Did you know that plastic bottles and polyester pants are essentially made of the same material? Or that if you made a dye from onion peels, it would not be pink but yellow? Or that several ingredients in cosmetics come from fossil fuels (the same oil from which we get petrol)? Or that natural Indigo dye bleeds but a chemically manufactured one does not? I didn't, until I attended a Material Literacy workshop a couple of weeks back.
Customers who don't know such details are the overwhelming majority. But why do we know so little about the products we buy? The answer can be found in many different changes that have taken place in the last few decades, most of which were not decided by buyers. Instead, while consumers were not paying attention, those making and selling things to us have transformed the worlds of materials, manufacturing, logistics and retailing.
How did we get here?
The things we use have gotten more complicated. A conventional car uses fifty different metals. A smartphone may contain at least 80 percent of the stable elements on the periodic table. It was much easier to know what something was made up of when it contained only three different types of materials.
Material literacy workshop in progress
Picture Credit: Sailee Rane
Along with this, manufacturing has moved farther and farther away from us. Up until even two generations ago, people were weaving and knitting their clothes at home. We then moved to buying the cloth and stitching at home, then to getting clothes stitched by a tailor, to buying readymade clothes from brick-and-mortar shops where we could touch and feel a shirt before buying it, to now ordering our clothes online. I wouldn't be surprised if a child born after 2000 has never been to a tailor or seen a sewing machine.
To add to this, supply chains have become increasingly complex. An item may be mined in one place, processed in a second, used to manufacture a product in a third location and finally shipped for use to a fourth. As the making of products has moved away from our immediate vicinity, our knowledge of where they come from and how they are made has correspondingly reduced.
Another factor is the advent of the knowledge economy. A couple of generations ago, the majority of people worked physical jobs in fields and factories, and understood much better how things were made. These days a lot of people work desk jobs in front of a screen, and don't know much about production.
Manufacturers don’t usually want us to know these things, and that makes all of this worse. The little they tell us can often be useless. I recently saw a label at a fast fashion brand store recently which read "100% viscose partly made from circulose pulp". How is this supposed to mean anything to a lay person about to buy the product? And if one can't read or understand English, then the difficulty is much higher. This kind of unclear labeling is now standard, and around the world, efforts to improve labeling have usually been opposed by producers of thousands of goods.
Not only do we know surprisingly little about where the stuff we use comes from, we know even less about where it goes after we are done using it. We throw it in the dustbin and don’t give it another thought. Everything outside of our usage of the item is a black box to us.
Ignoring the true costs and impacts
This creates two distinct but related problems. One, we are consuming more than ever without understanding the real costs that go into making the stuff we buy. Every item that is made needs materials, resources and energy. Unfortunately, the real costs of these are not reflected in the price of the item we're buying, and that is at least partly to blame for the culture of overconsumption. We buy what we can, and not what we need, and if a product is made more affordable by exploiting the environment, consumers rarely give it a thought.
But the resources we use to make all of this are not unlimited, and the rate at which we are consuming them is unsustainable. Every year, environmentalists mark ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ - the date on which humanity's demand for natural resources exceeds the Earth's ability to regenerate them in a given year. This year it fell on August 1 - i.e. with more than one third of the year still to come. In other words, the resources we consume every year would need another one third of the Earth for our buying to be sustainable.
The second problem is that we are also generating a massive amount of waste. We are buying more and more and also throwing away more and more to free up our minds and cupboards to buy more stuff. The stuff we throw away doesn't disappear into thin air. Very little of it is recycled. The majority gets incinerated, and some of it stays in the environment for a very long time. Waste contributes to roughly 5% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and up to 20% of methane, which is much more harmful than carbon dioxide.
Apart from the environmental impacts, there is a direct impact on human health. Plastics are everywhere, in many more products than we imagine, and that has resulted in a microplastics invasion. Did you know that the ‘compostable’ paper cup in which you get your coffee has a plastic lining? Or that the granules you find in several cosmetic products are actually plastic? This has resulted in microplastics being found in everything from our food to salt and sugar to the clouds about Mt Fuji to the human placenta. Microplastics can be deadly, with impacts ranging from damage to cardiovascular health to increased risk of cancer.
Mindfulness about materials
What we need is mindful consumption; we need to buy what we need and know what we are buying. We also need to bring back the habits of reuse, repair, and recycle. I believe a good starting point for that would be to understand where our stuff comes from - what Shubhi Sachan calls ‘material literacy’. It was she who conducted the workshop that got me thinking about all of this. The Material Library of India, which she founded, is a research and design consultancy that looks at the potential of industrial and agricultural waste. MLI reimagines waste as a valuable resource, contributing to the broader narrative of sustainable design and manufacturing practices and at a broader level, promoting awareness and fostering a deeper understanding of materiality.
"Material literacy is about solving the problem of materials," Shubhi told me. "It is about reconnection, reminding people where their stuff comes from and where it goes. That’s important to address the problem at its root. Recycling is a rescue operation and cannot be a way of life. We need to change how we manufacture and how much we consume. And for that, material literacy is key."
We need to think of material literacy the same way we think of financial literacy or, more recently, food literacy. Financial literacy is having enough knowledge about financial products to be able to make informed decisions about our money. Food literacy, which is on the rise over the last few years thanks to influencers like The Foodpharmer, The Liver Doctor, and Krish Ashok (Masala Lab), is about increased awareness of the ingredients in the food we eat in order to make healthier choices.
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Image Credit: Material Library of India website.
Material literacy, similarly, is knowing enough about what goes into the making of products, so that we can make informed decisions about what and how much to buy. I'd like to see material literacy become a phrase we internalise, and maybe a movement for material labels similar to Label padhega India that gets people thinking about food labels.
The workshop was eye-opening. It made me think afterwards; and now it makes me pause before I buy. I read labels on the clothes I own more carefully now and continue to be amazed at what I find. Just today I discovered that a T-shirt I have worn for years and was confident is 100% cotton actually has 8% polyester. I ask for my coffee to be given in glassware and not in the disposable cups many cafes use as default even if one is having it at table. On a flight recently, my first thought when I saw the crew collecting waste as we were preparing to land was - 'Oh God, they are not segregating!
Me agonizing about whether to replace my three-year-old phone or not is not going to solve problems that are systemic and need structural solutions. We do need to change how our stuff is made and that will have to be anchored by corporations. However, I also believe in individual action; I believe that if we empower people with the right information, they can - and more of them will - make better choices. Becoming materially literate is a first step towards encouraging a more mindful lifestyle.
