Who’s responsible for waste? A Q&A about the ‘conspiracy’ of overconsumption.
The last few weeks of the year are always a special time — for shopping.
According to the National Retail Federation, a United States trade group, Americans will spend nearly $1 trillion on clothes, electronics, trinkets, and other goods during the 2024 holiday season, which it defines as November 1 through December 31. That’s about a fifth of the whole year’s retail sales in just two months.
Will all that shopping make people happier? Probably not — more than half of Americans say they regret their previous Black Friday purchases, according to one national survey. Polling suggests the high people get from buying stuff is ephemeral; it fades quickly, only fueling the desire to buy more.
Perhaps the biggest loser in the cycle of overconsumption, however, is the planet. Obscured by the low prices featured in online flash sales are externalized costs to climate and the environment — in the form of raw material extraction, climate pollution from manufacturing and transport, and the waste that results when products and their packaging are eventually thrown away. By some estimates, the retail industry accounts for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The internet is littered with blogs and opinion articles claiming consumers are to be blamed — that “our need to shop is ruining our planet.” But Flora Bagenal, the producer of a new Netflix documentary called Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy sees an injustice in that framing. Why should everyday people feel guilty, the film asks, when manufacturers and retail companies are doing everything within their power to drive up the pace of consumption? These corporations have designed products to break down quickly, promised that recycling would keep the planet clean, and precision-engineered their advertisements and marketplaces to make the shopping impulse all but irresistible — all while passing the environmental toll onto the public.
“I’ve always felt that we don’t hold our companies to account,” Bagenal told Grist. “I wanted to explore that from the perspective of somebody who feels caught up in the system as much as everyone else.” Bagenal lives in the United Kingdom and has produced several other documentaries on topics including the anti-vaccine movement and mental health care.
Without explicitly using the term, Buy Now! makes the case for an alternative paradigm called the “polluter pays principle,” which holds that companies — not the public — should be held financially responsible for dealing with the waste they generate. In wonkier terms, the idea manifests as “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, policies that typically require large companies to pay into a central fund for waste management and prevention. In the U.S., five states have passed EPR laws for packaging.
Through interviews with former executives at Adidas, Amazon, and Apple, Buy Now! argues that consumer goods companies have knowingly abdicated their responsibility to the public good. Grist sat down with Bagenal to discuss the film and how she and her team of executive producers went about conveying the polluter pays principle to a general audience.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What was your motivation for producing a film about overconsumption, and the role of big consumer goods companies in turning it into a crisis?
A. We knew the waste problem was a really big problem, but we were worried about making something depressing that people turn away from. And so gradually, we evolved our thinking into shifting away from piles of rubbish and landfills and things like that — instead, we thought: Well, where’s it all coming from? And as you start peeling back the layers and going another step back, you realize that any film about waste is really going to have to be about who’s making the stuff that becomes waste. That was really a revelation for us — we realized that we could tell the story a bit differently and target companies that hadn’t been held accountable.
Q. The film’s subtitle is “The Shopping Conspiracy,” hinting at the strategies companies use to get people to buy more while still denying responsibility for the resulting trash. But one could argue that this is exactly what we’d expect from companies incentivized to maximize their profits. Why do you think their behavior warrants being called out as a conspiracy?
A. We had a lot of conversations about this — in the back of the taxi, in the back of the studio, in the edit suite. There’s no table where these imaginary execs sat around and decided to do this and then laid it on the world. But the conspiracy comes from the fact that you can’t work for one of these companies and not know the truth: that, while we’re all here trying to do our best, feeling guilty and wondering what we can do, these big companies are well aware of the impact they have on the planet and are still not doing enough. If I go down to the shop and decide to not buy a pot of yogurt because it might not be recyclable, nothing will change. But if a company like Adidas or Amazon or Apple actually decided to sell less stuff or make a product that would last three times as long, then something would change.
Q. The philosophy you’re describing — that polluters should pay for their pollution — has been popularized among policy wonks as “extended producer responsibility.” What strategies did you use to make that idea more accessible?
A. EPR is really popular in NGO [nongovernmental organization] and business circles, but we felt it was going to be really hard to communicate in a film and to get people to care. So we spent a lot of time trying to crystallize it into something that feels so obvious, that is hard to fight against. And actually, it was Erik Liedtke, the former Adidas exec, who hit the nail on the head at the end of the film. He said, “Stop putting it on us [the public], stop telling us it’s our responsibility. You produce this stuff, you need to account for its life after it gets thrown away.”
We also called the film “Buy Now!” to get at that moment when you press the button and you decide to give your money to a company. That transaction is the bit that makes money, that’s the bit that the industry is interested in. But once you press “buy now,” you’re making a contract that you don’t know about — you’re now a caretaker of this thing, and it’s your responsibility until you dispose of it, and then it becomes the whole world’s responsibility. The only one who’s not really responsible anymore is the company.
Q. Several countries and U.S. states have passed EPR laws, and environmental groups have put forward some ambitious proposals for new ones. But what’s the bigger-picture solution that those policies should be paired with?
A. There is a lot of good stuff now that companies are doing. The fashion industry in particular has embraced the idea of EPR, and some of the consumer goods companies like Coca-Cola have talked about it. I think it’s really, really important as a tool for governments to hold companies to account and to share the costs of environmental impacts. But it doesn’t solve the problem entirely. I think all of us still need to buy less stuff, and companies need to make less stuff. It’s fine to tax [companies] for the end-of-life stuff, but it doesn’t get away from the fact that reduction is the ultimate goal.
Q. Despite everything you describe about corporate responsibility for climate and environmental pollution, it can still be hard for people to imagine how to resist beyond individual actions — like by shopping less. How do you hope viewers will take action?
A. Well, not shopping doesn’t have to be just forgoing something. It feels quite satisfying as an act of resistance to be like, “You know what? I’m not going to spend my precious time and money on this company. I don’t need another coat.”
But the people that I really think about are the people who are working inside companies and have been feeling guilty for a long time. The people who feel like there’s something wrong and they’ve tried to change it and no one’s listened, or that they’re not in the right job and they could be using their time and the energy to do something that is more constructive. It’s those people I would love to watch this and have a change of heart. We’ve already seen some reactions to the trailer from people who work in advertising who basically have said, “You know, we sell this shit to you, that’s what we do all day long. And we all feel really bad about it.” I would love it if there were a few people who saw this and took it as an opportunity to say, “You know what? I can do better than this.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who’s responsible for waste? A Q&A about the ‘conspiracy’ of overconsumption. on Nov 27, 2024.