Subverting Consumerism

Reuse in an Accelerated World

Robert Crocker, Keri Chiveralls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138189096
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317281139
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

There is now a widespread interest in reuse in many domains, from opera houses built over old warehouses, to vintage clothes and everyday goods incorporating repurposed materials or parts. Despite its ubiquity, this extensive creative work is typically seen in narrowly environmental terms, as a means of reducing carbon, resource use or waste. However, as this volume shows, reuse also has aesthetic and cultural dimensions and a rich social currency, invoked to consciously subvert the accelerated consumer culture responsible for our unfolding environmental crisis.

In three parts, the essays in this book consider reuse in terms of values, aesthetics and meaning, its application in contemporary urban and spatial settings, and the revival of social practices involving a more conscious recourse to reuse and repair. These are bookended by the editors' essays: the first, on the significant relationship between reuse and technological and social acceleration evident in the surrounding consumer society; and the last, on the multiple forms of reuse deployed in a contemporary alternative building practice, and their contributions to presenting alternative ways of living in the world.

Challenging dominant understandings of 'waste' and 'consumption', Subverting Consumerism shows how reuse has become a means for many to creatively engage with the past, and to discover a continuity and sense of place eroded by the accelerative regimes of contemporary consumerism. Becoming a means of resistance, and offering a range of aesthetic, social and economic possibilities, reuse can be found to subvert and challenge the obsessive quest for the new found in contemporary consumerism.

1 Acceleration, consumerism and reuse

A changing paradigm

Robert Crocker

Introduction

Reuse is all around us. It is now so universal that it has become increasingly privileged in art, fashion, design, and architecture, becoming so widely used as to become almost invisible. No one particularly notices, for example, that in the local café the 30-year-old proprietor has found an old wooden beam and turned it into a defining feature of the bar where the coffee is served, its weather-worn surface offset by some handmade Spanish tiles he has bought online (Manzo 2014). In another example, in a café not far from where I live, old coffee making implements hang from the wall along with an old racing bicycle, suggesting the owner’s proud Italian origins and former devotion to the sport of competitive cycling (CBTB).

Suggesting a sense of continuity and place, of cultural difference and “situated identity” (Brinkman 2010), older objects such as these are placed deliberately to be seen and noticed. They can play many roles, including symbolic reminders of place, history, and cultural identity (Sandino 2004; Miller 2008). They can also tell some personal story, some point of difference in origin, or express a commitment to environmental values. However, in the same cafés that one might find such displays of old things, take-away coffee will still be served, typically in unrecyclable plastic-lined paper cups with plastic lids, suggesting a seemingly contradictory commitment to speed, to accelerated modernity, to getting things done more quickly and efficiently, even if they are pleasurable, and probably deserve more time than take-away allows for (Rosa 2003; 2010). So, in the café with the old coffee making equipment and bicycle, I regularly sit and drink my coffee whilst watching the police, ambulance, and fire service people show up in the morning on their way to work, having pre-ordered their take-away coffees online, using an app the patron has especially installed next to the till. Indeed, in this thriving business, two large new Italian machines are going all morning, with one entirely devoted to this take-away trade (CBTB; Rosa 2010; Rosa 2013).

In this chapter I want to look more closely at this now common contradiction, between fast and slow, between presenting – and representing – the past through reuse in a vast range of objects and images, which nevertheless sits beside the ongoing rush of consumerism, and a quest for the ‘latest and best’, and for doing things faster and faster (Rosa 2010). I will argue that the recovery and reuse of so many older things, from whole buildings to interiors, from the restoration of old bicycles and scooters to the sale of ‘vintage’ clothing and furniture, has become an important component of a popular, designed response to our environmental problems, and particularly a counter to the technological and social acceleration now evident in today’s consumerism (Appelgren and Bohlin 2015). This preference for reuse is often inchoate, vaguely aesthetic and emotive, typically lacking any technical understanding of how engaging in specific acts of reuse might ‘reduce carbon’ or save particular virgin materials or measurable energy. However, such activities are often self-initiated and thus can also act as a form of ‘prosumption’, combining production – and design – with consumption and use in a way that creates something unique and personal in an otherwise often bland, mass-produced built and manufactured environment of globally-made substitutable parts (Gregson and Crewe 2003; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; Gregson et al. 2013).

While this revival of reuse should be rightly welcomed by environmentalists for its impact on reducing the resources and energy required to make new things from new materials (Castellani Sala and Mirabella 2015; Cooper and Gutowski 2017), I will argue it can also significantly influence how the surrounding world of the new and old, of the natural and human-made, is understood, engaged with, interpreted, and valued (Guiot and Roux 2010; Gregson et al. 2013; Appelgren and Bohlin 2015). Reuse is thus of significance in and of itself as a cultural phenomenon of our times, and not only as a technical solution to an evident but entrenched environmental problem. As I hope to show, it is in part a creative and adaptive reaction to acceleration itself, to the increased speed and mobility, and accompanying ‘hyper-consumption’, that now characterises so much of modern life (Lipovetsky 2011).

Consumerism and escalation in the throwaway society

Since the late 1960s ‘consumerism’ has been repeatedly referred to and defined, with some slight variations, as a “way of life and state of mind” in which various acts of consumption themselves seem to become the individual’s “way to self-development, self-realization and self-fulfilment” (Benton 1987, p. 245, in Goodwin 1997, p. 3; and see Dittmar 2007; Tatzel 2014; Smart 2010, pp. 8 ff.). While the pursuit of individual fulfilment and self-expression through consumption has a long history, it is only in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century industrial America and Europe that active participation in such activities in a consumer society became possible for more than the wealthy (Kroen 2004; Berg 2005). More widely adopted in the early twentieth century, mass-production for mass-consumption first took on its more expansionary and escalatory form from the 1950s as modern democracy and mass-consumption became more closely entwined (Cohen 2004; Meikle 2005; Smart 2010). In this period, there was a unique coincidence of factors that favoured mass-consumption’s expansion in the West, and thus the ‘downward’ spread of consumerism, including the availability of abundant resources and oil for fuels, chemicals and plastics, and the underlying imperative to convert wartime economies to peacetime goals. This engaged more citizens in economic activities that seemed to support democracy, a combination of factors the environmental historian, Christian Pfister (2010) terms “the 1950s Syndrome” (see also McNeill 2010; McNeill and Engelke 2014). In this transformation, the professionalization of waste collection and recycling also played its part in encouraging a more rapid circulation of goods, from production to use and discard (Cooper 2009; Dauvergne 2010; Liboiron 2013a).

However, after the mid-1970s, the collapse of the post-war economic consensus and a new phase of globalization increased the flow and number of more affordable Asian-made goods into Western markets. Increasing computerization also transformed their production, distribution and promotion, increasing volumes and lowering prices of many goods for consumption, at least relative to many incomes (Schor 2005). Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill (2007), in their essay on the Anthropocene, refer to this increasing intensity and spread of consumption, at first in the West and then throughout the developing world, as “the Great Acceleration,” for it was in this period that increasing rates and volumes of consumption can be seen to have become an escalatory global dynamic, especially from about 1980, and one that necessarily resulted in a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions (Pfister 2010; McNeill and Engelke 2014).

More volumes of goods, including more fast-moving and single-use products, were now being made more cheaply for more people than ever before, who were also being encouraged to buy more, or upgrade what they had bought not so long ago, more frequently. This increasing technological efficiency, greater mobility, and adaptability has been closely tied to an overall increase in consumption speeds and volumes: as prices fall, more people purchase what they can afford, both to ‘keep up’ with their neighbours and to experience what they previously could not afford (Campbell 2015). Mobile phones can be used to illustrate this point: on the first day of sales in 2010, of the 1.5 million Apple iPhones sold, around three quarters of these went to people already in possession of an iPhone, presumably a working one (Kim and Paulos 2011). Retention rates across many categories of products have steadily fallen during this era of the “great acceleration” (Van Nes 2010; Evans and Cooper 2010). Furniture, kitchens, shop fittings, office and home interiors, and whole buildings, are now being replaced or upgraded more frequently than they were thirty years ago, and many seemingly sooner than even their makers are able to predict (Bakker et al. 2014; Campbell 2015; Wieser 2016).

In many domains, greater durability and longer retention rates would clearly benefit the environment (Evans and Cooper 2010; Bakker et al. 2014). However, consumer preference is in part driven by increasing affordability and universal availability, and also by the promotion of time- or energy-saving products such as electric leaf-blowers, which end up replacing the much more sustainable, but seemingly slower, broom. To this problem can be added that of a growing list of short-lived, often disposable, single-use plastic and card products and packaging, goods that are either unrecyclable or technically recyclable, but in practice only occasionally recycled (Dauvergne 2008; MacBride 2013; ISWA 2015; EMF 2016). These products are high volume and low cost, and so soon become part of an unmanageable global waste stream, contributing directly to environmental degradation and global emissions (Meikle 1997; ISWA 2015).

The lifespans of potentially durable goods can be shortened through various kinds of obsolescence (Slade 2006; Guiltnan 2009). ‘Technical obsolescence’ is familiar to most, where a part is designed to fail, for example in a toaster or kettle, with the user then pushed to buy another rather than spend money on repair (see Cooper and Salvia, this volume). Cheaper substitute materials, such as chromed plastics used in many household appliances, and laminated MDF and chipboards in furniture, are well-known examples of another version of this type of obsolescence. While the use of such materials might lower prices, they typically pose environmental risks at the end of their life, a cost transferred to the environment, and, eventually, to others (Bartels et al. 2012; EMF 2016). More durable, longer-lived timber furniture, for example, can greatly benefit the environment since its environmental load occurs almost entirely at the beginning of its life and not in its use phase (Cooper and Gutowski 2015). Kitchens, if made well, could last decades, but are now replaced within eight years, and sometimes much sooner (Parrott et al. 2008). Similarly, office buildings, which could last over 100 years, are now typically demolished and replaced in half this time or less (Skelton and Allwood 2013).

Thus, not only has the total volume of goods entering people’s lives tended to increase in response to specialized, supposedly time-saving needs, but more frequent upgrading has generally multiplied the impacts of this larger volume and variety of goods (Bauer et al. 2012; Campbell 2015). Barriers to retaining possessions for longer periods, to ‘not upgrading’, are also much stronger than they have ever been, with these often falling into the category of marketed or visual obsolescence. For example, at the end of their contract mobile phones typically lack insurance coverage, thus encouraging consumers into another contract, enticed with a ‘free’ phone to upgrade (Guiltnan 2009; Crocker 2012; Wieser 2016). Since repair can involve additional delays and added expense, this type of rapid replacement soon becomes the easiest and safest option, especially for electronic goods (see Cooper and Salvia, this volume).

In this accelerative expansion of consumption, a more rapid disposal of waste becomes an opportunity to sell more products (Dinnin 2009; Liboiron 2013a; Campbell 2015). Focused on the transaction, the fate of the prematurely wasted products becomes a matter for government, or distant others, to deal with and not the manufacturer or the consumer. Literally, this prematurely wasted material becomes ‘somebody else’s problem’ (Crocker 2016).

Deception, lock-in, and post-caution

Since most producers or manufacturers are now under such pressure from the market to produce more goods more quickly, creating waste and pollution are typically treated as external to the requirements of this primary task (Princen 2002; Clapp 2002; Dauvergne 2010). Most plastics, for example, once disposed of, have been known for some time to leak their additives into the environment, becoming persistent pollutants on the land, and in the oceans, but this has had very little impact on plastics manufacturing (Meikle 1997; Eriksen 2014; Glaser 2015). Despite widespread industry and environmental concern, knowledge of plastic’s serious environmental impacts has had only a marginal effect on the production and marketing of plastics, which continues to grow in volume and complexity (Liboiron 2013b; Eriksen 2014).

To encourage consumers to accept such routinized externalisation of environmental costs, media-based deception plays an important role in overwriting or distorting the environmental information available to consumers. In promoting cars, for example, products collectively responsible for up to around 20 per cent of greenhouse gases and vast quantities of toxic waste and pollution, a SUV can now be advertised as “nature’s friend” (Rollins 2006), whilst a hybrid car, because of its lower emissions in use (but not in manufacture or disposal), can be presented in striking visual terms as “invisible” to the environment, suggesting it has “zero” emissions (Li 2013). Such gross misrepresentations mask the significantly negative environmental impacts of these products, and the systems enabling and supporting them (Crocker 2013). Rather like the early ‘health based’ advertising of cigarettes in the 1920s, deceptive environmental advertising is often misconstrued as an exception, typically in the emotive term ‘greenwashing’, rather than the rule, a rule that is reinforced by its apparent normality. Thus, we no longer expect to be told the truth about what our products might do to the ‘distanced’ oceans (Liboiron 2013b; Glaser 2015).

Such routinized deception is aided by consumer dependence on many unsustainable products and systems (Sanne 2002; 2005; Dauvergne 2008). For example, once a city’s roads become essential to transport services, they cannot be replaced, since so many now depend on them, and the car soon becomes seen as an essential and expected service available to everyone (in theory), its environmental costs deferred or hidden from the system’s users themselves (Soron 2009). Dependence on such systems, and the services they provide, generates a ‘lock in’, or a type of ‘sunk-cost effect’, that is, a commitment created by the irrecoverable investments made in the past to the creation and maintenance of the system concerned, sometimes over many years (Janssen Kohler and Scheffer 2003; Kelly 2004). Sunk-cost effects involve an overestimation of the benefits of the system concerned, and a corresponding underestimation of its negative impacts (Cunha and Caldieraro 2009), along with a tendency to ignore or deny the v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of illustrations
• Notes on the contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Acceleration, consumerism and reuse: a changing paradigm
• Part 1 Culture, meaning, and value
• Part 2 Strategies and landscapes of reuse
• Part 3 Reviving practices of repair and reuse
• Index