The last few weeks of the year are always a special time – for shopping.
According to the National Retail Federation, a US trade group, Americans will spend nearly $1 trillion on apparel, electronics, trinkets and other merchandise during the 2024 holiday season, which it defines as November 1 through December 31. That’s about a fifth of the whole year’s retail sales in just two months.
Will all that shopping make people happier? Probably not — more than half of Americans say they regret their previous Black Friday purchases, according to one national survey. Polling suggests that the high people get from buying things is short-lived; it fade quicklyonly fueling the desire to buy more.
However, perhaps the planet is the biggest loser in the cycle of overconsumption. Obscured by the low prices found in online flash sales are externalized costs for climate and the environment — in the form of raw material extraction, climate pollution from manufacturing and transport, and the waste that results when products and their packaging are finally thrown away. According to some estimates, the retail industry is responsible for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The Internet is littered with blogs and opinion pieces claiming that consumers are to blame—that “our need to shop is destroying our planet.” But Flora Bagenal, the producer of a new Netflix documentary called Buy now! The Shopping Conspiracy see an injustice in that framework. Why should everyday people feel guilty, the film asks, when manufacturers and retail companies are doing everything they can to increase the rate of consumption? These corporations have products designed to break down quickly, promised that recycling would keep the planet cleanand precisely design their ads and marketplaces making the shopping impulse all but irresistible – all while passing the environmental toll on the public.
“I’ve always felt that we don’t hold our companies accountable,” Bagenal told Grist. “I wanted to explore it from the perspective of someone who feels as trapped in the system as everyone else.” Bagenal lives in the UK and has produced several other documentaries on subjects including the anti-vaccine movement and mental health care.
Without using the term explicitly, Buy now! makes the case for an alternative paradigm called the “principle that the polluter pays,” which holds that companies – not the public – should be held financially responsible for dealing with the waste they generate. In worse terms, the idea manifests as “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, policies that typically require large companies to pay into a central fund for waste management and prevention. In the US, five states passed EPR laws for packaging.
Through interviews with former executives at Adidas, Amazon and Apple, Buy now! argue that consumer goods companies have consciously abdicated their responsibility to the public interest. Grist sat down with Bagenal to discuss the film and how she and her team of executive producers went about bringing the polluter pays principle to a general audience.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What was your motivation for producing a film about overconsumption, and the role of large consumer goods companies in turning it into a crisis?
A. We knew the waste problem was a very big problem, but we were worried about making something depressing that people would turn away from. And so gradually we evolved our thinking to move away from heaps of rubbish and landfills and things like that – instead we thought: Well, where does it all come from? And as you start to peel back the layers and take another step back, you realize that any film about waste is really going to have to be about who makes the things that become waste. It was really an epiphany for us – we realized that we could tell the story a little differently and target companies that weren’t being held accountable.
Q. The film’s subtitle is “The Shopping Conspiracy”, which refers to the strategies companies use to get people to buy more while still denying responsibility for the litter. But one could argue that this is exactly what we would expect from companies incentivized to maximize their profits. Why do you think their behavior warrants being called a conspiracy?
A. We had many conversations about this – in the back of the taxi, in the back of the studio, in the editing suite. There is no table where these imaginary managers sat around and decided to do this and then laid it out on the world. But the conspiracy comes from the fact that you can’t work for one of these companies and not know the truth: that while we’re all here trying to do our best, feeling guilty and wondering what we can do, these big companies are well aware of the impact they have on the planet and still not doing enough. If I go down to the store and decide not to buy a jar of yogurt because it might not be recyclable, nothing will change. But if a company like Adidas or Amazon or Apple actually decided to sell less stuff or make a product that would last three times as long, then something would change.
Q. The philosophy you describe — that polluters should pay for their pollution — is popular among policy wonks as “extended producer responsibility.” What strategies did you use to make that idea more accessible?
A. EPR is very popular in NGO [nongovernmental organization] and business circles, but we felt it was going to be very difficult to communicate in a film and make people care. So we spent a lot of time trying to crystallize that into something that feels so obvious, that’s hard to fight against. And actually it was Erik Liedtke, the former Adidas executive, who hit the nail on the head at the end of the film. He said, “Stop putting it on us [the public]stop telling us it’s our responsibility. You produce this stuff, you have to account for its life after it’s thrown away.”
We also have the film “Buy Now!” to get at that moment when you press the button and you decide to give your money to a company. That transaction is the bit that makes money, that’s the bit that the industry is interested in. But once you hit “buy now” you’re making a contract you don’t know about – you’re now a caretaker of this thing, and it’s your responsibility until you get rid of it, and then it becomes the whole world’s responsibility . The only one not really responsible anymore is the company.
Courtesy of Netflix
Q. Several countries and US states have passed EPR laws, and environmental groups have put forward some ambitious proposals for new ones. But what is the bigger picture solution that those policies should be paired with?
A. There is a lot of good stuff that companies are doing now. The fashion industry in particular has embraced the idea of EPR, and some of the consumer goods companies like Coca-Cola have talked about it. I think it’s really, really important as a tool for governments to hold companies to account and to share the cost of environmental impacts. But this does not completely solve the problem. I think all of us still need to buy less stuff, and companies need to make less stuff. It is good to tax [companies] for end of life stuff, but that doesn’t get away from the fact that reduction is the ultimate goal.
Q. Despite everything you describe about corporate responsibility for climate and environmental pollution, it can still be difficult for people to think about how to resist as individual actions – such as by shopping less. How do you hope viewers will take action?
A. Well, not shopping doesn’t just have to give up something. It feels kind of satisfying as an act of resistance to be like, “You know what? I’m not going to spend my precious time and money on this company. I don’t need another coat.”
But the people I’m really thinking about are the people who work inside companies and have been feeling guilty for a long time. The people who feel that there is something wrong and they tried to change it and no one listened, or that they are not in the right job and they might be using their time and energy to do something more constructive. Those are the people I would like to watch and change my mind. We’ve seen some reactions to the trailer from people who work in advertising, basically saying, “You know, we’re selling you this shit, that’s what we do all day. And we all feel very bad about it.” I would love it if there were some people who saw this and used it as an opportunity to say, “You know what? I can do better than that.”
