The story of stuff

The story of stuff
This video was focusing on planting new minds to people about sustainable environment by showing the reality of process in production.
We consume so many products in our lives but how much do we consider about the life cycle of the product we are consuming? I know and understand the process of creating a product. There must be extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. We all know these process exist and there are consequences when producing, but we don’t know the severity of the consequences.
By viewing this video, it helped me a lot to understand the true stages of a product life. It is the government that initially controls us to purchase more and more products. Strategy used to boost up the economy by making us consume the product is planned obsolescence (intentionally designing a product with a date of end life so it can be re-purchased) and perceived obsolescence (people purchasing better designed products to catch up with trend even if product is working absolutely fine). They are both strategies to boost up the economy and for the nation to be more successful but it is a selfish strategy. This gives a huge impact on the environment. We have to use up the earth’s resources, pollute the environment when producing and find somewhere to dump the waste. It was surprising to hear that we have used one third of the earth’s resources in the past three decades. Countries like USA use more than their share of the earth’s resources and move on to use other nation’s share, creating pollution at the same time. It alarmed me since we are definitely going to run out of the earth’s resource if we kept consuming products that we don’t need. Only 1% of products purchased are still used after 6 months of purchase, meaning 99% of products get thrown away within the 6 months time. We will continue to consume products and repeat the process of purchasing and disposing, not knowing that we are harming the environment unless we realise the consequences. Filling our life with more and more products won’t help us to have a happier life since we fill our leisure time with those products and less interaction with the special things around us such as our family and nature. We know that we are heading to a disastrous conclusion and therefore we should work it out to fix the problem urgently before it becomes too late. This video definitely has influenced me about the way I thought about sustainable environment and it made me be cautious about the products I am purchasing.