Week 4: The Story of Stuff

'The Story of Stuff' is a documentary by Annie Leonard which uses an engaging animation to back up and highlight the points she makes, as well as displaying the information in a clear way.

It attacks the Western consumerist culture and encourages us to think more about where we get our products and how we use them. Her main argument concerns the 'materials economy', from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal, and how it can't be maintained to meet our needs as it is linear, and the raw materials are being used up.

She cites some shocking facts and figures:

• Just 4% of the USA's forests remain and 40% of the waterways are undrinkable. They use 30% of the entire world population's resources but have just 5% of the world's population
• 75% of global fisheries are at capacity
• 2,000 trees are destroyed per minute in the Amazon rainforest

 She blames the consumerist culture in the West for the increase in the use of the world's natural resources, as Americans are subjected to 3,000 adverts per day which helps to contribute to the 4.8lbs of rubbish that they create per person per day.

In another of Annie Leonard's videos she speaks about bottled water, which is less sustainable, 2000x more expensive and not as nice as tap water (according to taste tests). She blames advertising for this too, as we have been misled and scared into avoiding tap water.

I feel that she makes some good points in her videos but she is very opinionated and doesn't present a balanced view of the problems and so comes across fairly badly. However, without using the emotive language and personal feelings I don't believe she would scare people into changing as easily.