> From that point, I slowly began to understand that people in consumption-based societies assemble their identities via stuff, and become very emotional when t

> From that point, I slowly began to understand that people in consumption-based societies assemble their identities via stuff, and become very emotional when those identities – and that stuff- is discarded in ways that don’t match their values. Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that consumers actually care more about how their stuff is discarded, than how it is manufactured. Part of the problem is that so few bother to get rid of what they no longer use. They pack it around with them, unable to part with utterly useless things. The interview mentions Japan. In this context, it's interesting to contrast Marie Condo's Tidying Up. She talks at length about how emotions play into our inability to toss things out. Her system is simplicity itself. Begin by dumping all of your crap of a particular category into one big pile. She describes the shock most of her clients experience after doing so. If you've never tried this yourself, I can highly recommend it. It's staggering how much crap even tidy people accumulate because it's so often spread out in various places. It's not hard to understand how packing crap like this drives an insatiable urge for ever bigger houses and cars. You need more room to accommodate your every growing collection of crap. The environmental consequences of this behavior are staggering. I'm not sure whether this is is something new or not, but it's plain as day that houses, cars, and yes people are getting bigger. Look inside those houses and cars, and you're likely to find an accretion of crap whose contents even the owners can't recall. So there's a reluctance to toss things out, and there's a real lack of understanding about how much crap we actually have. Sounds like a first world problem to be sure, but one with bizarre emotional/psychological/environmental angles I don't think have really been explored that much.