American retail is riddled with cheap, fall-apart merchandise. We know this. Sales are a ploy to get a shopper to spend, as opposed to a boon for penny pinchers. Right. And how much mileage do we get from that old, overused adage, "You get what you pay for"? More than we'd like to admit.

So why is Ellen Ruppel Shell's new book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, so shocking?

Shell deftly weaves a compelling, cautionary tale out of disparate strands: the psychology of manipulating shoppers, the environmental costs of our lust for inexpensive things, the deskilling of the retail industry, and the loss of appreciation for "quality." Tracing the history of discount culture from the yesteryear excitement over brown paper packages to today's ambivalence about crammed plastic bags, Shell shows us why we feel we've been ripped off if we pay "full price."

She pushes readers to ponder the strange circumstances that make an item shipped from thousands of miles away less expensive than something homegrown. And how a major furniture retailer can convince a customer to get attached to a piece just enough to buy it, but not enough to keep it long. And, most disturbingly, just how expensive our bargain hunting is turning out to be.

_____

Ellen Ruppel Shell

Q. What audience did you have in mind when you wrote Cheap?

A. This grew out of my own curiosity about my own behavior. Since I have a science background, and I try to be a very rational person, I was startled by my own shopping behavior. So if that was happening to me, I figured it was happening to an awful lot of people. As someone who is socially conscious, I was making purchasing decisions that didn't reflect that social consciousness sometimes. I wondered what was behind that.

I'm trying to reach a thoughtful audience, and I'm particularly interested in reaching younger people because I think they have the spirit and the opportunity to change. Interestingly, it seems to resonate with young people quite a bit.

Q. Why do you think your message is resonating with young people, especially considering how inclined they are to move around and not get attached to their property?

A. I don't want to speak for all young people, but there are all sorts of ways to get value without playing into this con game of cheap.

You go to a place we have in my town [Boston], called the Garment District, which is second-hand, third-hand kind of clothes, and you can get really good stuff there for very little money. You can be creative with it -- dress it up or dress it down, do what you want with it. It's not a cookie-cutter piece out of H&M that everybody's wearing that week. You're the boss of that thing, it's not the boss of you. It's style rather than fashion.

The idea that you can go to IKEA and get good deals -- it's really not a good deal. You can't ever get rid of it, it's not something you can resell. You don't really own it; you're kind of renting it. So that's something that young people who are thinking about moving can think about. What you want to do is to be able to put it on craigslist, or maybe get your friends to help you move your stuff. You want your stuff to [have] resale value if you really want to save money. You're not being cheap, you're being smart. They're two different things.

Q. How does the psychology of marketing inhibit the ability of consumers to see an item in terms of its entire lifespan?

A. IKEA names all its products to make stuff seem cute, but then they're telling you, "You're not really attached to this, are you crazy?" They're getting you to laugh at and make a mockery out of the idea of durability. They make durability seem like an old-fashioned, passé idea. And it works. I think it's really juvenilizing: "Oh, come on, you want a new toy. You always want a new toy."

Particularly in the marketing of cell phones. You have a cell phone that works really well for you, and then you have a friend who has a cooler one, and you want it. That's kind of 4-year-old behavior. When you have 3- or 4-year-olds, they want the new shiny thing. But as you get older and a little more mature--and I don't mean 50, I mean 16 or 17--you learn that that's not what it's about. It's about what works for me. Marketers obviously don't want you to think that. In the case of the cell phone, they assume you're going to use it for a year or less, and it's not durable. Even if it is, they assume you're going to junk it. I say, "Screw them!" If it works for you, hang on to it. Don't buy into that, because basically, it's all about them making a profit. It's not about you and what you really want.

Come hither -- cheap goods for sale!Q. Do you see similarities between the psychology of marketing cheap goods and of greenwashing?

A. Yes, I do. There's a mnemonic device that's used by marketers in terms of discounting. The mental shortcut is, "Lower price, good deal." And those two things don't necessarily follow. Something that's low price triggers the impulsive side of our brains and causes us to make decisions without much thought. The same thing is true for some of this green marketing. We're told that something is green, or it has the aura of green, and that makes it OK to buy it.

That's actually why I [focused on] IKEA instead of Wal-Mart. Most of us think, "IKEA's the good guy." IKEA has taken some tiny, baby steps towards environmentalism. For example, they started charging for their plastic bags. When you charge for plastic bags, it's reasonable to question if it's really a green step or just a way to make profit. They use low-wattage bulbs in their stores. But those are cost-cutting measures. There's nothing wrong with cost-cutting measures, but they don't take environmental steps that cause them to reduce their profits. People think, "Oh, it's a green store." But the whole story that they tell of clean living and the outdoors is a mnemonic to get you to buy. When you look under the hood, and you look at something that is essentially being sold as a non-durable product, something that won't last and isn't necessarily marketed to last, that's not an environmentally sound product.

Q. What do you say to those who believe the way discounters do business is essential to the American spirit of capitalism?

A. If you reconsider Adam Smith's arguments, in light of today's realities, he would not say what a lot of people think he was saying. He was concerned about greed and morality. He was a moral philosopher. When we talk about a free market, Adam Smith could have never anticipated the free market that we have today, which is a global market of supply chain that depends on instant messaging across the globe and transportation costs being so low that they're essentially negligible.

That's why the invention of [shipping containers], which has severely lowered transportation costs, is so important in the story. In [Smith's] days, if you shipped something from Japan or China, it was costly. Now, it really isn't. It completely changes the argument about what works and what doesn't. And when you're talking about a global economy and you have workers who are completely out of our sight, who we use as a labor source--and the resources in those countries as well--and costs are so low because transportation costs are so low, it's a completely different equation.

Q. Do you foresee a change in our perception of cheap if transportation costs are driven up through climate legislation?

A. There's no question [about] that, if we actually taxed for carbon use around the globe so that we can't just outsource our pollution--which is what we're doing now to the developing world. In terms of pollution, it was pretty shocking to see the levels of particle pollution of areas in China. We're talking huge amounts of carbon being burned, toxins in the air and the water, which is all to keep prices low, because when you put in environmental protection it costs money. If the price of oil went up substantially and environmental restrictions were made globally so that we couldn't outsource our environmental costs, I definitely think this could have a big impact on cheap.

Q. So there are two ways to frame the rejection of cheap: from a personal, psychological standpoint and also an environmental standpoint.

A. And also sociopolitical impact, because as we pursue cheap goods, we also pursue lower wages, less benefits, and worse working conditions because that's what makes things cheaper and cheaper. If wages go up in Mexico, plants close up and go to China, and if wages go up in China, the plants move on to Vietnam. We're basically pursuing the least regulated cultures, where the rule of law is the weakest when it comes to enforcing the kinds of things we in the United States really value.

Q. Do you think the general public is shocked when they make the connection that their cheap habits are supported by deregulation?

A. Some of the critics have said the book is shocking in the sense that it kind of opened their eyes. And it was shocking to me; I didn't know this stuff before I did the book. I think with knowledge comes power and you get to enact change in people.

Q. Is a rejection of cheap goods and food sustainable on a global scale?

A. In the book I quote World Bank economist Michael Morris because I don't want people to think that this is going to be easy or that we're all going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It is a world of many billions of people. In talking about agriculture and small farms, there's this notion of happy peasants--which is a myth. It's true that small farmers can flourish, but it's also true that in many places in the world, the small farmers are the poorest of the poor. We do need to feed this world, which has so many more people than when we had these small farms. We do need to have large agricultural systems.

What I call for in the book is a middle way. I don't think we necessarily need factory meat farms, for example. I think that's actually a very costly system in many different regards. If that's something that the local-food movement and the slow-food movement pushes against, it's probably a good thing. Do we need large fields of gain? I think we do. [Fields of corn] to be fed to livestock is an unfortunate thing, but, as my background is in science, I do see the positives there, and I don't want to sell them short. For people who are starving around the world, they need a source of readily available food.

To feed the world, we're going to have to keep some of that in place, but we're also going to need a lot of local farmers, and we need more diversity in what we subsidize. We subsidize the grain growers, and the corn growers, and the soybean growers--anything that has to do with the meat industry. But we don't subsidize very much fruit and vegetable growers, which, if you're going to have a healthy diet, that's what you need. We need to really rethink our agricultural system, but the way to do it, I believe, isn't just to tell everyone to shop at their local farmers market--it's too expensive for most people, and it's unavailable to most people. I take more of a middle ground than a lot of other folks, people who I very much respect, but who I think are looking through a very narrow lens. I think we have to be careful not to oversell or oversimplify.

Q. In Cheap, you talk about the role that corporations and politics have played in how we've gotten to where we are, but you also place a significant part of that burden on individual consumers. How do we get to a sustainable middle ground in the retail landscape?

A. Consumers need more information. When you go to New York City and you go to a coffee shop, they tell you the calories of what's in the food. You can make better decisions; you change your choices.

I didn't write this in the book and I wish I had, but some kind of labeling so that consumers know the origins of what they're buying, and how it's made, and what it's made of [is important]. And eventually you should be able to go on the web and find out what company made this, where's the supplier, and [if] are they acting responsibly. Suppliers in the developing world are notorious for labor abuses. The way you make these changes is to make the labeling at the point of purchase where the buyer can see, right then and there, what he's buying. And that changes behavior.

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Cop a ride to COP-15...Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist
So you’re going to Copenhagen to help save the planet. Splendid! This December the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where international delegates will negotiate a post-Kyoto Protocol global climate plan. That’s the hope, anyway. Earlier we posted some tips and ideas for finding lodging the in Danish capital, but what about getting there?

Jet travel emits a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide, of course. And for non-European attendees, it’s pretty much the only option. So what’s a delegate/activist/NGO rep/journalist/gadfly to do?

Erik Nelson of environmental travel site Better World Club offered this insider tip: You pretty much have to fly. But! If you have the time, ships might be a low-impact alternative. See The Cruise People LTD for leads on both cruise and commercial ships. Even Nelson, whose site is sort of a green AAA, hadn’t heard of many folks doing this. But it’s possible.

For everyone else, the trip likely involves an arrival at Copenhagen Airport, Kastrup (CPH), the city’s main airport and Scandinavia’s busiest. The city is also well-connected to the rest of continental Europe by rail, if you find it more convenient to fly elsewhere.

More than 70 airlines fly to Copenhagen, according to Skyscanner.net. Most of the ones that fly from the U.S. are searchable on the usual flight search aggregators—Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak, Priceline.

Better World Club has its own flight-finder, powered by Orbitz, that makes it easy to buy carbon offsets when you book. It’s also got a carbon calculator to estimate the impact of flights, though finding the actual impact isn’t simple. For those (understandably) wary about the legitimacy of carbon offsets, check out this Grist guide to offsets.

And if you’re hell-bent against flying, a few other possibilities:

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How many light bulbs does it take to change a supply chain? In the case of Baxter Healthcare Corp., just three.

When Jenni Cawein, manager of corporate environmental health and safety engineering at the Illinois-based $9.8 billion health-care giant, arrived six years ago, she saw that the company was losing ground on waste. "I asked my boss, 'Who's working with purchasing?' It turned out it was nobody," she says. Cawein set out to build a case for integrating environmental criteria into the company's procurement process.

Show them the money.

Photo: iStockphoto.

"I asked what the purchasing department cared about the most," Cawein explains. "I did a lot of research, and of course they care about cost reduction, and had made certain commitments to reduce costs."

Armed with details about the department's goals, Cawein set up a time to address the purchasing staff. At that meeting, she offered an illustrative example involving three fluorescent light bulbs: one cost $1 and was expected to last 2 years; another cost $5 and lasted 8 years; the third cost $2 and lasted 2 years, but used 30 percent less electricity.

"When I ran the actual numbers, including real costs of electricity for all of our facilities around the world, plus labor and disposal costs, and showed them the data, their eyes just opened up," says Cawein. "I showed them that the cheapest bulb would cost us $50 million more than the most efficient bulb."

Cawein's message was clear: greening the supply chain is a strategic, bottom-line issue. Largely as a result of Cawein's light-bulb inspiration, Baxter has embarked on an effort to integrate environmental thinking into every aspect of supply-chain management.

Baxter is not alone in embracing supply-chain environmental management (though its effort may be one of the more ambitious). Companies in a number of sectors have been driving environmental thinking increasingly further upstream -- typically beginning with a handful of their biggest suppliers, and expanding those successes to smaller players.

In recent years, the supply-chain environmental management, or SCEM, movement appears to have gathered steam, and has given birth to some new industry and government initiatives. The U.S. EPA's Green Suppliers Network, a public-private partnership, aims to help suppliers and manufacturers eliminate waste, save money, and reduce their eco-impact. Members of the network -- including Abbott Laboratories, General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Herman Miller, Johnson & Johnson, Pratt & Whitney, and Steelcase -- focus on the root causes of waste, enabling them to decrease the use of toxic and non-renewable materials, use energy more efficiently, reduce labor costs, and promote greater employee participation in environmental-improvement activities.

At Baxter, SCEM isn't limited to buying light bulbs -- or, for that matter, to procurement itself. Its efforts extend from the manufacturing floor all the way to end users, primarily hospitals and doctors' offices.

Once Cawein helped her company's purchasing department understand the business value of SCEM, the next step was to bring manufacturing into the fold. Like many companies, Baxter has embraced the concept of "lean manufacturing," viewed by business gurus as being to the 21st century what "mass production" was to the 20th.

Lean manufacturing centers around the identification and elimination of waste. Its touted benefits are cuts as great as 50 percent in production costs, number of personnel, time required to get new products into the field, plus higher quality, higher profitability, and increased flexibility, among other things. In lean-manufacturing systems, waste-free, "continuous one-piece work flow" processes are highly reliant upon real-time supply-chain reliability. Lean manufacturing's focus on waste and procurement creates an attractive partner for SCEM: the former looks at things from a system-wide view, while the latter delves into the nitty-gritty process steps.

Baxter's supply-chain efforts extend downstream as well. The company's participation in another program co-sponsored by EPA, Hospitals for a Healthy Environment, has enabled it to better understand some of the end-of-life issues its products encounter inside health-care facilities. That, in turn, has helped Baxter work with suppliers to make changes in packaging and materials that reduce customer waste. In one case involving a medical-grade plastic that usually ended up in landfills, the manufacturer was able to get government funding to help develop a less-wasteful alternative. "I would never have dreamed," says Cawein, "that there was as much government seed funding for these technologies as there is."

Efforts like Baxter's demand that companies already have in place a firm environmental commitment and some strong management systems. A benchmarking survey of large companies conducted several years ago by Business for Social Responsibility found that companies with leading supply-chain practices shared common organizational characteristics, including a strong commitment to environmental stewardship; a desire to serve as a model for their industry; clear, consistent, and frequent internal communication and communication with suppliers; ongoing supplier education; and continuous improvement through built-in feedback mechanisms.

Such qualities, BSR concluded, are what separate ad hoc, reactive approaches to supply-chain management from more holistic, strategic approaches like Baxter's.

Cawein will be the first to tell you that making such shifts isn't easy. "You've got to be persistent and patient," she counsels. "You're talking about culture change. It's going to take a while. What I tell myself is that as long as I'm making steps forward, I'm happy. I expect this [effort to improve] will never end if we do it right."

Learning how to talk with procurement folks is key, she says. "You have to focus on your own internal people who are responsible for suppliers first, and that will take you a while. Environmental people on their own cannot do this. They tend to talk in generalities, and purchasing people tend to talk in hard facts. When you talk about cost savings, you've got to be specific. That's the thing that really started to bring them over. It has to be quantifiable."

In the end, it's the economics, stupid. If you can convince the powers that be that there's a way to save money beyond the purchase price -- and then can show them that it comes out of a specific budget -- you can break through the purchasing department's traditional reluctance to change vendors or products, says Cawein. "You've got to show them the link and prove it to them. Once they understand that it's not funny money, they go out and start negotiating."

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You've created the World's Greenest Product, and you're shipping it off to your first big customer. You've made it from the most environmentally sensitive materials, using only renewable energy. It's the pinnacle of eco-friendly everything.

Special delivery.

Photo: iStockphoto.

So what are you going to pack it in, cardboard or plastic? And how are you going to keep it safe: Styrofoam, newspaper, popcorn, peanuts, Crackerjacks?

Last month, this column reviewed the impacts of shipping by plane, train, and automobile (and ship, of course). This time we dig a little deeper, looking at the impacts of the actual packaging materials that companies choose.

Those who ship products confront a boatload of packaging options, when you consider both the outer container and the inner materials used to cushion goods and fill space. Much like the perennial grocery-bag dilemma, opinions abound about which combination is "best" -- and few of those opinions are conclusive.

Should you use a cardboard box instead of a plastic bag? How about shredded newspaper filler instead of foam "peanuts"? Logic might dictate that tree-based materials trump petro-based ones. But logic might be wrong.

So what's the best call when you're going green? The bottom line: It's the weight, stupid -- that is, the heft of the material, not its recycled content -- that most influences the environmental impacts of your bags and boxes.

Recently, a study commissioned by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. EPA offered one of the more comprehensive looks at the environmental impacts of transport packaging. It might even cause some manufacturers, retailers, and distributors to rethink their strategies.

The study analyzed more than 20 packaging options, including boxes, padded and unpadded bags, and several kinds of loosefill materials, made with both recycled and non-recycled content. It found that shipping items in bags -- whether paper or plastic, virgin or post-consumer -- had the lowest energy profile, including lower consumption of fossil fuels, less solid waste, and lower emissions.

Using corrugated boxes, including those made from post-consumer recycled content, was deemed to have a much higher impact. The heaviest combination (a corrugated box and molded-pulp loosefill) was found to weigh 26 times more than the lightest option (a linear low-density polyethylene, or LLDPE, plastic bag).

"The study confirms the waste-management hierarchy of reduce and recycle," explains David Allaway of Oregon DEQ's Solid Waste Policy and Program Development office. "Regardless of what the material is made of, the shipping bags have lower energy requirements and emissions because they weigh so much less." (The full report -- a weighty 500-plus pages -- can be downloaded from DEQ.)

The findings of the study -- which focused on materials used to deliver "soft" goods such as clothing and other relatively unbreakable products directly to consumers, as opposed to electronics and other more sensitive goods -- are significant, since they are contrary to many companies' tendency to focus on post-consumer recycled content as the main environmental attribute in selecting shipping materials.

"We have not found the environmentally friendly packaging material that doesn't cause environmental impacts," Allaway says. "Sometimes I think that gets lost in the enthusiasm for changing materials or using recycled content."

Allaway is quick to point out, however, that "this is not a paper-versus-plastic study." Rather, he says, it's about factors that are too often overlooked: "The lesson is to pay attention to weight and volume," he says. "Weight matters." Indeed it does. In 2004, Ontario became the first jurisdiction in North America requiring companies to contribute toward recycling fees based on the weight of their packaging.

In fact, more than 30 countries across Europe and Asia currently mandate some form of producer responsibility for packaging, according to Raymond Communications, which produces publications and conferences on the topic. As more such laws come on board, these seemingly simple decisions are becoming increasingly important.

Even aside from governmental regulations, choosing the right packaging can save a company, well, a bundle. Norm Thompson Outfitters, for instance, estimates that it is saving around $1.15 million each year by increasing its use of lightweight polyethylene shipping bags -- $664,000 in freight, $415,000 in materials, $75,000 in labor -- instead of using cardboard boxes.

And even small steps add up quickly. Nike slaps "Re-Use It" stickers on incoming boxes in one warehouse, then does just that, saving more than $50,000 a year. And Toyota implemented a system of returnable plastic containers to ship floor mats to a distribution center. After eliminating disposable pallets and cartons, the supplier was able to pass along savings to Toyota in the form of a reduced unit price for floor mats.

In the end, says Allaway, the rule of thumb is to first make sure that your shipping cartons aren't oversized, in order to reduce the use of packaging materials. (Smaller packages can also decrease freight impacts, as many long-haul trucks fill by volume, not weight.) Once you've downsized, select combinations that weigh less than the other comparable options. And only then, focus on making the "right" green choice: "Once you've chosen the material, by all means use post-consumer recycled content," says Allaway.

Of course, if you take this advice too far and underpackage the World's Greenest Product, causing it to break during shipment and require replacement, you'll end up creating an even bigger environmental impact, since you'll have to ship out a whole new one. Sometimes more really is more.

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We all know that planes, trains, and automobiles use gobs of fuel and spew mega-gobs of greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere -- and that makes freight transport a particularly dirty business.

Your new iPod is in there somewhere.

Photo: iStockphoto.

The environmental impacts of shipping goods hither and yon are significant but relatively obscure, the true costs hidden amid complex shipping tariffs and product price tags. Businesses that rely on products being moved from one place to another have been able to do little to change the performance of truck, rail, and marine cargo companies. Moreover, cargo companies haven't been on most environmental activists' radar screens.

But that's changing. The growing focus on climate and energy -- along with such evergreen issues as biodiversity and air and water pollution -- have brought shipping's environmental impacts into the fast lane. Activists are starting to wage campaigns against dirty shippers. And a handful of companies, including some of the world's largest freight haulers, are beginning to take action.

The environmental cost of moving goods can be significant. Take cargo ships, for example -- the means by which two-thirds of the goods purchased by U.S. consumers arrive on American shores. While oceangoing vessels worldwide account for just 2 to 3 percent of global fossil-fuel consumption, they are responsible for 14 percent of the nitrogen emissions from fossil fuels and 16 percent of all sulfur emissions from petroleum, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University.

One reason: cargo ships run on "bunker fuel," the dirtiest, cheapest product that remains after gas and other high-grade fuels are refined from crude oil. Bunker fuel contains up to 5,000 times more sulfur than diesel. As a result, according to Bluewater Network, a division of Friends of the Earth, a single container ship emits more pollution than 2,000 diesel trucks.

Ballast is another issue. Modern cargo ships hold within their hulls millions of gallons of water, which is moved around to ensure the ship is properly trimmed, improving safety and speed. Ships routinely exchange ballast water while in port as cargo is loaded or unloaded. The water pumped out of the ship is alive with organisms from ports previously visited. One analysis of ballast water from foreign ships entering Canada found as many as 12,392 marine creatures per cubic meter. The survivors often invade their adopted homes, sometimes wreaking havoc; the zebra mussel fouling the Great Lakes is just one example.

Of course, ground and air freight have impacts, too. Truck and rail represent about 17 percent of all transport-related climate emissions. Over the past four decades, freight-truck vehicle-miles have increased more than 50 percent, while fuel efficiency has grown only about 12 percent. Overall, the 35 billion gallons of diesel fuel used by truck and rail companies each year produce more than 350 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, aircraft transport boasts greater fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions per ton-mile than any other mode of transport. And their emissions' negative impacts are amplified due to the high altitude where they occur.

All of which is getting activists moving. In recent years, for example, Bluewater Network successfully sued the U.S. EPA over regulation of emissions from large, oceangoing vessels. In April, a delegation of environmental and public-health organizations from the E.U. and the U.S. pressed the International Maritime Organization to reduce ship smokestack emissions by 70 to 90 percent, saying the cuts would protect those who live and work near ports from cancer, respiratory ailments, and premature deaths.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has also weighed in, issuing a report that points out that although trucks account for just under 6 percent of highway miles driven in the U.S., they account for a tenth of all domestic oil consumption. They're also responsible for a quarter of smog-causing pollution and the majority of the cancer threat posed by air pollution in some urban areas. According to the EPA, idling trucks and locomotives use 1.2 billion gallons of diesel fuel a year and emit more than 200,000 tons of nitrogen oxides. Talk about idle indulgences.

What's going on to reduce such impacts? A boatload. A couple of years ago, the nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility convened a Clean Cargo Working Group to help retailers and manufacturers reduce the impacts of oceangoing transport. They developed a set of standards for measuring the climate impacts of shipping, along with a questionnaire to give ship operators.

This wasn't easy. Calculating the climate impact of, say, a pair of shoes being shipped from China involves understanding the type of ship, the kind of fuel it burns, the shipping lane it traveled, and other factors. Companies like Chiquita, Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, and Nike have been involved with the effort to work with vessel operators including K Line, Maersk Sealand, and NYK Line to implement the new standards.

Meanwhile, back on dry land, trucking companies -- driven by such mega-shippers as Dell, Home Depot, IKEA, J.C. Penney, and Lowe's -- are gearing up a new generation of vehicles that significantly improve fuel economy and reduce emissions. FedEx has been working with Environmental Defense to produce a low-emission, hybrid-electric delivery vehicle that could become a medium-duty truck for the company's fleet. Wal-Mart, with one of the world's largest fleets, has pledged to increase its trucks' efficiency by 25 percent over the next three years and double it (from 6.5 to 13 miles per gallon) within a decade. Efficiency comes from improving engines, of course, but also from such steps as installing "side skirts" on trailers to reduce wind resistance.

What can you do to reduce shipping's impact? Four things:

In the end, keep in mind that the environmental impacts of the products you buy may pale compared to the impacts of shipping them across oceans and continents.

Getting there, as they say, is half the fumes.

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In what appears to be an uncoordinated campaign, three friends have brought me three different mail-order catalogs, asking me to condemn them publicly.

At first I resisted, because I prefer to dump on catalogs as a class, rather than singling some out, which might leave the mistaken impression that others are okay. However, three requests add up to a near-mandate in the column-writing business, so, after an obligatory blanket condemnation, I shall indeed denounce the catalogs in question, which strike me as, in order, 1) normally smarmy, 2) infuriating, and 3) pathetic.

Even from companies with which we want to do business, catalogs flood into our lives too often, too thick, too glossy. They are just successful enough at seducing us to buy things we otherwise never would want to keep the mail order business going. However, only 2 to 4 percent of catalogs mailed produce an order. Catalog sales must be one of the world's most wasteful endeavors.

Let us be clear what is being wasted. The trees and inks that go into the catalogs. The fuels that print, assemble, sort, label, bale, truck, and deliver them. The space in our kitchens or garages where we hold them before more energy takes them to the recycling center or dump. The cost of all this shows up in our taxes (for the recycling or dump) and in the price of the product.

Over 90 percent waste. That was my complaint about catalogs, until I studied the ones my friends brought me.

The first is the spring 2000 L.L. Bean Home catalog. Running through pictures of towels and lamps and down comforters are lines like these: "Home is feeling like you're in a country cottage (even if you have a city address." "Home is room to play, room to grow." "Home is the sound of cartoons and giggles." "Home is a place where traditions are made." Normal nauseating catalog copy.

I think what irritated my friend was the implication that braided rugs and flannel sheets make a home. That warm and comfy feelings can be bought. That traditions and giggles come from stuff, rather than from people and love.

But that's just the everyday advertising lie. Summon up a profound human value, especially one that is threatened by the frantic wastefulness imbued in the totally unnecessary product being advertised. Intertwine the material product with soulful evocations of the nonmaterial value. Want youth and energy? Buy Coke. Love your kids? Buy toys. Want a peaceful, relaxing home? Buy L.L. Bean chenille bedspreads.

The second catalog, the early spring 2000 (ominously implying a late spring follow-up) output of a company called Harmony, made me much madder. Harmony, it says, is owned by an enterprise called Gaiam, a combination of "Gaia" and "I am." Dedicated to "natural health, ecological lifestyles, personal growth, and sustainable commerce," it is, says the catalog, one of the leading lights of "the fast-growing LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) industry."

Uh-oh, I thought, as I opened the first page to a shiny $239 water filter. As a card-carrying environmentalist, I see entirely too many of these catalogs. Biodegradable trash bags. Ultrasonic bug repellers. Magnetic massage machines, all-cotton sheets, $450 ozone-generating air purifiers.

Want health, cleanliness, nature? Buy green-tinged stuff. These eco-porn catalogs are extra annoying because they offer a whiff of unearned virtue with each purchase, as if every "green" product, like every other product, didn't come from the earth, pollute in its manufacture and delivery, and eventually go back to the earth as waste. A real environmental catalog would inform the consumer about that impact. This Harmony one doesn't even bother to say what kind of plastic the spinning composter is made of or how many watts the electric aromatherapy machine draws.

Want health, cleanliness, nature? Buy less, buy with full information, buy only what you need, stay far away from the fast-growing LOHAS industry.

The Christmas catalog from Hammacher Schlemmer is the one that broke my heart. The first page offers a $4,000 stand-up snowmobile and a $1,200 silent violin with head-phones, so you can practice without disturbing anyone. This catalog is meticulous about wattage information. The electric pants press draws 250 watts, the pop-up hot-dog cooker draws 660 (but it does heat two hot-dogs and buns), the heated cat bed with orthopedic mattress draws only four. For this kind of mindless exhibitionism, we pollute the planet and change the climate.

The advertising lie here is old as the hills and so very sad. Want respect? Buy a $17,000 rotating Christmas lawn display with 1,130 lights. Want to feel important? Buy a $129.95 gentleman's leather tray to empty your pockets into at night. Want to ease your affluent loneliness? Buy a $39.95 hand-held interactive Monopoly game with five electronic fellow players, each with a different personality and a 400-word vocabulary.

Think of the effort, the money, the resources put into designing, making, advertising, buying, shipping, storing, and disposing of these unsatisfying substitutes for very real nonmaterial needs. Imagine putting even a fraction of that effort directly into home, comfort, health, cleanliness, nature, respect, friends, and love.

Related Links:

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Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting

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