Uconsumption: Tentative project proposal regarding old cellphones

Recently I had to buy a new cell phone. I don’t mean that I wanted a new one with cooler features, I mean the “0” button on my old one stopped working, and it turns out you pretty much need all ten digits to use a phone, even if you’re a minimal cell phone user, as I am.

This happened to coincide with a fresh round of attention to the much-discussed problem of e-waste. (See this earlier post.) I assumed that Sprint would simply take my old phone and get rid of it for me appropriately. They didn’t. But when I got home, I noticed that they’d given me a special envelope, the one pictured here. So I guess I just pop it in there and put it in the mail and it gets taken care of for me.

Seems better to just take it from me at the store. But …

… assuming that this is on the up-and-up — and the disposal really is responsible — this envelope approach is kind of interesting. If it’s true, as this article mentioned, that there are hundreds of millions of cell phones just sitting in desk drawers, maybe somebody should come up with a way to distribute envelopes like these – or really even just distribute the mailing address. (I’ve obscured the address here because I guess there might be some kind of parameters about what phones they accept, and I don’t want the upshot of this post to be Sprint coming after me if a bunch of other providers’ phones start showing up, or whatever.)

I see that on the site of Recellular, the famous wireless recycling company, they list “use a pre-paid envelope” as a way to send them an old phone, noting that such envelopes are “available from most wireless retailers or packaged with your new cell phone.” (Does that mean all new cell phones come with an envelope? I don’t know.) I’m not sure if there’s some reason why they wouldn’t just publicize the address, for those who have an old cell phone sitting around and might be willing to spring for postage if it meant they didn’t have to drive somewhere to drop their old phone off or pick up a special envelope.

So it all got me thinking: Wouldn’t spreading the address or addresses to send your old cell phone to be a pretty easy online word-of-mouth (unconsumption) project for somebody? I mean spread them in a way that was fun and caught on and got people to take action? Good project for an agency looking to do something good? Clever student project that sparked thousands to properly unconsumed their outdated mobiles?

Is this already happening? If it is, could it be done better?

Or am I missing something obvious? About why it wouldn’t work?

Unconsumption and T-shirts

Longtime readers may recall my past musings on what I refer to as “unconsumption.” I haven’t written about it lately, but I have thought about it a lot, and particularly recently, for reasons I’ll get to in a few weeks.

I’m going to start writing about it again, sort of to revive it as a theme, and I want to start by defining the term, as I now think of it. Or rather, I hope to work my toward a definition, over a series of posts, and see if anybody has a reaction or a thought or a vicious smackdown in response.

Previously I’ve written about unconsumption as a name for, basically, getting ridding of stuff, as opposed to acquiring it. And I’ve tried to explore whether that process can entail the same pleasures and satisfactions that we commonly associate with consumption (or at least the moment of acquiring something new). Today I want to expand or reframe the definition to include: Finding a new use for something that was about to become “trash.”

A number of artists and crafty types work with discarded or recycled materials — a process sometimes called upcycling. Just today I saw a post on Craftzine about someone who makes scarves out of selvedge scraps. The Crafty Bastards Blog regularly highlights upcycling creators, like this maker of recycled skateboard jewelry, or this person who makes grocery bags out of old T-shirts.


The other day, Andy Bosselman posted about a bunch of interesting T-shirt sites, one of which has an interesting unconsumption/upcylcing variation. (I read about or someone emailed me about this site at around the same time, but I can’t remember where and/or who this on Coudal.com at around the same time.) Anyway the site is called Re-Shirt.

The idea is that people donate T-shirts. In particular, you’re supposed to donate a T-shirt with a story: “a T-shirt that someone associates with a special memory: an important career step, an unforgettable football match, a demonstration in Guatemala, the feeling of an entire stage in their life.”

An image of the T-shirt, along with a short version of its story, is posted on the site, for sale.

I like a couple of things interest me about this. First is the recognition that the importance, and value, of an object has to do with its story, or rather the way its story and the owner’s story overlap. (For a whole book of examples of what that means, see Taking Things Seriously.)

Second is that each shirt chosen for sale on the site “is given its very own orange Re-Shirt Label, a number is printed on it, and it begins a new registered life. Every future owner can now document the experiences they have with their Re-Shirt online and continue the story of this piece of clothing.”

I did a Q&A a little while back here with the folks behind (Re), who do something similar, repurposing red T-shirts with an “Inspi(re)d” logo. I’m sort of fascinated with the general concept of a free-floating logo that gets put onto already-existing objects, sort of a secondary form of branding.

I wonder if there are possibilities for the unconsumption idea in that kind of strategy …

How to raise prices even when you’re selling garbage. Literally.

 

Speaking of garbage: I don’t know how I’ve managed to overlook this guy, but Day To Day had a piece yesterday about Justin Gignac, who sells trash. The project, he says, evolved out of an argument over the importance of packaging to the consumer mind. To prove that it mattered, he decided he would nicely package Valtrex up some … garbage. He put it in cool cube boxes. And:

Several years and more than 1,000 sales later, the cubes now go for as much as $100.

Each tightly sealed box comes with a “Garbage of New York City” label and a small sticker with the date that the trash was picked. They are also signed and numbered.

As great as this is, the piece mentions a particularly compelling side note, which is that over time he has raised his prices. What he tells Day to Day is that while he started at $10, he was getting tired of the project and decided to bump it $25 on the theory that https://openoralhealth.org/where-to-buy-lasix/ sales would decrease.

They did not.

He bumped them to $50, and even $100 and they still sold, and sell. The main difference is that now they’re considered art — even though it’s the same old garbage.

I’m not surprised. Observers of both the real-world marketplace and theories of human behavior are well aware that the effect of prices on sales can be counterintuitive. And it strikes me that it would be particularly true in a case like this: Raises the price on garbage, and what it becomes is more valuable garbage.

Not to cast aspersions on any particular brand, but I’m pretty sure Jonah Bloom at Ad Age did a column once about how the owners of Izod (I think it was) pumped up sales by … raising prices. The problem was that Izod had become so cheap it had lost its cachet. And it turned out the easiest way to give it a prestige boost was basically to put a higher price (tramadol) on the same items.

More scientifically, this theme comes up in the work of Dan Ariely, a very clever professor at MIT who studies behavioral economics. He’s done a couple of research projects related to an offshoot of the placebo effect (work that I actually cite in Buying In, by the by).

He (and colleagues) found that subjects who did a puzzle test after drinking an energy drink performed significantly worse if they thought the drink had been bought at (non-quality-related) discount. A more recent study on pain-relief placebos found that more expensive ones were more effective. (More on the latter study here.) The bottom line is that the research suggests maybe we really do get what we pay for. Ariely, who really is one of the smartest people working in this realm, has a new book out called Predictably Irrational in which he makes this point better than I just did — check it out.

Bottom line though is that value is a more flexible concept than we sometimes assume. Even when the thing being valued is, you know, pure garbage.

[For more about Gignac and other cool projects he and his girlfriend are working on, which I might follow up on later, check the Day To Day piece.]

Garbage thinking and trash talk

A surprisingly interesting piece in the Times today mulls the meaning of garbage. Snippet:

There is also much to understand about the odd place garbage now holds in middle-class life. At least in part the impulse to redeem garbage and its handlers is found not only in these windows. Spurred by environmental concerns, attitudes have been shifting.

Instead of wanting to excommunicate our trash, we often treat it as if it were not refuse at all. We classify our waste, create different containers for it and carefully label it, the way we would collections of cherished objects. We are even instructed to rinse some garbage.

Coincidentally I just learned that the next installment of Adult Ed, a really cool-sounding series of events in Brooklyn that almost makes me wish I still lived up yonder, is also trash-related. “Trash and The City” features guest lecturers Benjamin Miller (author of Fat of the Land), Robin Nagle (anthropologist in residence at NYC Dept of Sanitation), Michael Mandiberg (Eyebeam research fellow), and Gertrude Berg (artist “who takes care of her own trash.”)

April 8 at Union Hall in Park Slope. Details here.

Can’t “average people” do green things?

I’ve been brooding for a couple of days now about Treehugger’s recent post, 4 Reasons Why Recession is BAD for the Environment. It’s a perfectly reasonable post, but this is the bit that’s bothering me:

Average people, when money is tight, will look for less expensive products (duh). Right now, that usually means that greener products won’t make it.

I understand what they’re getting at, and that many “ethical” products cost more, etc. But I feel like it’s become too routine to equate the consumer role in addressing environmental or sustainability (or whatever) concerns with simply buying products. And in particular, with considering eco-ness as something like a luxury.

Too often I think people trying to build eco-businesses get caught up in chasing the high-end, moneyed niche, and using the quasi-lux positioning as a hook. I know some people think it’s good when green-ness and “status” become intertwined, but I’m not so sure. “Status” is a fluid concept. It can spark backlashes as easily as emulation. (Grant McCracken has explored a similar point here.) And it can seem optional — if you’re buying green for status, not because of something more tangible, it’s much easier to stop.

Selling eco as a luxury or a status marker may or may not build a profitable business, but when it does, it tends to be a niche business. And the more this approach is used, the more it ends up creating a broader impression that consumer ethics is itself a luxury good — and something that “average people” just can’t participate in.

I suspect there are other ways to participate in the general idea of environmental responsibility that have nothing to do with buying anything at all, let alone status-buying. That’s what I had on my mind when I posted the other day about consumer behavior and the potentially grim economy: That maybe non-shopping activities — unconsumption, if you will — would be a good thing to think about.

Possible new inspiration for better consumer behavior: The grim economy

I’ve never really been a big believer in the theory that American consumers are going to be led to more ethical and/or less “wasteful” behavior because the trendy thought leaders are all buying Priuses and shunning plastic bags.

But I had an interesting conversation with somebody recently about whether, perhaps, consumers behavior will evolve in less-wasteful directions for a very different reason — a tanking economy.

This conversation was a result of an NYT story this week that was the most-emailed thing on the Times site for a day or two: “Economy Fitful, Americans Start To Pay As they Go.” Snippet:

With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling, the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means.

The shift under way feels to some analysts like a cultural inflection point, one with huge implications for an economy driven overwhelmingly by consumer spending.

Is there some chance that this will have an effect on “consumer ethics” — meaning everything from recycling to thinking about sustainability to simply being less wasteful and more thoughtful about consumption?

It’s not like everybody will become a Freegan, or join The Compact, or become a hardcore “simple living” adherent. But seriously. Will those sorts of ideas trickle more into the mainstream? Will Freecycle get more popular? Might style obsolescence slow? Could more people start thinking about their own consumer behavior in a different way — not because it’s “cool,” but because they sort of have to (or just fear that they will)?

Just a thought, but I’d love to know if you see anecdotal evidence (the friend I was chatting with did) and/or what you think.

Update 2/9/08: Treehugger offers reasons why the grim economy is bad for eco-ness.

Consumer control and an awful lot of discarded cell phones

This has already gotten considerable bounce online, but just in case you missed it, it’s worth reading “The Afterlife of Cellphones,” by Jon Mooallem, from this past weekend’s NYT Magazine. (Particularly if you have an interest in “unconsumption,” a recurring Murketing theme.)

The piece concentrates on cellphones, but as a single example of widespread problems with e-waste that apply to most any sort of gadget you can think of. To me the most interesting section was the final one, which includes the argument that “most phones are retired because of psychological, not technological, obsolescence.”

This is no real surprise, of course, but it’s interesting to read someone saying “People want [a cell phone] to be an expression of their personalities” in this context. In the business/marketing/design press, statements nearly identical to this are made all the time, regarding a wide variety of products. But in those settings, the remark is invariably positioned as a) something that must be understood if you want to run a profitable consumer business, and/or b) an adjunct to the argument that the “consumer is in control” and this newly empowered creature demands not just functionality but individuality-expression and stylistic excellence and so on from most every object s/he owns.

So perhaps the consumer really is “in control” … and is making a mess of things?

Also interesting: “82 percent of those with Internet-enabled phones do not go online.” This plays to another theme that’s interested me for a while now: Paying a premium for features that are never used.

And finally: “The United States Geological Survey estimates that in 2005 there were already more than half a billion old phones sitting in American drawers.”

In Consumed: Starting Over

Returned Goods: How unwanted product flows back into the consumer ecosystem.

This week’s Consumed column in The New York Times Magazine is about how “reverse logistics” processes are changing, to deal more efficiently with the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods consumers return every year — ranging from the defective to the perfectly-good-but unwanted.

Electronics makers are trying to get better at evaluating the “perishable” products that we send back to them to sort the useless from the potentially re-sellable. Some spin this as e-waste-reducing “social responsibility,” but there’s another factor as well: “There’s a huge market” for returned electronics,” one professor says. And indeed, one firm specializing in such re-selling liquidates $3.5 million worth of merchandise every day.

Read the column here.

Catalogs, consumer choice, and the annoyance-to-profits formula

Back in October I mentioned a service called Catalog Choice, which is designed to let you opt out of, well, catalogs. I signed up, and have been steadily typing in catalog information ever since. But I can’t say I’ve seen a notable reduction in how many show up in the mail, week after week.

They tell you to wait ten weeks for results, or something like that, so I figured maybe it would just take time. But recently Business Week wrote about the service and it turns out there’s another issue. Apparently what Catalog Choice does is collect this data and turn it over to the catalog retailers, who are supposed to act on it by purging people like me from their lists. But BW says at least some retailers simply “blew off” off this information, and “have done nothing with the names.” And an email from something called The Direct Marketing Association to its members is quoted:

Bearing the subject line “JUST SAY NO,” it warned retailers that Catalog Choice’s “priority is to eliminate catalogs as a marketing medium. It is not in your interest to further their efforts!”

Evidently few retailers were willing to talk to BW. LL Bean claimed it is “evaluating [the Catalog Choice data] for accuracy.” Williams-Sonoma/Pottery Barn “says it ‘is still figuring out the right thing to do for our customers.'”

It would presumably be more accurate to say they’re still trying to figure out the right thing to do for their bottom line. After all, pretty much everybody claims to hate catalogs — but obviously lots of people order from them just the same. So the basic operating procedure is to send catalogs to people who say they don’t want them, and maybe even believe they don’t want them. It might seem wasteful to spend money pursuing such people, but I’m guessing the payoff is there: Annoying potential customers is, really, part of the business model. The question likely boils down to whether the Catalog Choice effort can make a big enough issue of this to embarrass the companies into deciding that maybe its annoyance-to-profits algorithm needs an adjustment.

Flickr Interlude

Tech
Originally uploaded by Kyle Tombstone

See also the enjoyable set Trash.

[Join and contribute to the Murketing Flickr group]

Service promises to stop unwanted-catalog flow

The other day I got an email informing me about this web site: Catalog Choice. It is a “sponsored project” of The Ecology Center.

The idea is that you can use the site to opt off the mailing lists of various catalog-sending retailers.

I’ve finally gotten around to registering (I don’t exactly know why that’s necessary, but maybe there’s a good reason) and have started entering catalog info. You kind of need each unwanted catalog at hand when you’re doing this, because part of the process is entering the customer number from the label. They say it takes 10 weeks or so for each catalog to stop. And they don’t have every catalog in the system yet, but you can make requests.

So anyway I’ll let you know what happens, but if anybody else out there is interested in stopping the rather wasteful flow of paper … now you know.

Scraptastic? Perhaps.

And in another bit of unconsumption news, Everyday Trash points to Made From Scrap, a San Francisco organization that does workshops on repurposing plastic bags into “wristlets,” old T shirts into pillows, and that sort of thing. I have slightly mixed feelings about this kind of thing, but they seem to have good intentions, and maybe it engages people in the underlying issues. Also, learning to do stuff like this is better than just buying the repurposed objects, I think.

“Pay as you throw”

I’ve been meaning to get back to posting on unconsumption topics again, and here’s a good one: Cities reducing garbage with “pay as you throw” schemes. IHT columnist Elisabeth Rosenthal explains:

The basic concept is this: The more you throw away, the more you pay…Economists and environmental scientists say that communities have long made it too cheap and easy to dispose of trash, giving consumers the wrong incentives. Why shouldn’t garbage disposal be billed like gas or electricity, related to usage?

“Somehow garbage became viewed as a right rather than being conducted under a user fee system – and that has had terrible consequences,” said Lisa Skumatz of Skumatz Economics Research in Colorado.

Studies have shown that “pay as you throw” programs achieve the desired effect brilliantly. In a recent study, the amount trash in 100 communities that adopted the concept immediately went down by about 16 percent, Skumatz said.

One-third of the savings come from increased recycling, one-third from more composting and one-third from people relying more on items that are reusable or have less packaging.

Maybe there’s some counter-argument that makes this a bad idea, but it sounds pretty smart to me. Then again, it’s a systematic response, not an individual-empowering one, so I’m not sure how easy it would be to get people excited about it.

Getting rid of a spent iPod battery

Last night, I managed to put a new battery in my (third-generation) iPod. It was slightly more of a pain than I thought it would be, but it seems to have worked. So this morning I was about to toss the spent battery into the trash when I realized that this was probably not a very responsible thing to do.

One quick Google later I found this: FastMac says that even though I didn’t buy my new battery from them, I can send them my old one and they’ll dispose of it responsibly through their TruePower Recycling Program.

So barring unforeseen developments, that’s my satisfying unconsumption moment of the week.

In praise of dubious trend stories

For months I’ve been reading and hearing about the supposed backlash against bottled water. The stories, whether online or on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, always point to those couple of restaurants in San Francisco that serve tap water, and say that the bottled water industry is concerned about the tide turning against them, and so on.

And at some point, every story includes some equivalent of what’s known as “the to be sure graf.” That term refers to the paragraph — sometimes literally beginning with the words “to be sure” — that completely undercuts the entire thesis of the story. In this case, the To Be Sure Graf discloses that bottled water sales are rising steadily. That is to say: There is no backlash.

Yes, people are raising concerns. Yes, they make an excellent case about the downsides of bottled water. But in terms of marketplace proof that consumers are actually changing their behavior in a measurable way? It’s not there. As the WSJ noted yesterday: “Bottled-water volume rose 11% in the first half of 2007. Soda volume decreased 5.9%.”

In general, this kind of thing drives me crazy. But I’ve decided to stop complaining about it. Because I’ve had an epiphany. Bullshit trend stories can be a force for good.

What I mean is, it has occurred to me that it’s possible that the bullshit trend stories about consumers fleeing bottled water could, eventually, if they achieve critical mass, actually cause consumers to flee bottled water — or at least to recycle their empties.

For years, activists have made the case against bottled water. Lately, that case has also been made in some pretty good articles. But that hasn’t been enough to make any particularly noticeable impact on consumer behavior. So maybe dubious trend stories will do the trick. If enough people keep writing them, then some day, they will actually start to be true.