Do extraction and production techniques need improvement for the environment or are they better than what they used to be?
To begin to find out the answer to this question, there will be a summary of the online viral video clip by Annie Leonard, commonly known as The Story of Stuff. In this online video, Annie Leonard makes statements on the extraction and production processes that take place before we buy our products. Then moving onto looking into Lee Doran’s critique online video in response to The Story of Stuff, which opposes Annie Leonard’s statements, give my own reflection on either side of the argument and then come to a conclusion that will answer this question.
In the online video by Annie Leonard, she mentions that stuff moves in a system from extraction, to production, to distribution, to consumption, to disposal. She addresses the issues of mass consumerism with its linear system affects the environment, people’s health and lifestyles. For example, we are polluting the air and ignoring the civilians’ right to clean air by the government.
According to Annie Leonard’s statements in the video, the extraction process is using too many resources, killing the wildlife, polluting the water, and destroying forests and habitats. The U.S has 5% of the world’s population but is using 30% of the world’s resources.
Reviewing Annie Leonard’s points, there seems to be a strong view on how harmful this process is to the environment. Her description makes a decent point but she fails to talk in depth about the techniques of extraction and what procedures are needed to be taken in order to supply the resources, let alone making a point on how eco-friendly the process is. An example that seems to oppose Annie Leonard’s statement is the efficient extraction of polyphenols from post-harvested agro-industry vegetal sources in Italy. There were two techniques that took place to intensify and speed up the extraction of these resources, known as ultra-sound assisted extraction and microwave-assisted extraction. The results showed a lower impact of the environment compared to widely used maceration.
As said by Annie Leonard about the production process, we are using immense amounts of energy and toxic chemicals to create contaminated products. Apparently 100,000 synthetic chemicals are used in products today. Not only that but she mentions that Brominated Flame Retardants are a major cause of toxicity to the brain, which leads onto a point that the highest level of toxic contaminants are found in human breast milk. Another point that was brought up is that over the world, 200,000 people a day are moving from sustainable environments into slums to work in the production factories full of toxins. The U.S production industry admits to producing over four billion pounds of pollution a year and so they move the factories overseas and pollute the land over there.
Annie Leonard has addressed issues such as toxic chemicals endangering employees and the huge amount of pollution that’s created from the production process in the factories quite firmly. Although, there are possible solutions to making sure these buildings are as green as they can be by performing a wide assessment on every building’s energy levels. There should be cogeneration techniques taking place in all of them in order to combine and produce heat and power in a singular process. Another popular choice of electrical production methods are photovoltaics, they’re capable of generating electricity through the day, providing they have battery storage with net metering to solidify continuous power. Furthermore, they are ergonomically efficient within the buildings they’re set up in, with factors such as easy installation; out of sight on the roof and silent throughout.
Lee Doran opposes the statements by Annie Leonard with points such as the fact we’re actually replanting the trees after cutting them down, waters have been cleaner in the recent decades and people eat meat to raise the standard of living. He states that we are not running out of resources which he backs up with a graph of the price system. As resources decrease, the costs increase and therefore will move people into supplying alternative resources instead. I agree with what he says on that basis but his simple statement that eating meat will improve the standard of living is incorrect. There doesn’t need to be much research to know that if most of the world’s population continued to eat meat then obesity would increase dramatically as it already is in today’s society, and so health standards would decrease.
When talking about the production stage, Lee Doran addresses the fact that the locals of the developing nations aren’t forced to work in slums because they have no choice. He states that they have been living in poverty until the last couple of decades where investments have provided them with much better employment opportunities. Also, Lee Doran makes a point that the U.S moves their factories overseas purely because of “economies of scale”. The U.S goes to other countries for the reason that specific products are much cheaper to produce over there according to Lee Doran. This is a bold statement by him but he’s also forgotten about the issues that usually happen when this happens, such as human rights and the protests against corporation developments that are unwanted on their homeland. This response to Annie Leonard’s online video has made some solid points but the downside is that this is a left-right wing argument so Lee Doran’s points are too far out there for the target audience (9-year-olds) to know about.
To wrap this up, Annie Leonard has voiced her statements of corporations’ extraction and production processes having a huge negative effect on the environment and people’s health/wellbeing. Also, we’ve looked into an opposing critic’s views on the important and factual mistakes that show in the video. My reflection on this debate is that both Annie Leonard and Lee Doran failed to address other particular issues within certain areas of their videos. This may be due to the fact that both parties are too far left and too far right in the argument so therefore both can be seen as biased. In my opinion of it all, there needs to be an in-depth assessment of the extraction and production processes of products by un-biased people and then it can be determined whether or not these techniques need improving.
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HowTheWorldWorks, 2009, Story of Stuff, The Critique Part 1 of 4 [Online Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5uJgG05xUY [Accessed 28 March 2014].
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Mark, 2009, The Story of Stuff Critique – a Critique. Available at: http://breathenetwork.org/2009/10/08/story-of-stuff-critique-%E2%80%93-a-critique/ [Accessed 23 May 2014].
storyofstuffproject, 2009, Story of Stuff (2007 OFFICIAL Version) [Online Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM [Accessed 28 March 2014].
