When we began our Rubbish Free Year challenge, oddly enough, it wasn’t the plastic in the ocean, waterways pollution or the greenhouse gas methane that landfills are good at creating that inspired us. Rather, it was the pre-consumer activities and impacts that result from our consumption habits. This page has a variety of links to websites that do a great job of explaining this stuff in a more, concise and effective way then we can. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve got anything else to add onto this page.

The Story of Stuff: We highly recommend this short online movie about where stuff comes from. Deals with the big picture of our production consumption model. American made but tells a global story, particularly relevant to any Western ‘consumer’. Makes a complex and heavy topic palatable. Thoughtfully produced with low density images for easier downloads.

Stuart McMillen created this cartoon in September 2009 which clearly explains why it is important that we view the economy as being held within the environment, rather than the inverse.

Take this quiz to find out how many worlds would we need if everyone lived like you. Really easy, visual and really, really informative. Unfortunately we can’t select NZ as our country yet, just Australia or USA, but it works well anyway.

Photographic artist, Chris Jordan, has made visual representations of the number of cell phones thrown away every day, or the number of plastic water bottles thrown every 5 mins etc. Also has some non-rubbish related images, like the number of people in prison in 2005, but mostly very relevant and a very powerful way of grasping the issues of consumerism globally (all stats are from USA).