Buy now, pay later

The Nic Stacey-directed documentary, launched at the height of pre-Christmas retail discounting, suggests product teams design for obsolescence – ignoring disposal impacts – to keep profit engines firing while marketing and UX have perfected the art of making us impulse buy stuff we don’t need with minimal friction.

Meanwhile brands are telling consumers ‘recycling will fix the problem’. Except, “the truth is very, very different”, per former MTV and NBC marketing boss Mara Einstein: Less than 10 per cent of plastic produced globally each year is currently recycled, despite what the packaging labels may suggest, with brands complicit in misleading practices to curb any fears that the impacts of overconsumption might be a little harder to solve.

The evidence and testimony the documentary pulls together makes it hard to argue otherwise – though some of those now issuing mea culpa made a decent living doing it.

Amazon

Amazon comes under fire from its former principal UX designer, Maren Costa, later fired – unlawfully – by the company in 2020.

Costa says she was “the designer that launched the beauty store, launched the jewellery store, launched the apparel store”.

Amazon’s ecom MO, per Costa, was to “reduce your time to think a little bit more critically about a purchase that you thought you wanted to make … it’s really a science. We were constantly developing new ways to get you to buy.”

Amazon was “influencing your behaviour in subtle ways that you’d never even realise. We could have a certain sentence that says, ‘Free shipping if you purchase $25 or more.’ In one case you make the ‘$25’ orange. In another one you make it green. You can have nine different things that you’re testing against each other – and there’s enough traffic to the site that you could get statistically relevant data on which version … makes the most money. Every pixel on that page was tested and optimised and optimised and optimised.”

Costa ended up working at Amazon for 14 years – before getting fired after challenging the company and organising workers on rights and Amazon’s climate plan, or lack thereof.

She’s now working as US advisor to WorkForClimate, a platform founded by former Atlassian exec and current Grok Ventures ‘operator in residence’ Bryan J. Rollins – a Damascene conversion from nudging hundreds of millions of people to buy more stuff they didn’t really need.

“I felt like I was making shopping better and making it easier to find a delightful item. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of that as it becomes a more and more efficient engine. I don’t think we were ever thinking about where does all this stuff go,” states Costa.

The stuff – tomorrow’s plastic, textile and e-waste – is accelerating. Per the documentary:

• 68,733 phones produced each hour
• 190,000 garments produced each minute
• 12 tons of plastic produced each second
• 400 million tonnes of plastic waste this year alone
• 50 million tonnes of consumer electronics waste in 2024

Amazon last month launched Haul, a sub-$20 competitor to Shein and Temu. Which means more junk on the pile.

Fast fashion

The documentary unpicks the yarns spun by the fast fashion industry around sustainability and recycling.

Roger Lee has worked in garment manufacturing for two decades. “Probably one out of six dress shirts sold in the US is made by us,” he says.

When he started there were two seasons a year, which meant selling a product for six months. Now fast fashion’s rise has “forced other brands to rethink about having newness every month”.

The upshot is that “Gap produces around 12,000 new items a year, H&M 25,000, Zara’s 36,000 and Shein is somewhere around 1.3 million new items a year,” says Lee, likely referencing this article, which in turn is based on numbers compiled by Dr. Sheng Lu, Professor, Department of Fashion & Apparel Studies, University of Delaware.

Lee thinks those numbers “might be even low”. Given they were published in 2022 and based on earlier data, he’s likely right.

While some may argue there is no supply without demand, Lee suggests otherwise – brands, retailers and platform aggregator have made prices so low that demand responds accordingly.

“I would say that brands have made people feel, ‘Wow, it’s so cheap I can buy it. Even if it lasts a few washes, it’s still worth the money,'”  Lee continues.

“From that point of view, the brands changed the psyche of customers. But the brands don’t really think about the whole cycle.  When you dispose, what happens? Brands are not responsible for that today.

“This a problem that affects everyone on earth. Polyester is a type of plastic made from oil. The biggest effect that we’re seeing right now is that when you wash synthetic polyester clothing, there’s a lot of microplastics that come out. And that actually enters into the water system, and will come back into what we eat.”

Dead man’s clothes

The growing use of synthetic fibres in fast fashion means an increasing chunk cannot be re-used. Which means ‘sustainability solutions’ touted by manufacturers, brands and retailers are often just causing bigger problems somewhere else.

Even when clothes are shipped off to be re-used, a lot of the time, they end up dumped in Africa.

Ghana is one country feeling the impact.

“In the last ten years, clothing waste has become a huge issue here. Many brands encourage people in Europe and in the US to donate their old clothes,” says designer Chloe Asaam. “A lot of the donated clothing ends up being exported to places like Ghana. The problem is, so many clothes are sent, and we have no way to deal with this volume. So, often the clothing gets dumped or washed by rains onto the local beaches.”

(The locals in Accra, Ghana’s capital, call the donated clothing that make its way from market stalls to clogging their beaches “dead white man’s clothes”, with fast fashion giant H&M among the brands most commonly found washed up.)

“There is just too much clothing coming in. We are what, 30 million people in Ghana? And you have 15 million pieces coming in every week.”
 

Consumer electronics

After working on what became FaceTime, former Apple software engineer Nirav Patel joined Oculus VR, and ultimately became Director of Engineering at Facebook. Eventually he realised that consumer electronics is “broken”.

“If you’re making notebooks or smartphones, where essentially all consumers already have one, your business model depends on those consumers needing to replace the ones that they already have,” he says.

“There’s something like 13 million phones thrown out every day … Even though they are incredibly advanced and expensive, and in some ways almost the pinnacle of our industrial capability as a civilisation, they are basically throwaway objects,” says Patel. “I look at that and I think that’s really broken – that’s broken across every possible way that you can look at it.”

The problem is, entire economies are built on throwaway models.

“As soon as your business model starts to revolve around that replacement cycle … it becomes extremely difficult to then reverse and go back,” says Patel.

“If you’re that CEO, if you’re that executive and you go to the board and say, ‘We’re going to take our $50 billion in revenue we make every year, and turn it into $25 billion,’ they’re going to show you the door and someone else is going to take your seat.”

Hence Patel leaving Oculus in 2019 to launch Framework, a consumer electronics company where the laptops are designed to be easily upgraded and repaired (though some seasoned tech reviewers suggest there is still work to do).
 

Consumer tech fallout

The documentary tracks ‘recycling’ shipments of consumer electronics from Dresden in Germany, to Antwerp in Belgium, to Thailand.

Waste investigator Jim Puckett, followed the tracker, arriving in Thailand to “an appalling scene”.

“The workers were actually smashing the stuff apart by hand, releasing a lot of very toxic substances in the process. It’s something that no one thinks about when they’re designing these products,” says Puckett.

“They’re making someone else pay, but they’re paying not with money, they’re paying with their health. Ingredients of electronics includes heavy metals, cadmium, lead, mercury, brominated flame retardants, which can cause all kinds of problems with cancer and reproductive disorders. So, these things are not just litter. These things are hazardous waste.”

Per former Apple/Facebook engineer Nirav Patel:

“My own personal experience, if you’re a designer or an engineer in one of these companies, waste never enters the conversation. There is no meeting within a company building a laptop or phone or other device that’s, ‘Let’s talk about what happens at the end of life’,” he says.

“I have flashbacks to specific conversations designing a virtual reality headset. It has a battery inside of it. That battery is sealed and placed in a way that can’t be swapped out and made to last longer. And I know there’s … a ticking time bomb around the world of several million of these VR headsets that are going to turn into e-waste without really a path for recovery. And I do feel partial responsibility for that.”

Ex-Adidas brand chief

Former Adidas brand president and executive board member Eric Liedtke tells a similar story. In 2014 Adidas was “bleeding out,” he says. So he went to work – and spearheaded a massive turnaround driven by brand storytelling.

“The storytelling is so critical in this industry … to really drive consumption. That’s what the role of Adidas – and every other fashion brand – is: how do you create ‘objects of desire?’ This is where the fashion industry’s really good … We know you. We spend a lot of time on consumer research to understand the different consumers – and we know the consumers to approach with different messages.”

Eventually he started to consider the impact. “What we’re finding is that you’re eating plastic. It’s going into our deep lung tissue, that’s crossing into our blood cell membrane.”

Most plastic isn’t recycled – and per the documentary more than 90 per cent of plastics globally end up burnt, buried, or in the sea. “Pick your poison,” says Liedtke.

He claims a come to Jesus moment provided clarity.

“When you looked at the increase in items you’re selling per month, per quarter, per year… it just becomes this… cycle of pain. That may be providing you and your family with an ultimately lovely lifestyle, but you have to still reconcile that with things that are important to you as a human being. You could only hide from your complicit nature so long.”

Which is why Liedtke says he stepped down from Adidas in 2019, “to put all my efforts and energy for the rest of my life into fixing some of the problems that … I don’t want to pussyfoot around – I did contribute to.”

Liedtke, along with execs from Quicksilver and R/GA, then co-founded Unless Collective, which makes plant-based trainers and streetwear designed to leave zero plastic waste (though it doesn’t come cheap, at US$149 for a hoodie). A few months ago, Unless was acquired by Under Armour – where Liedtke will once again lead brand and growth, but also, per the release, transformation.

Coke, Unilever, and packaging ‘lies’

Companies like Coca-Cola are singled out as being among the worst examples of greenwashing by former MTV and NBC marketing boss Mara Einstein – with marketing complicit in “pumping out plastic while telling us that recycling is going to fix the problem … The truth is very, very different.”

Chemical engineer and plastic pollution expert Jan Dell backs that view.

“I see lying labels everywhere I go … the vast majority of recyclable labels on plastic packaging today are false,” says Dell.

“I’ve worked with the biggest, most well-known brands who make footwear, apparel, toys. I have helped companies figure out how to design and manufacture safely, efficiently, and really environmentally best way. These companies worked really hard to make their factories really efficient and not hurt the environment. But once they made the product and they put it on the store shelf, they wipe their hands of it: ‘That is not our responsibility,’” she adds.

That poses two problems: Consumers can’t avoid plastic packaging and most of it is not recyclable – despite packaging being plastered with labels that suggest that it is.

“The products companies today are telling us, ‘Buy more, have more stuff. Just as long as you recycle, everything’s going to be okay.’ But the mountains and mountains of plastic waste that are all over the world prove that this isn’t true,” says Dell. “We simply cannot recycle our way out of all this stuff that they want us to buy.”

So what’s the solution? “Make less plastic.”

Or alternatively, make less stuff full stop – and there’s the rub.

Paul Polman, who ran Unilever for a decade as CEO after leading Europe for P&G and the Americas for Nestlé, also makes an appearance. Polman’s sustainability initiatives at Unilever – bidding to decouple growth from its environmental footprint – largely coincided with topline gains, through he faced some shareholder criticism that he was more concerned with sustainability than financial performance – criticisms that grew sharply under his successor, Alan Jope, as growth stalled and Unilever’s share-price slumped.

Polman, who now chairs multiple boards, says corporate short-termism is to blame for over-consumption and the resulting existential plastic, textile and e-waste problem

“After ten years of running Unilever, I felt … I could have a bigger impact in the world by moving outside of the corporate world. If you run businesses just simply for the short term, for the shareholders alone … not caring about the negative consequences of what you’re doing, then there’s something fundamentally wrong. Yet, that is exactly what we’ve been doing.

“As long as we define success as producing more stuff, more profits, I think, unfortunately, we are in trouble.”

Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy is on Netflix.