turn toward voluntary business standards and market mechanisms to offset ecological harms is doing relatively little to mitigate the global environmental consequences of rising rates of consumption.
For these reasons, big business is making the growing problem of overconsumption worse, not better. Overconsumption, most simply, is consumption that exceeds the capacity of ecosystems to regenerate, retain dynamic stability, and support future life. Telltale signs of overconsumption include the irreversible decline of renewable resources (such as fish, timber, water, and arable land), the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources (such as oil, gold, diamonds, phosphate, and coltan), the loss of entire ecosystems (such as grasslands, watersheds, and salt marshes), and the polluting of natural systems with carbon, e-waste, chemicals, and plastic.
Overconsumption for individuals occurs when they exceed their “fair earth share” – an amount each person could in theory consume without irreparably degrading the earth for future generations.2 Overconsumption can also be measured at national, regional, and global scales. Ecological footprint analysis by the Global Footprint Network, for instance, estimates that if everyone on the earth were to consume like North Americans do today, we would need three to five Earths to regenerate natural systems and absorb the waste.
Overconsumption at the global scale is rising in part because more individuals are consuming more of everything. But it also connects closely with ostentatious and wasteful consumption, such as living in a 40-room mansion, driving a Hummer, or constantly upgrading products. Unequal wealth and consumer desires, however, only partly explain increasing rates of overconsumption.
In a process some call “commodification” and others “commoditization,” since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century more and more of daily life has been turned into market transactions for ideas, services, and objects, with animals and people traded as products, and with advertisers equating the buying of “goods” with feelings of self-worth, pleasure, and happiness. At the same time governments have subsidized infrastructure (e.g., highways) and steered economies toward overconsumption, while international organizations – such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization – have provided financing and supported trading arrangements to increase the consumption of natural resources and industrial agricultural products.
Commodification and globalization have reinforced the power of big business to manufacture excessive, unequal, and wasteful consumption. As we have seen, the vast majority of consumer-facing TNCs are now claiming a total commitment to sustainability, responsibility, and citizenship, emphasizing the generosity of their philanthropy and the environmental value of their programs to promote recycling, energy efficiency, less waste, and more conservation. Yet even a quick glance at their communication with shareholders and investors reveals a bullheaded focus on accelerating growth, building new factories and stores, enticing new customers, and generating higher profits – in other words, a total commitment to increasing consumption in any form.
Strategies to expand and remake consumption vary across TNCs. Ones like Apple and General Electric focus on branding, mass marketing, and upgrading. Ones like McDonald’s and 7-Eleven concentrate on franchising. Ones like Walmart and Amazon emphasize discount sales and bulk purchases. Ones like Cartier and Tiffany sell luxury goods as status symbols. And ones like Louis Vuitton and Gucci push the newest season of designs. Yet in every case the underlying goal is the same: to get more people to buy more things.
There are countless examples of big business manufacturing overconsumption. Consider the marketing of big, heavy SUVs. These vehicles are now, in the language of industry analysts, “the largest drivers of growth” across all automobile markets, accounting for around twenty-nine percent of global sales in 2016. Over the past decade total auto sales have been rising especially quickly in emerging markets such as China and India. But, even with small car sales falling, total auto sales have also been increasing in mature markets like the United States as automakers push up sales of SUVs and pickup trucks with clever advertising, easy financing, and cash rebates. For the seventh straight year, total US auto sales set yet another record high in 2016, with Ford’s F-Series pickup truck leading the charge. That year SUV and pickup sales accounted for sixty-three percent of total US auto sales, up from fifty percent in 2013.3
The history of sugar offers another example of how big business manufactures overconsumption. Over the course of the twentieth century average sugar consumption quadrupled, with caloric intake rising from an average of about 150 calories per day in the early 1960s to over 200 today. Americans consume the most sugar: on average over 126 grams a day, more than the British (93 grams) and Canadians (89 grams), far more than the Italians (58 grams) and Japanese (57 grams), and way more than the Israelis (14.5 grams) and Indians (5 grams).4
In 2016 global sugar consumption yet again set a new record high, having climbed to over 170 million metric tons (up from 155 million metric tons in 2010). Sugar sweetens much of what we eat. It is in candy, cereal, cakes, and cookies. It is in jam, yogurt, and canned sauces. And it is in bread, soups and alcohol. One of the biggest uses, however, is for soft drinks, and the world’s single biggest buyer of sugar is Coca-Cola.5
In recent years Coca-Cola has been shifting away slightly from using sugar to make its Coke, Fanta, Sprite, and sports beverages as people drink more of its diet and sugar-free products. At the same time Coca-Cola is quick to emphasize in its sustainability reports that it is now trying to use more of what it calls “sustainable” sugar: for instance, buying over one million metric tons in 2016 (mostly Bonsucro-certified sugar).
Yet even a cursory glance at the company’s other reports shows its core business remains getting more people to buy more of its five hundred brands. Here, the vision is not of a healthy, sustainable world, but one where Coca-Cola controls an even larger share of the global soda market and where on average every person drinks at least 135–155 liters of soda a year, as is now the case in Argentina, the United States, Chile, and Mexico.
Already in 1980 the Coca-Cola Company, with sales of US$5.9 billion, was capturing more than thirty-five percent of the global soft drink market. In 2016 sales exceeded US$44 billion, with people drinking on average 1.9 billion servings a day of Coca-Cola brands. That year alone Coca-Cola introduced over five hundred new products to markets across the world – or, as the company proudly told its shareholders at year’s end, “nearly two products launched per day.”6
Coca-Cola is an exceptionally powerful company. But, of course, it is just one of many forces engineering taste preferences toward sweetness. Mars, Mondeléz, and Nestlé play leading roles. So do Hershey, Cadbury, Nestlé, and Ferrero, among many other companies. And there are many factors beyond sugar causing global rates of diabetes and obesity to rise, including the dietary impact of fast food, processed food, and meat companies. Yet there is no question that the dogged marketing of soft drinks by companies like Coca-Cola is a major reason why Americans consume so much sugar, why global consumption of sugar is now so high – and is still rising – and why the World Health Organization reports a more than doubling of obesity across the world from 1980 to 2014.
Tales of corporate re-engineering of consumer cultures could go on and on. We could look at Chiquita and the mass marketing of Cavendish bananas. Or at McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s and the consumption of fifty billion hamburgers a year in the USA alone. Or at De Beers and every culture’s seemingly insatiable love for diamonds. Or at Procter & Gamble’s campaign to turn China into a leading disposable diaper market by advertising Pampers as offering babies a longer and deeper sleep, making for smarter and healthier children. Going into more detail, however, is unnecessary as in every case a similar pattern emerges: big business, both legally and illegally, does everything in its power to sell more of its products.
One consequence is that corporate innovation has rarely ever reduced global consumption of anything. This holds true even when rapid technological progress takes holds, as a 2017 study in the journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change shows. One example is the miniaturization of silicon semiconductors. Compared to the 1970s it now takes far less material to produce one transistor. Yet global consumption of silicon has climbed steadily as companies make more products with silicon and as more people buy more products with silicon, from computers to smartphones to tablets.
The study in Technological Forecasting & Social Change did find a couple of examples of an absolute decline in consumption. This occurred when governments took strong action to end production, as with thallium, mercury, and asbestos. And this occurred when companies substituted new inputs to feed broader demand, as with the decline in wool consumption as the clothing industry turned to synthetic materials (or, as we will see in the next chapter, what may now be occurring with coal as producers switch to less-polluting energy sources). But, generally, gains from higher technological efficiency of corporations have almost always rebounded to stimulate even more consumption.7
Certainly, big business is not solely responsible for rising overconsumption. That would be an absurd claim. Yet given the dominance of the world’s largest companies within the world economy (see Chapter 2 for details), big business is clearly the single biggest cause. This point deserves heavy underlining as so many governments and NGOs are now misguidedly looking to corporate self-regulation and eco-consumerism to govern us out of the global environmental crisis. A deeper look into the ecological shadows of consumption reveals the potential for catastrophe if we do not tackle this growing problem of overconsumption.
The globalization of the world economy since World War II has been increasingly shifting the costs of rising overconsumption into ecosystems far from the eyes of the majority of consumers, degrading the Amazon, depleting the high seas, eroding Africa, and polluting the Arctic. These shadows of consumption include what economists often call “externalities,” which arise when market prices do not reflect the full costs of production, such as emitting greenhouse gases. Shadow effects include as well, however, the intentional distancing of production costs and waste by states and firms; for instance, as they ship garbage and e-waste overseas or as they relocate dirty industries into poor, racialized neighborhoods. Deescalating our global environmental crisis will require confronting these hidden costs of overconsumption, especially by the wealthiest ten percent of the world’s population, who now account, for example, for around half of the emissions of carbon dioxide arising from individual consumption.8
The proliferation of chemical and electronic waste is one sign of the intensifying shadows of overconsumption. There are now more than 144,000 chemicals in commercial use, and for most of them we have very little understanding of the long-term consequences as substances interact with each other and as they bioaccumulate in nature. And far more chemical pollution is on the way. Every year, for example, brings another forty-five to fifty million metric tons of e-waste as consumers discard cellphones, computers, televisions, dishwashers, and microwaves: of this waste, only six to eight million metric tons is safely recycled, while much of the rest lands in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa.
The Arctic is now one of the planet’s most contaminated regions as persistent organic pollutants – such as dioxin, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) – bounce across the earth like grasshoppers until settling in the coldest regions as the process of evaporation and precipitation comes to an end. Even the deepest recesses of the earth are filling with chemicals. Recent tests on crustaceans living in the inky blackness of the Mariana Trench, an eleven-kilometer deep crevice in the western Pacific Ocean, found exceptionally high levels of PCBs and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs, a flame retardant in products like couches, pillows, and TVs). PCB levels in the crustaceans from the Mariana Trench were as much as fifty times higher than for crabs from the dirtiest waters of mainland China.9
The shadows of consumption on the earth’s climate are equally alarming. Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions are the main technical causes of climate change, with carbon pollution accounting for around three-quarters of human-induced warming over the past century. The majority of this carbon pollution links to just 90 fossil fuel and cement companies, and big oil companies clearly have much to answer for.10 But rising overconsumption is also a fundamental reason for rising greenhouse gases. Coal, oil, and natural gas fuels the making and recycling of consumer products. Construction, roadwork, and landfills are also major sources of greenhouse gases. So is the heating and cooling of homes and office towers. And so is the driving of cars, SUVs, and trucks, which, for instance, account for around one-fifth of US emissions.
Industrial food production is another major source of greenhouse gases. Land clearing emits carbon dioxide; rice cultivation, manure, and flatulating livestock spew methane; and organic and chemical fertilizers release nitrous oxide. The shipping, trucking, and flying of food across vast distances is also a significant source of emissions. In total, the global agricultural system accounts for around one-quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.11
The earth’s climate is drifting into an ever-deeper crisis as the shadows of mass production, transportation, and industrial agriculture continue to intensify. Already, average temperatures have gone up by more than 1°C since pre-industrial times. And far more warming is likely. In pre-industrial times the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 270 to 275 parts per million of molecules; today, the figure is over 400 ppm and rising. Methane, with more than twenty-five times the long-term warming power of carbon, is also increasing. The ten years before 2017 was the hottest decade ever recorded; and 2016 was the hottest year so far. If trends continue, average temperatures could well rise 3 to 4°C above pre-industrial times by the end of this century; if trends worsen, we could even see a rise as high as 6°C.
Climate change, moreover, is just one of many interacting and reinforcing environmental changes brought on by the shadows of overconsumption. Fresh water is growing scarcer for the world’s poorest people as industry, industrial agriculture, and well-off individuals consume ever more; billions of people do not even have enough fresh water to meet basic needs. Meanwhile, global rates of extraction, degradation, pollution, and ecosystem collapse are continuing to rise. Biodiversity loss is one critical sign. Every day, of the eight to nine million species, between ten and five hundred are becoming extinct, with rising numbers of species under threat as rates of loss accelerate.12
Especially telling is the consequences of the shadows of consumption for tropical rainforests. More than half of these forests have been cleared since 1950, and of those remaining only fifteen percent are still intact enough to retain full biodiversity. For many decades now deforestation of the tropics has been one of the biggest causes of climate change, accounting for around fifteen percent of global anthropogenic carbon pollution. Yet still, every year, even in the face of an escalating global biodiversity crisis, millions of hectares of old-growth tropical forests are logged and then razed for palm oil estates, soy plantations, and cattle ranching.
Ocean life is suffering, too, in the shadows of humanity’s rising consumption. Since 1950 the number of seabirds has fallen by more than seventy percent, overhunted, poisoned by human waste, tangled in fishing gear, and killed off by oil spills and climate change.13 One-fifth of coral reefs have been destroyed, and at least half of the remaining reefs are under threat from global warming, acidification, chemical contamination, fishing, and tourism. The populations of more than half of commercial fish species have fallen by more than ninety percent since the beginning of industrial fishing. Some, such as the cod off the east coast of North America, have crashed to less than one percent of their original population. These declines have done little to slow commercial harvests. Each year at least half-a-trillion fish are consumed or discarded as bycatch, an amount which, if lined up, would touch the sun.14
The growing crisis of plastic waste vividly illustrates the destructive power of the ecological shadows of overconsumption. Plastic production has gone up sixfold since the 1970s, and is now around 330 million metric tons a year – roughly equal to the weight of all the people on the planet, assuming an average weight of 43–45 kilograms per person. And production of plastic is set to double again over the next twenty to thirty years.
Around forty percent of global plastic production goes into packaging, and the vast majority of plastic packaging is thrown away after a single use. Every year companies are now producing around five hundred billion plastic bottles, an increase of two hundred billion since 2004. Rising consumption of plastic bottles of water and soda explains much of this increase. Coca-Cola alone is now selling 108 to 128 billion plastic bottles, according to calculations done by Greenpeace in 2017. On our present trajectory, within the next five years companies will be selling around six hundred billion plastic bottles a year.15
Plastic garbage is now swirling in immense eddies in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans. The Arctic has become one of the most polluted regions for plastic, with bottle caps and fishing gear littering island shorelines, and with over a trillion microplastics (less than five millimeters in diameter) trapped in the sea ice. Trying to explain what is going on in the Arctic, in 2017 the scientist Wouter Jan Strietman described the seas around Svalbard – an archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole – as “the drain hole of the Gulf Stream.”16
On a recent trip to the Svalbard islands Strietman and his colleagues found the shores littered with plastic, with bottle caps accounting for eight percent of the identifiable plastic pieces. Yet this plastic comprises a tiny fraction of global ocean pollution. Trillions of pieces of plastic – or roughly two hundred million metric tons – are now in the oceans. And another five to thirteen million metric tons of plastic are flowing in annually. If the trends over the past decade continue, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation calculates that by the middle of this century the oceans could contain more plastic than fish (by total weight).17
Henderson Island, never inhabited, and lying in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and Chile, offers a rare glimpse into the shadows of plastic consumption. Both New Zealand and Chile are more than 5,500 kilometers away from the tiny coral atoll, which is just thirty-seven square kilometers in size. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) lists Henderson Island as a world heritage site, noting that it is “one of the few atolls in the world whose ecology has been practically untouched by a human presence” – “the ideal context for studying the dynamics of insular evolution and natural selection.”18
Yet here, Australian and British researchers recently found thirty-eight million pieces of plastic washed ashore, making the remote island one of the world’s most densely polluted ever discovered. Hermit crabs are now housing themselves in the plastic remains, including one seen scurrying along carrying an Avon cosmetics jar.
And the plastic debris keeps coming. Each day, as the researchers toiled away, another thirteen thousand pieces of plastic washed onto the sandy beaches of Henderson Island. “This plastic is old, it’s brittle, it’s sharp, it’s toxic,” said lead researcher Jennifer Lavers of the University of Tasmania. “It was really quite tragic seeing these gorgeous crabs scuttling about, living in our waste.”19
It would seem we are now well into a new geologic epoch: the age of Homo sapiens, or what many people are now calling the Anthropocene, with humans causing earth-scale changes akin to an asteroid hitting the earth. Already, we have warmed our climate, cleared more than half of the tropical forests, driven innumerable species into extinction, emptied the oceans of much of its life, and polluted every nook and cranny of the planet. Relying on overconsumption to propel economic growth and business prosperity is without question an ecological mistake. And voluntary corporate sustainability, eco-markets, and eco-consumerism are obviously doing very little to address the problem of overconsumption.
Given the arc of history since World War II, far more environmental degradation would seem to be on the way. Yet I don’t see total destruction ahead. And, as I argue in my concluding chapter, there are definitely opportunities to lessen the extent of the coming destruction.