Pass.

I had kind of hoped "unconsumption" would be about producing things that hold up longer than a year under normal use. Maintaining things that were intended to wear out after a year and be discarded, like coffee makers or toaster ovens. Buying things that are built to last so we won't have to keep running out to Wal-Mart to replace them every year to 18 months.

No, it's about dresses made from NYC MetroCards. Fail.

Consuming less is a point that is better made by design critiques and environmentalism than by making freaking tiki masks out of toiler paper rolls. This approach is why conservation is always reduced to granola-nut absurdity instead of the planet-preserving, life-affirming ideal it represents.

Spend extra for higher wearing and more durable items- I spent extra money for pickup truck tires that were high wearing,one size over the stock size, and a major brand. I've put 100,000 miles on the tires by maintaining them- checking the air, rotating them on a good schedule, etc. Had I purchased "cheap" tires then I would have been on my third set by now with the extra resulting fees for mounting and balancing three sets...

As for reuse of products, the humble household bleach bottle used to be the ultimate repurposed item. Now, with different types of "whiteners" and detergent additives, it use has declined and the whole bleach bottle reuse craft has gone by the wayside.

Well, feh. I like the blog. Some of the features are a little out there, but others are plenty useful, at least as inspiration.

I also appreciate the point about materialism.

I don't shop much at all, except for groceries, and I really really hate having to replace durable goods. But I consider myself very, very materialistic because I love stuff, and I hate to see it die.

But I have never understood people who buy lots of stuff just to impress other people with their ability to buy lots of stuff.

@HurtsSoGood: Perhaps the 'unconsumed' business cards will eventually make way for highlighting products built to last. For now, though, I suppose the FedEx-box-turned-wine-rack is interesting to look at.

Ok, the tire sculpture is very cool. But just think of all of the mosquito babies that will never come to be. Won't someone please think of the mosquito babies!

@econobiker: I hate spending a ton of money on tires. Because last time I needed a new tire, it was 6 weeks after I'd just had that tire replaced, and I put a big fat nail in it driving down the road. D'oh!

Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.

-a brave new world

One piece about consumption that really resonated with me is the middle bit of Bruce Sterling's Viridian "manifesto" - scroll past all the blah de blah down to the paragraph starting with "What is sustainability?"
[www.viridiandesign.org]

I particularly love the phrase "the legendry of shopping."

@econobiker: Any tires that will last for 100k miles on a non-commercial vehicle are going to be drastically compromising both dry and wet weather traction to achieve this silly goal. I'll take half the wear, 20 foot shorter stopping distances from 70, .05 increase in lateral grip, and a smoother transition at breakaway point in an emergency correction situation any day.

@HurtsSoGood: Yeah, I don't think I'm losing money because I didn't make a sculpture out of a toilet paper roll! I just won't have a sculpture!

@HurtsSoGood:

I too hoped it discussed the product quality of what we buy. and suggestions on how to reform industry that has made life cycle not a green cycle but a profitable one.

Disappointed.

@Unsolicited Advice: Yeah, I don't think you save money or the environment by making a sculpture out of old tires.

"Americans don't truly care about things." This concept goes so far beyond re-purposing, and how we as a society have truly become a disposable society. We just use things once (or a few times) and throw it away. The concept of "durable goods" and "quality workmanship" is being replaced by "cheap" and "disposable". Of course we no long care about what we buy, because it's easily and cheaply replaceable.

This is so different than just a generation or two ago. My father-in-law had a plastic ice scraper in his garage. The handle had broken off. He had attached a metal strip to the pieces and fixed the handle. He could have bought a new one for $1, but he FIXED it. It still had value to him, even though anyone else today would have thrown it away.

That is our core problem. We have gotten into the habit of spending money on things we no longer value, and that we didn't truly value when we bought them. And the result is we buy a bunch of Chinese-made plastic crap that ends up in a landfill within a year (and that doesn't include the packaging).

Billions of dollars are spent on advertising and studies on how to best advertise bigger, better, and more fashionable stuff. No surprise that it works. Making art out of salvaged materials is nice, but I think beside the point.

People can decide that they don't want to be manipulated into buying things that other people tell them to buy. The economy is probably helping a lot of people decide to do the work and think for themselves, but I suspect many will revert back to puppet mode once finances improve.

@HurtsSoGood: I don't really understand the disposable culture myself. My toaster oven is at least 10 years old... it's old enough that I can't remember for sure when/where I bought it, but it's in a photo of my kitchen that's that old. I have a hand mixer that my mom had when I was a boy... it got handed down to me in college sometime and Mom has probably had 3 different ones since then, while my ancient one still works. My blender is an Osterizer from the '60s, not because it's retro (though that's nice) but because I found it for $5 at a garage sale years ago, spent about $10 to replace the missing lid for the pitcher and it's been blending salsa, malts and the occasional margarita (when we have guests who can't hang with on-the-rocks) for years.

The Wal-Mart/Target cheap crap that people buy without any consideration toward utility, durability or quality represents false economy at best.

Creating goods from old materials (wine racks, credit card jewelry, etc) is all well and good, but it's just pushing the waste materials around. Making one peice of disposable garbage into another peice of disposable garbage doesn't solve the issue (though it keeps things out of trash heaps a little longer.) To reduce waste we should educate consumers on the long term value of products and teach them to delay their instant gratification and instead hold out for nicer products. You can buy a 50$ press board bookshelf that will last a year or you can wait a few months, save up, and buy a $500 hardwood bookcase (arbitrary numbers, I know) that will last a life time. We could also encourage consumers to contact the companies they purchase from and alert them when they are being wasteful in terms of packaging, shipping, etc and pledge to vote for more ecologically sound choices with their wallets.

@Unsolicited Advice: Seconded. This does more harm to the image of legitimate, intelligent conservation than anything else, and is completely useless for those of us who want to have less impact on the environment and/or want our goods to last longer (and our dollars to go further).

@HurtsSoGood: Product quality has dropped so precipitously that it's downright infuriating. I should not have to buy new tennis shoes every two months just because I walk my dog a few miles per day. I should not have to buy new belts multiple times a year just because the material is so cheap. Deodorant sticks should not crumble to dust half the time I use them. Headphones should not fizzle out and die every three months. And so many of the "high-end" products are just rebranded or slightly modified versions of the low-end products that it can be difficult to tell which products are the high-durability ones.

To bolster one's profit margins by a lack of durability is, in my opinion, an ethically questionable practice, but it's incredibly common today and it's difficult to work around as a consumer.

@Unsolicited Advice: Thirded. Excellent points, and well-stated.

@JamieSueAustin: It's not just pushing things around if you create something you'll actually use and that you might have bought new otherwise.

So it is better to make a little necklace out of credit cards and other junk than it is to go to a store and buy one.

And even the little art projects that aren't replacing anything are, I suspect, meant more to highlight the problem of disposability than they are to solve a problem in a pragmatic sense.

Planned obsolescence is a very serious problem, and it really is something people should be more conscious of, but the fact that this particular blog doesn't address that particular issue head on doesn't make it worthless.

If they added a brillo pad to sculpt some "bed-head" hair on it, the toilet paper roll sculpture, above, bears an uncanny resemblance to me before I've had my first cup of coffee.
Well, OK. My first three cups of coffee.

@Ubik2501: I feel very lucky that I've only purchased one television and two dvd players in the last seven years. Granted, I tend to do extensive research before making any purchases, especially electronics, since they're considered by the general populace to be the most disposable.

@spanky: Um, a credit card necklace? Are you for real? JamieSueAustin is 100% on the mark when she calls this absurd article for what it is:

"... it's just pushing the waste materials around. Making one peice of disposable garbage into another peice of disposable garbage doesn't solve the issue."

If more consumers were product savvy, as well as financially savvy, we wouldn't have so much crap out on the market.

Fitting that used up toilet paper rolls are used to model cardboard faces of Bush and Cheney.

@Leksi Wit: It's always amusing to me how outraged people get over this. It's like Lifehacker, which all but erupts into a moral panic whenever they feature a DIY project.

Yeah, a credit card necklace is a silly thing, but:

1. If you are in the market for silly things, making a silly thing out of garbage is preferable to purchasing a silly thing made from new materials. When I was a kid, we used to make jewelry out of soda can rings and gum wrappers. It satisfied both our impulse to make things, and our desire to have things. How is this different?

2. Repurposing disposable junk is often a means to illustrate the fact that there's too much disposable junk out there.

A lot of cardboard options on that site. Having lived with nightmarish thousands of cockroaches, I'm going to have to pass on using a preferred egg-laying-site as a material for my furniture.

For those of us who want to fix and continue to use the products we already own, it has gotten harder and harder to find people to fix those things that we cannot fix ourselves. It costs more to fix our lawn mower than it does to buy a new one, we have the same problem with our vacuum cleaner (we'd like to buy a replacement part instead of buying a whole new one but can't semm to buy just the part) and Mr. Sam is on his 5th power washer in 5 years (he finally went with the best one he could find with the hope that it will last longer than a year this time around).

@GearheadGeek: Ah, the 60s vintage hand mixer. Mom has one she got as a wedding present in 1961. It emits a funky electric ozone odor when you turn it on, but it still works, nearly a half-century later. The price tag was still on it (major faux pas, BTW), which said $17.95. Translating prices from the early Kennedy era to today, you almost have to just move the decimal point one position to the right. Needless to say, if you're paying $180 for a hand mixer, you ought to be able to pass it on to your grandchildren.