As the mid­dle-class daugh­ter of a refugee moth­er and a Depres­sion-era father, I grew up strad­dling two worlds. My par­ents could afford much more than they were will­ing to buy. Most things that broke could be and were repaired. My Ger­man grandmother’s apho­risms lin­gered in the air: ​“Waste not, want not,” ​“A pen­ny saved is a pen­ny earned,” ​“A stitch in time saves nine.”

While my parents continued working at the sturdy antique desks they inherited from my grandparents, my children have become the first and last owners of a seemingly endless supply of plastic toys and particle-board furniture.

By the time my own chil­dren were born, Amer­i­ca was flood­ed with cheap and cheap­ly made goods. So while my par­ents con­tin­ued work­ing at the stur­dy antique desks they inher­it­ed from my grand­par­ents and sleep­ing beneath a hand-cro­cheted bed­spread, my chil­dren and their friends became the first and last own­ers of a seem­ing­ly end­less sup­ply of plas­tic toys and par­ti­cle-board furniture.

I was part of the tran­si­tion­al gen­er­a­tion. Build­ing blocks were still made of wood. Com­forters were still filled with down. I recall the metic­u­lous­ly machined pen­cil sharp­en­ers with ​“made in West Ger­many” stamped on their sides that last­ed until I lost them. Even the cheap items – the ones ​“made in Japan” – tend­ed to hold up pret­ty well.

Now near­ly every­thing is pro­duced in Chi­na and made to be dis­card­ed. Accord­ing to a 2008 report by the Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute, the Unit­ed States import­ed $320 bil­lion in Chi­nese goods in 2007. In that year alone, this coun­try import­ed $26.3 bil­lion in appar­el and acces­sories, $108.5 bil­lion in com­put­ers and elec­tron­ic prod­ucts, and $15.3 bil­lion in fur­ni­ture and fix­tures from China.

The man­u­fac­ture, dis­tri­b­u­tion and dis­pos­al of an ever-grow­ing moun­tain of short-lived con­sumer goods has tak­en an enor­mous envi­ron­men­tal toll. Annie Leonard’s web­site ​“The Sto­ry of Stuff,” which has gar­nered more than 7 mil­lion views in less than two years, has helped spread aware­ness of that cost far beyond the usu­al envi­ron­men­tal­ist circles.

We can’t, how­ev­er, only blame the quan­ti­ty and qual­i­ty of Chi­nese goods for the envi­ron­men­tal and oth­er con­se­quences of this transocean­ic fac­to­ry-to-waste stream. For that we can blame the two horse­men of the mod­ern con­sumer apoc­a­lypse: func­tion­al obso­les­cence and fash­ion obsolescence.

Func­tion­al, or planned obso­les­cence is the pur­pose­ful deci­sion by design­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers to ensure things don’t last, so that con­sumers must buy new ones. Fash­ion obso­les­cence is the relat­ed deci­sion to offer new fea­tures and aes­thet­ic changes to entice con­sumers to dis­card their old items in favor of updat­ed and sup­pos­ed­ly bet­ter ones.

Iron­i­cal­ly, prod­uct obso­les­cence was once seen as the rem­e­dy for what ailed our coun­try. Liz­a­beth Cohen, chair of the His­to­ry Depart­ment at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty and author of A Con­sumers’ Repub­lic: The Pol­i­tics of Mass Con­sump­tion in Post­war Amer­i­ca (Vin­tage, 2003), traces the ori­gins of mass con­sump­tion to the peri­od imme­di­ate­ly before and after World War II, when a demand-dri­ven econ­o­my was seen as the key to our nation’s recov­ery and prosperity.

“In the 1940s and ​’50s, there was a much clos­er con­nec­tion between con­sumer demand and fac­to­ries and jobs,” Cohen says. ​“That was a com­plet­ed cir­cle more than it is today. When peo­ple were buy­ing things, they were buy­ing things that were made by Amer­i­can workers.”

The only way to guar­an­tee con­tin­ued demand was to ensure that peo­ple would keep replac­ing the things they owned. The lit­er­a­ture on planned obso­les­cence makes fre­quent ref­er­ence to state­ments by indus­try ana­lysts and strate­gists of that era. ​“Our enor­mous­ly pro­duc­tive econ­o­my … demands that we make con­sump­tion our way of life, that we con­vert the buy­ing and use of goods into rit­u­als, that we seek our spir­i­tu­al sat­is­fac­tion, our ego sat­is­fac­tion, in con­sump­tion,” retail­ing ana­lyst Vic­tor Lebow said in 1948. ​“We need things con­sumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and dis­card­ed at an ever increas­ing rate.”

This applied to male as well as female con­sumers, and to styling lines on cars as well as hem­lines on skirts. Allied Stores Corporation’s Chair­man B. Earl Puck­ett, speak­ing to fash­ion indus­try lead­ers in 1950, said, ​“Basic util­i­ty can­not be the foun­da­tion of a pros­per­ous appar­el indus­try. We must accel­er­ate obso­les­cence.” And Gen­er­al Motors’ design chief Harley Earl said in 1955, ​“The cre­ation of a desire on the part of mil­lions of car buy­ers each year to trade in last year’s car on a new one is high­ly impor­tant to the auto­mo­bile industry.”

Busi­ness peo­ple and politi­cians weren’t the only ones push­ing this idea, Cohen says. ​“Labor real­ly bought into this pack­age. Pur­chas­ing pow­er was the answer to how peo­ple would be employed and have a bet­ter life. Con­sumers would fuel the pow­ers of fac­to­ries that would pro­vide jobs that would put mon­ey in peo­ples’ pockets.”

Since then, Cohen argues, we’ve con­flat­ed our con­cepts of our­selves as good con­sumers and as good cit­i­zens. The idea of con­sump­tion as our country’s eco­nom­ic engine con­tin­ues to this day. Indeed, after the attacks of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, Pres­i­dent Bush implored Amer­i­cans to go shop­ping. And fru­gal as I am and as green as I try to be, dur­ing the recent eco­nom­ic down­turn I’ve found myself feel­ing that every major pur­chase I make is a per­verse kind of civic duty. The notion of the cit­i­zen-as-con­sumer clear­ly runs deep.

But things have changed since the 1940s and ​’50s. ​“When peo­ple were mak­ing goods that last­ed [back then], they were ben­e­fit­ing from the explo­sion of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism and the expand­ing of mar­kets,” Cohen says. ​“Now that we have this glob­al reces­sion, it’s prob­lem­at­ic. Where do these com­pa­nies go if they are going to build goods that last? How do they prof­it if they don’t sell new goods? I don’t know the answer to this, but it’s a prob­lem that pol­i­cy mak­ers, eco­nom­ic plan­ners, labor unions – every­body has to think about.”

A rad­i­cal­ly obvi­ous idea

Although the green­ing of the Amer­i­can con­sumer has fos­tered some decep­tive green­wash­ing cam­paigns seek­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on our good inten­tions, it has also made it pos­si­ble for us to make bet­ter eco­log­i­cal and eco­nom­ic choices.

A host of clever web­sites now enables con­sumers to cal­cu­late their own eco­log­i­cal foot­prints and offer advice on how to reduce the toll. These include:

MyFoot​print​.org, where you can find out how many Earths would be nec­es­sary if every­body on the plan­et shared your lifestyle;

H20​Con​serve​.org, where you can tal­ly your water footprint;

Wattzon​.com, where you can cal­cu­late the ener­gy required to sus­tain your lifestyle.

Some of these cal­cu­la­tions become con­cep­tu­al­ly com­plex as they try to mea­sure the ener­gy required for the extrac­tion and trans­porta­tion of raw mate­ri­als, and the man­u­fac­tur­ing, dis­tri­b­u­tion and ulti­mate dis­pos­al of prod­ucts. It can all get abstract quite quick­ly, but there’s a far sim­pler mes­sage embed­ded in all that com­plex­i­ty: Buy stuff that lasts.

Saul Grif­fith, a 2007 MacArthur Fel­low, ser­i­al inven­tor and co-founder of WattzOn, refers to this as ​“heir­loom design” – a term he intro­duced dur­ing a talk at the Feb­ru­ary 2009 Green­er Gad­gets con­fer­ence in New York. The best way to low­er the quan­ti­ty of ener­gy required to man­u­fac­ture and dis­trib­ute con­sumer goods, he argues, is to make those prod­ucts not only durable, but repairable and upgradable.

Grif­fith shares this rad­i­cal­ly obvi­ous idea with Tim Coop­er, head of the Cen­tre for Sus­tain­able Con­sump­tion at Sheffield Hal­lam Uni­ver­si­ty in Sheffield, Eng­land, and edi­tor of the forth­com­ing book, Longer Last­ing Solu­tions (Gow­er, June 2010). The Cen­tre, which Coop­er found­ed in 1996, con­ducts research into con­sumers’ behav­ior as well as the envi­ron­men­tal effects of the choic­es they make.

Coop­er argues for ​“prod­uct life exten­sion” – mak­ing things more durable, using them prop­er­ly, and ensur­ing they are main­tained, repaired, upgrad­ed, and reused. A key obsta­cle, he says, is the per­cep­tion (sup­port­ed by pub­lic poli­cies) that high­er lev­els of con­sump­tion yield greater hap­pi­ness. After all, an increase in the GNP is con­sid­ered healthy for the econ­o­my and can only be achieved if con­sumers increase their spending.

Coop­er calls for ​“slow con­sump­tion,” the con­sumer pur­chas­ing equiv­a­lent of the Slow Food move­ment (which seeks to build con­sumer aware­ness and appre­ci­a­tion of food and its con­nec­tion to com­mu­ni­ty and the envi­ron­ment). ​“The issue to address is what kind of econ­o­my is going to be sus­tain­able in its wider sense – eco­nom­i­cal­ly, envi­ron­men­tal­ly and social­ly,” he says. ​“The cur­rent econ­o­my is not sus­tain­able. The sheer through­put of ener­gy and mate­ri­als can­not be continued.”

If prod­ucts were more durable, Coop­er argues, some jobs lost due to the decrease in con­sump­tion would be off­set by the addi­tion of more high­ly skilled main­te­nance and repair jobs. And where­as the lost jobs might be over­seas, the repair jobs would be local. ​“We need to look at new busi­ness mod­els that move away from man­u­fac­tur­ing and sell­ing more and more prod­ucts,” he says. Such mod­els might include ​“prod­ucts that last longer but have asso­ci­at­ed ser­vices attached to them, so that the sup­pli­er guar­an­tees to main­tain, repair and upgrade the prod­ucts for a cer­tain period.”

This might be a hard sell for con­sumers, how­ev­er. Coop­er cites the results of a sur­vey in which British home­own­ers were asked what they con­sid­ered the dis­ad­van­tages of longer-last­ing appli­ances. Twen­ty-three per­cent stat­ed con­cerns about price, while 30 per­cent said they feared these prod­ucts would become ​“out of date.” He found that con­sumers were often dis­in­clined to have prod­ucts repaired because of the high cost of labor com­pared with the low cost of replace­ment, thanks to the quan­ti­ty of con­sumer goods man­u­fac­tured in coun­tries with low wages and lax envi­ron­men­tal regulations.

When I men­tioned this conun­drum to one of my eco­log­i­cal­ly con­scious friends, she sheep­ish­ly admit­ted she had just dis­card­ed her old DVD play­er because the repair esti­mate was high­er than the cost of a new one. ​“The present eco­nom­ic sys­tem does give an advan­tage to the cur­rent econ­o­my,” Coop­er says, ​“and for the con­sumer, replace­ment is often the cheap­er option.” That would have to change.

Close encoun­ters of the durable kind

Most of us have had an heir­loom design or prod­uct life exten­sion epiphany at one point or another.

Years ago, along with an untold num­ber of oth­er caf­feine addicts, I suc­cumbed to the then-ubiq­ui­tous ads for Gevalia cof­fee. Buy a cou­ple pounds of beans and get a free drip cof­feemak­er. That became the first of a steady stream of plas­tic auto­mat­ic drip cof­fee machines of var­i­ous makes that took up res­i­dence on our coun­ter­top, none of which lived to see their sec­ond birth­days. Each time one broke, my hus­band and I found that the fea­tures avail­able to us had mul­ti­plied. We could buy cof­feemak­ers with built-in bean grinders, brew strength con­trols and pro­gram­ma­ble timers. We had been cor­nered by a com­bi­na­tion of func­tion­al obso­les­cence and fash­ion obsolescence.

Then we dis­cov­ered what any self-respect­ing Ital­ian cof­fee drinker knew all along: A $30 cast alu­minum stove­top espres­so mak­er lasts for­ev­er. Replace the rub­ber gas­ket every cou­ple of years, and you’ll stay hap­pi­ly caf­feinat­ed for life. We bought a used ​’70s mod­el on eBay sev­er­al years ago and have been using it every day ever since.

Not every­thing old­er is bet­ter, of course. Vis­it your local thrift store, and you’ll be con­front­ed by an exhib­it of the unnec­es­sary and the obso­lete. Did any­body ever need a bread machine, an ice cream mak­er or an Atari game console?

And yet, thrift stores are also the repos­i­to­ries of time-test­ed items. The gar­ments sold there are Dar­win­ian suc­cess sto­ries. They’ve sur­vived the wrath of wash­ers and dry­ers and still have sig­nif­i­cant life left in them. The dish­es may be mis­matched, but they are dish­wash­er and hand-wash­er safe. And I’m con­vinced that this is where the world’s miss­ing tea­spoons come to rest. If heir­loom design has a line of bou­tiques, this is it.

Heir­loom design has its adher­ents in the design and man­u­fac­tur­ing worlds, too.

Patag­o­nia, based in Ven­tu­ra, Calif., was found­ed by avid moun­tain climbers who began sell­ing cloth­ing to sup­port their bare­ly prof­itable climb­ing-hard­ware busi­ness. From the start, the com­pa­ny was ground­ed in con­cern for the envi­ron­ment, and was an ear­ly adopter of sev­er­al social­ly and envi­ron­men­tal­ly respon­si­ble cor­po­rate poli­cies, from donat­ing a per­cent­age of prof­its to envi­ron­men­tal groups to offer­ing employ­ees on-site daycare.

Patag­o­nia prod­ucts are designed to last, and when they don’t hold up, the com­pa­ny stands behind them. Its ​“iron­clad guar­an­tee” states: ​“If one of our prod­ucts does not per­form to your sat­is­fac­tion, return it to the store you bought it from or to Patag­o­nia for a repair, replace­ment or refund.”

Six­teen years ago, my old­er broth­er gave me a Patag­o­nia fleece jack­et his chil­dren had out­grown. He pur­chased it around 1987 for his old­est daugh­ter, who wore it until she out­grew it and hand­ed it down to her younger sis­ter. When she out­grew it, my daugh­ter wore it, and then my son. At some point, the zip­per broke, so I sent it to Patag­o­nia, which repaired it at no cost. The jack­et nev­er wore out. That’s heir­loom design.

The alter­na­tive to dura­bil­i­ty and repair is reman­u­fac­tur­ing. After more than two decades in the mod­u­lar car­pet busi­ness, Ray Ander­son, founder and chair of Inter­face Inc. of Lagrange, Ga., heard a talk by envi­ron­men­tal­ist Paul Hawken and was inspired to green up his com­pa­ny. In addi­tion to oth­er eco­log­i­cal efforts on the mate­ri­als and pro­duc­tion sides, in 1995 the com­pa­ny intro­duced an ​“ever­green lease” arrange­ment, essen­tial­ly turn­ing car­pet into a ser­vice instead of a prod­uct. By tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for retriev­ing and reman­u­fac­tur­ing car­pet no longer want­ed by its cus­tomers, Inter­face was able to keep used car­pet out of the waste stream and reduce the need for new materials.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the leas­ing con­cept proved com­pli­cat­ed and expen­sive. The com­pa­ny even­tu­al­ly gave up on it but con­tin­ued to aggres­sive­ly pur­sue dis­card­ed car­pet – both its own and that of oth­er com­pa­nies – so that the mate­ri­als could be reclaimed and reman­u­fac­tured. Andrew King, a vis­it­ing fel­low in mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bris­tol and con­sul­tant with the Cen­tre for Reman­u­fac­tur­ing and Reuse, notes that reman­u­fac­tur­ing is prefer­able to recy­cling because it pre­serves most of a product’s embod­ied ener­gy while bring­ing it back to its orig­i­nal qual­i­ty. And it cre­ates jobs.

Here’s the kick­er: By empha­siz­ing prod­uct dura­bil­i­ty, ser­vice and reman­u­fac­tur­ing, both of these com­pa­nies have earned extra div­i­dends in the form of cor­po­rate image and cus­tomer loyalty.

In search of solutions

The ques­tion, then, is what would it take to over­come our depen­dence on cheap goods? Even though obso­les­cence is no longer a boon for this country’s man­u­fac­tur­ers, cheap prod­ucts are essen­tial for con­sumers who can bare­ly afford to put food on the table. If a durable cof­feemak­er costs twice as much as a break­able one but lasts four times as long, it’s still less attrac­tive to some­one who doesn’t have the addi­tion­al cash up front.

Pol­i­cy would have to play a key role in revers­ing this unfor­tu­nate check-out counter cal­cu­la­tion. Leg­is­la­tion on extend­ed pro­duc­er respon­si­bil­i­ty (EPR), requir­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers to account for the full life-cycle of their prod­ucts from extrac­tion to dis­pos­al, could affect con­sumer cul­ture by mak­ing dis­pos­able items more expen­sive and reviv­ing an inter­est in repair.

Such leg­is­la­tion is com­pli­cat­ed, how­ev­er, by the ongo­ing pres­sure to pro­tect indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion. ​“Leg­is­la­tion tends to get watered and watered until it gets to be almost a hin­drance to these break­through changes because in order for Big Busi­ness to buy into it, it has to become easy for them,” King says. EPR leg­is­la­tion would only be effec­tive if it cre­at­ed a finan­cial incen­tive for indus­try to pro­duce more durable goods and for con­sumers to favor them.

Con­sumers are cer­tain­ly influ­enced by price, but Coop­er holds out hope that they also can be per­suad­ed by hav­ing more of a con­nec­tion to the objects they pur­chase – some­thing referred to as ​“emo­tion­al­ly durable design.” If that sounds too touchy-feely for a cof­fee machine, con­sid­er the dif­fer­ence between a pair of shoes cus­tom-made for you by your local cob­bler and an off-the-rack pair from the shoe store. Which would you be more like­ly to clean, resole and repair?

Part of the solu­tion might also be hav­ing more prod­ucts avail­able with­out the bur­den of own­er­ship. Tool rentals, car-shar­ing and even laun­dro­mats dimin­ish the num­ber of prod­ucts that need to be man­u­fac­tured and place a pre­mi­um on dura­bil­i­ty and longevi­ty. (This can even be done infor­mal­ly. We’ve shared a lawn­mow­er with one of our neigh­bors for years.) ​“We should have much more attach­ment to cer­tain prod­ucts but for oth­ers we should see that they are ser­vices,” King says.

Coop­er warns, how­ev­er, that rental can back­fire in some areas, such as elec­tron­ics. ​“The dan­ger of the rental mod­el with tech­nol­o­gy is that as advances are made, peo­ple who rent them might upgrade even more quick­ly than they would at the moment,” he says. But even elec­tron­ics could have a small­er eco­log­i­cal foot­print if they could be updat­ed through the use of mod­u­lar design instead of being casu­al­ly dis­card­ed. ​“The trick will be to under­stand what does and what doesn’t change,” King says.

King sees con­sumers play­ing a large role in putting pres­sure on indus­try to make the nec­es­sary changes. ​“The real issue is cre­at­ing the demand,” he says. ​“I work with a large num­ber of large multi­na­tion­als. When they assign their design­ers to the chal­lenge – design this for two lives – they rise to the chal­lenge. They just start to think in a dif­fer­ent way.”

Ulti­mate­ly, envi­ron­men­tal and eco­nom­ic sus­tain­abil­i­ty won’t be pos­si­ble until we become less depen­dent on con­sumer spend­ing, which cur­rent­ly com­pris­es 70 per­cent of the U.S. econ­o­my. We can’t just keep churn­ing out, buy­ing and dis­pos­ing of stuff.

“We can diver­si­fy the range of goods that are under­pin­ning our econ­o­my and pro­vid­ing us with jobs and some pros­per­i­ty,” Cohen says. ​“It doesn’t just have to be com­modi­ties for the indi­vid­ual con­sumer. That would be the best hope.”

To lis­ten to Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin dis­cuss this sto­ry on the ​“David Siro­ta Show” (AM 760 Pro­gres­sive Talk, in Den­ver, Colo.) on Novem­ber 11, 2009, click here.