Our consumption costs

We Americans consume far more than our fair share of the world’s resources. According to the AAA Atlas of Population and Environment, the world’s top energy consumers are the U.S. and China. We are way ahead at 25.32 percent of the world’s consumption while China is at 9.96 percent. On top of this, 21.28 percent of the world’s population lives in China while a mere 4.64 percent live in our country. Although these statistics may not seem to have bearing on everyday life of the Cal Poly student, they truly affect us all. If America wants to create a successful economy and society for the future, we must get used to living with less consumption and sharing more with the world’s exponentially increasing population. We will not sustain ourselves unless there is an overall shift out of our wasteful lifestyles.

What follows is a day in the life of the average Poly student and the true story of the things he consumes. We will call him Paul. All information was gathered from the book “Stuff, The Secret Lives of Everyday Things by John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning.”

Paul rolls out of bed 10 minutes before his 8 a.m. class. In his mildly hung-over fumbling, he realizes that Sunday was probably not the best night to be hanging out with his buds Jack and Coke. He goes to the kitchen and starts a pot of coffee. Drinking the cup, he ponders the plan for the day. What he does not think about is what it took to get that caffeine into his system. It takes about 100 beans for each cup, which is about one-sixtieth of the beans that grew on the coffee tree that year. The tree is on a farm in Colombia that replaced thousands of acres of rainforest at the turn of the century. In the 1980s, the farmers cut down the shade trees on the plantation to make room for higher yielding varieties. This increased soil erosion and decimated bird species. If Paul drinks only two cups of coffee a day, he will consume 34 gallons a year, made from 18 pounds of beans. Farmers must keep up 12 trees by applying 11 pounds of fertilizer to support Paul’s personal use.

At 8 a.m., he throws on his t-shirt and runs to class with a full coffee mug and drives to campus less than a mile away. The fabric in the shirt is a 50/50 polyester/cotton mix. Starting with a few tablespoons of fossilized Jurassic era biomass (oil), the plastic fibers are created. During this process, one-fourth of the polyester’s weight is released in air pollution. Pollutants such as nitrogen and sulfur oxides, hydrocarbons, particulates, carbon monoxide, and heavy metals are created in the process. These pollutants create lung and heart diseases, suppress the immune system and impair breathing. Just to put this all to scale, the United States produced more than 64 billion pounds of plastics in 1994, which equates to about 250 pounds per person. The two ounces of cotton that went into making the t-shirt was produced on about 14 square feet of cropland. The soil was treated with aldicarb, which is one of the most toxic pesticides used in the U.S. Cotton accounts for 10 percent of the world’s annual pesticide production.

Before Paul makes it to class, he quickly stops to pick up the free New York Times in front of the Library. The paper is 220 grams of newsprint covered with two grams of petroleum and soybean based ink. Sourced from Canadian lumber, the paper pulp is converted into newsprint after an extremely energy intensive pulping process. Oftentimes, newsprint is made from 50 percent recycled pulp. It is a step in the right direction, but it is not necessarily good for the environment. Both virgin and recycled pulps are bleached with chlorine dioxide to remove impure coloration. The bleaching creates chemical reactions with the materials in the pulp to create dioxins and furans such as TCDD and TCDF. These byproducts are known carcinogens, as well as suppressing the immune system and causing birth defects. After his class Paul may find time in his busy student day to read the title page articles of the newspaper before he drops it in a recycling bin.

Throughout his day, Paul uses many more things than the three examples just given. What you just read was a miniscule sample of the secret life of the things we consume on an everyday basis. This column is not intended to preach about how people should live. It is simply intended to enlighten about the scale of the energy and material use of some everyday things in a college student’s life. It will hopefully prompt you to think about and talk about the destructive scale of the average American lifestyle.