Consumerism, technology and it's effect on the environment
Consumerism is very much a part of our western capitalist
culture, but its negative effects on the environment are destroying the earth.
It can be argued that the more products there are to buy the more chance people
will spend money, the more money being spent means more people will be
employed, decreasing depression and keeping our economy turning avoiding
recession. However the consequences cannot be ignored
- The extraction of resources ( oil, metal, wood etc)
- The energy used to create the product
- The toxic byproducts produced whilst making the goods and
their packaging
- The Travel mileage of exporting the goods (pollution from lorries,
boats and trains)
- The waste we create one we’ve finished with the goods.
These are all the issues that we have to face. The problems
will only continue to grow in scale as supply for demand increases as eastern
countries develop (In the film ‘The age of stupid’ it was reported people in
the less developed countries want the American life style of having lots of
nice things).
Due to china’s high population, low wage rate and effective
production line the UK as well as many other countries find themselves
importing lots of products at a cheaper rate then it would be to produce them
in their own countries. This only adds to the pollution problems.
Possible solutions
- Decreasing imports and producing more products in our own
countries could boost employment but raise the cost of products in general.
- Decreasing the amount of packaging or getting rid of
packaging all together!
What can designers
do?
- At Costa coffee, they have designed there new packaging to
use fewer
resources, saving over 18 tonnes of paper annually. This initiative is part of
the company’s drive to achieve zero waste to landfill operations by 2017.
-Other companies have opted to take the initiative for no packaging at
all. Such as the concept for GLAD’s kitchen waste bag.
- A particularly interesting idea I found was Sustainable web design. Web
design is not normally an area you could associate with sustainability but
several industries are trying to reduce or at least curtail carbon
footprints and energy use. The internet's carbon footprint is currently at a
whopping 830 million tons of CO2 annually, which is bigger than that
of the entire aviation industry. That amount is set to double by 2020.
‘Rotating carousels,
high-res images, and more, we have been designing increasingly energy-demanding
websites for years, creating monstrous HUMVEE sites where we could be just as
well served by slender hybrids’
The idea advises
- Staying clear of interaction design ( as this has the
biggest effect on the carbon footprint)
- Replacing video’s with image stills
- Reducing images by replacing them with text
- consider using a green hosting company to host your
website. Many of these are powered by renewable energy
Of course implementing these idea’s will hinder the future
and evolution of web design considerably and it throws up the big question what
are we more concerned of doing, going green to save the planet or pushing
technology to the limits to offer more exciting better experiences to everyone.
References
- Richard Robbins, Global
Problem and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 209-210
- http://www.bakeryinfo.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/11872/Costa_launches_new_sustainable_packaging.html
