Essay 2

                                        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

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Mercola, D. (2007, January 1). The Hidden Life of Garbage. Miracle Mineral Supplement |MMS | Miracle Mineral Solution. Retrieved May 27, 2013, from http://www.mmshealthyforlife.com/?p=1760

Story of Stuff, Full Version; How Things Work, About Stuff - YouTube. (2007, January 1). YouTube. Retrieved May 23, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8

The Story of Stuff - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2013, April 25). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved May 23, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_stuff

United Arab Emirates Consumer Price Index (CPI) | Data | Chart | Forecast | News. (2012, January 1). TRADING ECONOMICS | 300.000 INDICATORS FROM 196 COUNTRIES. Retrieved May 27, 2013, from http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-arab-emirates/consumer-price-index-cpi

Vadayar, M. (2012, October 9). gulftoday.ae | Consumerism˜root cause of economic woes’. Latest news, comments and reviews from The Gulf Today | gulftoday.ae. Retrieved May 23, 2013, from http://gulftoday.ae/portal/4364688e-fc56-4cfa-a502-746f192c3c50.aspx

Waste management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2013, May 23). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved May 23, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management

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