Consumption, resources, and the environment: What you need to know

 Consumption, resources, and the environment: What you need to know.

It’s easy to go through life as a consumer. We all consume things, it's unavoidable, it's a natural part of being human and living in society. But have you ever stopped to think about just how much you consume and why? Society encourages us to buy things with advertisements bombarding us every single day, but you also consume things possibly without even realizing it. We drive on roads, use sidewalks, maybe take a train. All of that infrastructure takes resources as well. A lot of that consumption you may feel as though you have no control over, but you definitely have more control than you think. For now, I just encourage you to take a moment, step back, and look around.

Think about the clothes you’re wearing, the device you’re using, or even the car you drive. Do you truly know where these things come from? You might have a vague idea, but the full story of how these products end up in your hands is far more complex than you might think. 

Let’s take something like a pair of jeans. It’s just fabric and thread, right? It turns out it’s actually a lot more complicated than that.

Cotton Cultivation: Jeans start with cotton, a crop that takes up about 2.5% of the world’s farmland.2 Cotton requires resources like water and land to grow. That cotton has to be harvested, then spun into thread and woven into fabric.

Synthetic Fibers: Many jeans also contain synthetic fibers like elastane to make them stretchy. Synthetic fibers are made from oil-derived polymers. The production of synthetic fibers, like elastane, uses an estimated 342 million barrels of oil per year.2 That’s an immense amount of a non-renewable resource for something some individuals may wear just a few times.

Mining for Steel: The button on your jeans may seem insignificant, but imagine producing steel for millions of buttons. It involves mining iron ore, smelting it, and combining it with carbon, an energy-intensive process that leaves a significant carbon footprint.

Packaging and Transportation: Once the jeans are made, they’re packaged in plastic (another petroleum product) and shipped to you, often traveling hundreds to thousands of miles in trucks fueled by petroleum. 

Now, imagine this: Taylor Swift wears this one pair of jeans and now everyone wants a pair. Demand skyrockets, and this cycle intensifies. More cotton is grown, more oil is extracted, more steel is mined, and more trucks are needed. Then what happens when we run out of easily accessible resources? What if we start mining across the street from your home to get enough iron for the buttons? How would you feel about an oil rig drilling in your neighborhood to produce more plastic packaging? You probably wouldn’t feel great, but the reality is that if it’s not in your neighborhood, it’s probably in someone else’s. All these people need their Taylor Swift jeans so what do we do? Well, that’s a very complex question to answer, but I’ll give you one of the simpler options: stop consuming so much stuff. Easier said than done obviously, but for the most part, if people stop buying so much unnecessary stuff, we’ll stop making so much unnecessary stuff.   

At the end of the day, it’s not just about the jeans. It’s not even really about whether Taylor Swift can convince you to buy a pair of jeans. What really matters is that every product we consume whether it’s our smartphones, food, or whatever trinkets that we all buy, they all have an impact. Everything comes from somewhere, everything uses resources. The oil industry alone is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, releasing gasses like methane into the atmosphere.  Greenhouse gasses are able to trap energy which in turn heats our atmosphere, causing global warming. For most of the Earth’s existence the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere remained between 200-280 ppm, as of 2023 the concentration is now over 420 ppm.1 

This issue is more than just a pair of jeans; it’s about rethinking the way we consume and the impact our choices have on the planet. Some things you don’t have much control over, the infrastructure we all use everyday we are an indirect consumer of. However we all directly consume a lot of things: gas for our cars, jeans, cheeseburgers. That is the stuff where we can make the biggest impact. Start small, maybe you don’t need that new pair of jeans, then go from there. 

Works Cited

1. Denchak, M. (2023, June 5). Greenhouse Effect 101. NRDC. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/greenhouse-effect-101#causes

2. Stallard, E. (2022, July 29). Fast fashion: How clothes are linked to climate change. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60382624