Story of
stuff
The products people use
in everyday life didn’t come from the air, nor by a magical spell or even from
wonderland. All these stuff people keep buying and using to complete their
needs and demands are not as good as they think they are and not as safe as
they seem. To discover the truth behind these products learn the materials
economy process that goes by 5 main stages: from extraction to production to
distribution to consumption to disposal. You might know these stages but wait
until you hear the negligible details and listen to the invisible facts.
First of all, extraction is the action of
taking out something. However, extraction is the stage where the natural
resources are being used way too much and at the same time the environment is
being damaged and the living creatures around us die. In order to produce
anything, factories need some materials to work with like iron and wood. Moreover,
the only way to get these materials is to cut down trees, breakdown the
mountains and steal the water from the marine creatures but that’s not the
whole problem, the big problem is that people take much more than what they
need and if they continued this way the planet will no longer be available for
human kind to live.
The step that follows extraction is production;
the materials that were taken from the environment are going to the factories
and by the use of energy to mix toxic chemicals in the financial resources to
provide the people with toxic products. Furthermore, toxic stuff are almost
everywhere and they are used daily for example the pillows people put their
heads on them, cry over them and sleep for hours with them are highly dangerous
since they were made with toxic chemical. However, these toxic chemicals are damaging
the poor factory workers even more who must be having hard circumstances to
work on such a horrible place like for instance their need for money in order
to survive and feed their children. Nevertheless, the productions process
trashes the world to get the needed materials, spread toxins around the people
and finally again pollutes the earth with factories waste and no matter where
the factory is located the damage is still going to reach us.
After that comes distribution, after
destroying the land and then producing the new stuff from the factories the
products moves to the shops to be sold, distributed and handled to the public for
money. Furthermore, the store will keep gaining money and the products are going
to end from the stores so more products are going to be made and nobody ever
notice how much money is lost into toxic products and how much harm is caused
by simply shopping!!
Next
comes the consumption, where the people who are responsible for public safety,
health and environment. The government, that is suppose to work day and night
for our benefit and the companies everywhere who should be working to provide
us with our stuff both cooperated to raise the economy by making the public
spend half of their time working to gain money and the other half to lose the
money in shopping for unnecessary stuff. Moreover, companies chose two methods
to sell their products: planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence.
Furthermore, planned obsolescence is when people buy a new product and in no
time it loses its value like coffee cups because they can’t be used more than
once. Consequently, people will be forced to buy a new coffee cup each time they
want to drink coffee and thus they are polluting the world and losing their
salaries too. On the other hand,
perceived obsolescence is the strategies of making a person get rid of a
product that is completely fine!! For example, sometimes a person might change
his mobile phone even though it’s perfectly fine just because it made him look
very old fashion.
The final stage of “the materials
economy” process is disposal. Moreover, disposal is the action of eliminating
the trash. In addition, the trash people tend to throw away once were products
sold in the markets but with time people have decided to get rid of them for
different reasons. However, all the trashes are immediately taken to a landfill
or worse they might be burned and then taken to a landfill to release most of
the dangerous toxins in all the time. As a consequence, air, land pollution and
climate change is caused. Furthermore, there is a way to reduce the damage by
recycling but it’s impossible to recycle all our garbage since they carry
dangerous toxins and some of our trashes are unbreakable in the first place.
Consumerism is a problem that has
appeared recently in UAE. Moreover, “the culture of consumption cast a shadow
on the UAE society because of its openness to the world market, its economic
prosperity and the high level of per capita income, which caused a lot of
problems”( Vadayar, M. – 2012). Furthermore, all of these factors together made
Emirati people unbelievably careless throwing their money in absolutely nothing
except buying unneeded products and aiming for either the most expensive or the
newest products even though they might not have that required money to buy
these products they resort for debts and loans but sometimes they can’t repay
for them and then they get into massive troubles and this causes most of the
financial problems among Emirati individuals.
To sum up, the materials economy process
is a very serious threat to the whole world and especially to the human kind. People
should be aware of this problem and cooperate to stop the damage; they should
work into saving forests, cheer on clean production, work in labor rights, fair
trade products, renewable energy and blocking landfills because that’s the only
way in order to protect the people and the environment. Everyone should work
with all their power and unite together; government, companies and public to
achieve this goal to stop harming the Earth and the living creatures including the
human beings.
References
APA
formatting by BibMe.org.
