Consume Your Ethics
It is far easier and affordable nowadays to live desired lifestyles, where as global trends change, so can personal trends. Ikea for example has made it possible for home alterations on a low budget. Where previously you may have had furniture for a good part of a lifetime, it is now more readily possible to change a style as often as the contents of your wardrobe. This increase in consumption has huge implications on the environment.
It is what we do with the unwanted products that is important. Landfill sites simply allow us to ‘forget’ about the things we no longer desire to keep. There is the option on a personal level to reuse objects and alter them in a way that makes them more useful. Information is at our fingertips. You only have to search the internet for a few minutes to come across a vast number of sites with ‘solutions’ for reusing products and encouraging this notion on a wider scale. However, there has to be the desire to create something from old, instead of buying what you want from new, something that in today’s society could be considered the easier option. An alternative is to sell items to others. EBay has been designed to make this an accessible option to the majority. Also donations to charity shops and adverts on free-cycle see items go to a more welcoming home, for others to make use of these unwanted items.
It is far easier and affordable nowadays to live desired lifestyles, where as global trends change, so can personal trends. Ikea for example has made it possible for home alterations on a low budget. Where previously you may have had furniture for a good part of a lifetime, it is now more readily possible to change a style as often as the contents of your wardrobe. This increase in consumption has huge implications on the environment.
It is what we do with the unwanted products that is important. Landfill sites simply allow us to ‘forget’ about the things we no longer desire to keep. There is the option on a personal level to reuse objects and alter them in a way that makes them more useful. Information is at our fingertips. You only have to search the internet for a few minutes to come across a vast number of sites with ‘solutions’ for reusing products and encouraging this notion on a wider scale. However, there has to be the desire to create something from old, instead of buying what you want from new, something that in today’s society could be considered the easier option. An alternative is to sell items to others. EBay has been designed to make this an accessible option to the majority. Also donations to charity shops and adverts on free-cycle see items go to a more welcoming home, for others to make use of these unwanted items.
Projects on a wider scale have also arisen. ‘Pay as you throw’ programmes have been set up in the US, with residents charged for each unit of waste thrown out(1). This is all well and good, but this issue of waste isn’t just down to the consumer and have limited control over the planned obsolescence built into designs.
Responsibility of course is, and should be shared. To bring ethics and consumption closer together, things need to change. Whilst industries should take a look at how they could change consumption from a top down approach, we as consumers should find ways to alter our patterns of consumption and take a bottom up approach. This way we might someday meet in the middle.
References
(1) http://www.mass.gov/
Images:-
Charity Shop - http://www.onlineborders.org.uk
Responsibility of course is, and should be shared. To bring ethics and consumption closer together, things need to change. Whilst industries should take a look at how they could change consumption from a top down approach, we as consumers should find ways to alter our patterns of consumption and take a bottom up approach. This way we might someday meet in the middle.
References
(1) http://www.mass.gov/
Images:-
Charity Shop - http://www.onlineborders.org.uk
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