Purchasing power: How serious buying can lead to a more just and sustainable future

Purchasing power: How serious buying can lead to a more just and sustainable future

Sandra Goldmark has several roles.She is an associate professor of theatre at Barnard College, Barnard’s inaugural Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action, Entrepreneur, and author of this book fixed. Her work details how, as individuals and as a society, we can transition to a sustainable and just ‘circular economy’, one that prioritizes the reuse, repair and sharing of existing materials over the creation of new products.

On a cold winter morning, I talk to Goldmark in her office, surrounded by books, design sheets and materials waiting to be repurposed for her next project. Below is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

What made you switch from a theatre and design background to focusing on sustainability?

About 10 years ago, I had a moment where it was a job crisis. I work as a theatrical set designer at Barnard.

In theory, I’ve always cared about the environment. I’m at home, rinsing my yogurt cup and taking my little canvas bag to the supermarket.

But I would go to work in theater and design, show after show, year after show, every show, every season, every year, and I would put thousands of pounds of scenery in the dumpster. I started to think, this is crazy.

I wondered, “How can I make a commitment to the environment in my life, in theory, and then go to work and make garbage day in and day out?”

At the same time, I had my second child. When you have kids, everyone sends you all kinds of things you don’t need.

When I came home from maternity leave, a whole bunch of things in my house broke: a vacuum cleaner, a light, a backpack, a toaster, a necklace. And there’s nowhere nearby to fix anything.

I thought, “This is crazy, I can’t fix my vacuum, I have to buy a new one.” I know these things can be fixed, because in the theater we’re always solving problems. I know that if you have the time, space, tools or skills, you can fix a necklace, a backpack, a vacuum cleaner.

So, something started to happen. One was that I started opening these repair shops all over New York with theater artists. Short-term pop-up shops where we fix people’s broken items for a fee.

At the same time, I started to change the way I design for theaters and really prioritize reuse. Think about how we budget for sustainability.

And then the third thing I started was I added the role of Director of Sustainability at Barnard. So it’s all very overlapping and confusing. Ten years have changed who I am and what I do.

The goal is to try to approach this problem from all the different angles.

your book, fixed, talking about how to have things without destroying the planet, and a lot of your work is focused on sustainable engagement with material culture. Can you tell me about your personal relationship with Stuff?

Well, I ended up moving from a place of extreme desperation to a place where I now feel I can make responsible choices and operate in a more manageable way.

I also understand larger systems better. I know what some of the policy and business changes that need to happen are and I can advocate for those.

I know you are working with Barnard to build a circular campus. Can you talk about what that was like?

So we’re building this framework at Barnard, called the Circular Campus, to address many problems at once.We use circularity as a holistic framework to help us reduce CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions, reduce waste, support student access to supplies and materials, support community resilience, and support connections with local communities.

We feel that this recurrent framework is a cross-response to cross-challenges.

There are five buckets on the circular campus: Waste, Food, Green Space, Design Build and Deconstruct, and Reuse and Sustainable Sourcing. We put them together because they are all interrelated.

If you want to reduce waste, you have to look at what you buy. You have to see what’s going on in the cafeteria. When you’re working on a renovation project, you have to see what’s going on. If you want to look at your renovations, your capital projects, you have to look at procurement. You have to look at how things affect green spaces.

I like to think that loops provide positive action steps that you can actually take. For example, when I need 10 chairs to renovate a classroom, I ask, “Can I use them?” From there I ask, “How do we build a platform to support reuse?”

Many people practice reuse. Loops are nothing new. One of the goals of Circular Campus is not to pretend that we are building something new, but to acknowledge and validate this very powerful practice around us, especially one led by women and low-income communities.

What ideas do you have to help encourage a massive shift towards reuse and repair?

Well, one, we The system needs to be built to make it easier, right? It needs to be as easy to buy and repair as buying new or easier.

Second, we need international fair labor standards. Repair and reuse are almost inherently locally based, but now costs are stacked with artificially reduced overseas labour costs for cheap new goods. It will be difficult to transition to a circular economy unless we address inequities in production until we get people to pay appropriately for making our stuff.

But we can’t stop and wait for it to happen because it’s going to be a very, very long time. Businesses can start building these reuse and repair weapons into their business models.

Policymakers from municipalities all the way to the federal government can start building incentives to help people move away from buying new goods and toward more sustainable methods.

Are you advising that sustainability-conscious consumers should avoid buying new items?

It’s a very tricky thing involved, and sometimes people challenge me. They said, “Okay, wait a minute, it doesn’t seem fair from your statement that new items should be more expensive.”

I always say, “Yes, new products need to get more expensive because the people who make our new products need to get a living wage and we need to think about the true cost of all the resources we’re extracting from the process.”

The solution to this inequality is not to keep prices artificially low, making it difficult for people in overseas manufacturing communities to survive, so that we can get low prices here. The solution to this problem is to increase access to higher quality items throughout the system. Again, through reuse and repair.

Now, we have this new cheap commodity, right? We need new products that are smaller, high-quality fair labor, sustainably produced. Then we need access points to the whole system so that more people can get high-quality goods at different prices.

What are the first steps anyone can take in creating a more sustainable future?

I always like to say to people, especially about “things”, “If you just want to start small right now, think of it as if you had two dials (like a radio). One dial is new and one is Used goods. You want to reduce sales of new items, and you want to increase sales of used items in addition to high-quality items.”

That’s your start. Then from there, you can advocate for policy changes.You can host a repair cafe [an event focused on learning how to fix broken items] in your community. You can think about where you shop.

There is a very simple starting point that almost anyone can start with today.

Mary Lily is a Ph.D.Columbia University student Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology Program.