Sustainable Pricing
posted at 4:14 pm
on Nov. 18, 2006
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Have you ever had this happen to you: You have a thought in your head, a sort of big thought, like a new way to think about art, or a great invention, or a politic consequence that no one seems to be saying, and then you suddenly trip over that idea at a mall or in a newspaper?
It just happened to me. I was wondering what life would be like if every item sold had to have its sustainable price put on it.
In other words, if you buy a cordless phone, if there was something on the package that said how much that company would have to charge if it was also responsible for making sure that phoen could be completely recycled to an earth-neutral substence.
Or how much they’d have to charge to ensure that they could go on making that phone model forever.
I mean, a phone is made out of plastic from fossil fuels, and rare earth metals, and maybe a bit of rubber. Part of why you can buy it for $26.99, is that it’s produced using materials from the planet that the company will never replace. It’s the same reason little kids can sell lemonade for $0.25 per cup—they’re taking sugar and ice from the house, and they don’t have to replace them.
How much would that phone cost, if the company had to also somehow return that material to the earth—pay for the phone’s recycling cost, for example, or contribute to alternate energy research, or make the phone entirely out of materials that were renewable? A lot more. A hell of a lot more.
I was going to call this concept, “sustainable pricing” and just like processed food has to have its nutritional content, processed goods have to have their sustainable price printed on the label. We should know what our lifestyle is actually costing us.
If I buy a chair made of wood, and another made of plastic, I should be able to see the true cost of the plastic one.
Then I sat down in front of my email, and Joel Achenbach has written the cover story to the Washington Post magazine this week. It has passages like this one:
Earthaven is a low-budget, backwoods advertisement for the alternative view. Its members are attempting to craft a new society, built not around economic growth but around the idea of sustainability and what they call “permaculture,” the goal of creating modes of living that will never damage the planet.
And this one:
“If everyone lived at the lifestyle of Americans,” says Jim McMillan, who works on alternative energy for the Department of Energy, “we’d need five planets.”
It’s time to change something, and I think that a great first step is to stop hiding the internal mechanisms of consumerism from the people who consume. When I was in elementary school, I got taken to a farm to see how they milked cows.
It was a small farm near Calgary. It probably had 200 cows, and I think they made a decent perentage of income from the tour groups, school and otherwise, they hosted. But why didn’t they take me to the meat rendering plant? Why don’t they take school kids to the dump?
Why don’t they take kids to—well, part of the reason is that kids in North America can’t see many of the places where the truly significant industrial process happen. Kids ought to be taken to Butte, Montana or a clothing factory in Thailand.
But our kids aren’t the ones that get to visit that factory.
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