The Story of Stuff
“The Story of Stuff”
All our stuff goes through a process in the materials economy: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. It sounds so simple but there are a lot of loopholes in between each step goes through.
The first stage is extraction. Extraction means taking the planet’s resources – wood, minerals, coal, fossil fuel, water, plants, animals, and soil out of the earth and starting their journey through the materials economy. The problem here is simple: we are using too much stuff, the processes by which we extract all that stuff cause more damage and we are not sharing the stuff equitably. We are trashing the planet. We are using and wasting more resources each year than the earth can renew. And on top of using too much, the processes we use to extract all that stuff like clear cutting forests, mountain top removal mining, bottom trawling fishing and others further damage ecosystems, change the climate wipe out species, use up water and create pollution.
Extractive industries are linked to wide ranging health problems resulting from pollution, water, degradation and toxic associated with the extractive processes. In mining, oil and gas sites, residents report increased asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, autoimmune diseases, liver failure, cancer and other aliments.
Workers are getting trashed too. Workers in extractive industries bear a disproportionate burden of health and safety threats. Mining, for example, accounts for only 0.4% of the global workforce, but is responsible for over 3% of fatal accidents at work - about 11,000 per year, about 30 each day. Forestry is among the three most dangerous occupations in most countries.
In a globalized economy, the risks of extractive industries are disproportionately borne by communities in developing countries while the rewards consistently accrue to the corporations and consumers in the wealthier countries.
The second stage is
All our stuff goes through a process in the materials economy: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. It sounds so simple but there are a lot of loopholes in between each step goes through.
The first stage is extraction. Extraction means taking the planet’s resources – wood, minerals, coal, fossil fuel, water, plants, animals, and soil out of the earth and starting their journey through the materials economy. The problem here is simple: we are using too much stuff, the processes by which we extract all that stuff cause more damage and we are not sharing the stuff equitably. We are trashing the planet. We are using and wasting more resources each year than the earth can renew. And on top of using too much, the processes we use to extract all that stuff like clear cutting forests, mountain top removal mining, bottom trawling fishing and others further damage ecosystems, change the climate wipe out species, use up water and create pollution.
Extractive industries are linked to wide ranging health problems resulting from pollution, water, degradation and toxic associated with the extractive processes. In mining, oil and gas sites, residents report increased asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, autoimmune diseases, liver failure, cancer and other aliments.
Workers are getting trashed too. Workers in extractive industries bear a disproportionate burden of health and safety threats. Mining, for example, accounts for only 0.4% of the global workforce, but is responsible for over 3% of fatal accidents at work - about 11,000 per year, about 30 each day. Forestry is among the three most dangerous occupations in most countries.
In a globalized economy, the risks of extractive industries are disproportionately borne by communities in developing countries while the rewards consistently accrue to the corporations and consumers in the wealthier countries.
The second stage is