The Answer to the Climate Crisis Isn't a Reusable Cup
Especially if you get it in eleventy different colours.
‘At Stanley, we believe that through invention and originality we create a more sustainable, less disposable life and world’, it reads on the website of Stanley under the header ‘sustainability’. Stanley is a brand best known for its water bottles, which are made to last a lifetime. Unfortunately, capitalism does not reward manufacturers of long-lasting products. A company’s level of growth is restricted by the number of products it sells. By selling a product which survives its consumer (Stanley products have a lifetime warranty), the company is forced to continuously find new clientele.
TikTok made me do it
Until recently. When #Watertok became trending on TikTok, the brand saw its chance and started gearing its marketing towards a young, mostly female demographic. The result? People collecting a multitude of cups in a variety of colours. The launch of limited edition cups -as well as celebrities and influencers raving about the cup- added to the craze by creating a sense of scarcity and value. “It’s kind of a FOMO (fear of missing out) thing where people are like, ‘Oh, everyone else has one. So I have to get one,” eighteen-year-old influencer Bella Boye said to cincinatti.com.
It’s ironic that a cup that’s supposedly made to be sustainable by being reusable -and thus eliminating the need for multiple cups- is now just another consumer trend, urging people to buy -you guessed it- more cups. The Stanley cup craze is merely one small example of the wider problem of capitalist consumer culture. Capitalism is an unsustainable economic model: infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is impossible. With the increase of concern about our planet’s climate (2023 was the hottest year on record, by far), companies profiting from consumer culture are doing a desperate attempt at marrying consumerism and sustainability: in comes greenwashing.
But it says so on the package!
Greenwashing is a phenomenon where companies claim to do more to protect the environment than they actually do. This manifests in a variety of ways, for example using vague labels such as ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly’ on packaging. What is a at the root of greenwashing, is companies’ attempt at shifting the responsibility for the climate crisis to the consumer while simultaneously continuing to increase sales by capitalising on the consumers’ desire to do something good for the environment.
As Summer Felsen writes in her article for REVOLVE: “Capitalism has commodified the planet’s resources while encouraging companies to produce far beyond earth’s limits, and “green” capitalism tries to convince us that economic growth and environmental degradation do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.”
Who’s footprint?
One great example of greenwashing Felsen points out is the ‘carbon footprint’, a concept conjured up by the marketing team of oil giant British Petroleum (BP) in 2004. The carbon footprint allows individuals to calculate to what extent their daily routine contributes to the rising carbon-dioxide levels. It neatly transfers responsibility for the climate crisis from large corporations like BP to the individual.
The carbon footprint calculator caught on so well that years later it is still a hot topic. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has its own calculator, as does the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Brands geared towards environmentally conscious clientele like to throw the term around as well.
Yet MIT researchers calculated that even a homeless person in the U.S. had too big of a carbon footprint according to BP’s calculator. “As long as fossil fuels are at the basis of the energy system, you could never have a sustainable footprint. You simply can’t do it”, says Benjamin Franta, researcher at Stanford Law School in this mashable article.
From growth to redistribution
The idea that current levels of consumption can be maintained if adjusted in some way to be sustainable, is a fairy-tale. Meanwhile, this is still the ‘out’ of the climate crisis a lot of people and politicians are aiming for. One of the popular solutions for the finiteness of fossil fuels is the use of electric cars. Yet replacing all the cars currently on the road for electric ones is not a viable solution.
“There is not enough copper on the planet,” says economist James Meadway to the Guardian. “We can’t get the lithium to produce the batteries, these things can’t actually happen.” Instead of growth, Meadway suggests we start focusing on redistribution. “We’re just not going to have so much growth in the future because of the climate crisis,” he says. “There isn’t some technology we can invent that can make that happen.”
Technology won’t solve this crisis for us
“Political leaders in wealthier countries incline towards one of two competing responses,” writes Kate Soper, professor of philosophy at London Metropolitan University. “They either question the urgency and feasibility of meeting net zero targets and generally procrastinate (the right-wing tendency); or they proclaim their faith in the powers of magical green technologies to protect the planet while prolonging and extending our present affluent ways of living (a position more favoured on the left and centre).”
But technological advancements won’t get us out of the climate crisis. The root problem is what scientists have coined the human ‘behavioural crisis’. “We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz to the Guardian. He is the lead author of a new paper which proposes that the ecological overshoot is caused by deliberate exploitation of human behaviour. “We need to become mindful of the way we’re being manipulated,” he says. The only real solution is to reduce consumption.
Look at renewable energy farms, for example. They are paraded as the alternative to fossil fuels - without ever discussing the level of consumption itself. “These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades - they’re not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand,” Metz says.
Exploitation of human nature
The paper delves into how human nature has been exploited into overconsumption. In the current system, people’s desire to be part of the group is used to manipulate them into buying certain items, such as fast-fashion clothing (or certain reusable cups), to signal their inclusion. But these signals don’t have to be clothes, they could be anything.
“We’re talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they’re trying to say about themselves”, Phoebe Barnard says, study co-author and evolutionary behavioural ecologist. “The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint - or even better, have an ecologically positive one.”
An alternative
An alternative to capitalist consumer culture, is the model of degrowth. As you might have guessed, degrowth does not prioritise corporate profits but rather focusses on social and ecological wellbeing. It calls for a redistribution of wealth and for more connected societies. And, as Soper writes, making the case for sustainable consumption “means challenging the belief that sustainable consumption will always involve sacrifice, rather than improve wellbeing.”
Soper point out that the supposedly wealthy life that most in the West enjoy isn’t making us all that happy. “Its commercial priorities have forced people to gear everything to job seeking and career development, but still leave many people facing chronically unfulfilling and precarious jobs and lives. Consumer culture, formerly seen as a vehicle of self-expression, is better viewed at this stage in its evolution as a means of extending the global reach and command of corporate power at the expense of the health and wellbeing of the planet and most of its inhabitants.”
A radical solution to a radical problem
There is no way around it: to live sustainably and in harmony with the environment, we will have to slow down and consume less. But perhaps this isn’t such a sacrifice at all. Soper sketches a potential future where people work less and spend more time pursuing their passions. Where the sharing of vehicles, tools and services creates social hubs and makes us into more involved and engaged citizens.
It might sound utopian and rather far-out, but as Felsen concludes her account on climate guilt: “while many of these ideas may seem radical given that capitalism has been the bedrock of our economic and political systems for generations, I propose human extinction from environmental catastrophe to be far more radical.”