Note: The below essay was written by Yvon Chouinard and originally published in the New York Times on November 23, 2023.
Over 50 years ago, my wife, Malinda, and I bought a chef’s knife of carbon steel that we still use. It could be passed down to several generations. Compare that to the junk stainless steel ones that might not rust but that won’t hold an edge to cut a tomato.
Cheap products, made poorly and thrown away quickly, are killing people and the planet.
Since 1999, humans have far surpassed — by billions of metric tons — the amount of Earth’s resources that scientists estimate we can sustainably use. The culprit: our overconsumption of stuff, from shoddy tools to fast fashion that is trendy one day, trash the next.
Obsession with the latest tech gadgets drives open pit mining for precious minerals. Demand for rubber continues to decimate rainforests. Turning these and other raw materials into final products releases one-fifth of all carbon emissions.
The global inequality that benefits some and persists for the many, ensures that some of the poorest people and most vulnerable places bear the social and environmental costs of international trade. Research links demand for goods in Western Europe and the United States to the premature deaths of more than 100,000 people in China because of industrial air pollution.
And people keep buying junk. In a world where it’s often cheaper to replace goods than to repair them, we have gone from a society of caretaker owners to one of consumers.
Manufacturers and brands must shoulder much of the blame. They increase sales by intentionally limiting the life span of batteries, lightbulbs, washing machines and more through planned obsolescence. Some build in quality fade, slowly downgrading materials to save money and duping customers into buying something a little bit worse each time even if the label stays the same. As a result, products that could have been made to last a lifetime — or even generations — end up in landfills.
This hurts low-income buyers most of all. The rich can pay a premium for craftsmanship, but as the saying goes, the poor can’t afford cheap goods. The novelist Terry Pratchett captured the problem in his “boots theory” of socioeconomics: “A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
I know firsthand the high stakes of low quality. When I started forging climbing equipment and selling it out of the back of my car in the 1950s, I was my own best customer. My dirtbag climber buddies and I wanted stronger pitons and sturdier carabiners to support us as we hung thousands of feet above the Yosemite Valley floor. If the metal were too soft or a joint too weak, the resulting fall would have killed me or one of my friends.
I wanted to stay alive, so I chose quality at every turn, creating products that were simple, versatile and made with the lightest, strongest materials I could find. And I didn’t want to deface the wild, beautiful places I loved, so I got creative and designed new gear that wouldn’t scar the rocks.
To this day, some of the most popular items Patagonia makes were designed in the 1970s and ’80s — essential products that we continue to tinker and refine. The company I founded turns 50 this year. People ask me how it has managed to stick around so long when the average life span of a corporation is less than 20 years. I tell them it’s been our unrelenting focus on quality, which includes making things that last and that cause the least amount of harm to our planet.
Countless skeptics told me we’d never turn a profit. They thought we were crazy for repairing our own gear and urging our customers to buy less. They said our focus on quality would drive up prices and put our products out of reach.
But the naysayers were wrong. Some of our most loyal customers still live out of vans and save up for one of our coats, knowing they may not need to replace it for a decade or more. And long-lasting goods create secondhand markets for discounted clothes and gear that have many years of good use left in them.
Quality is smart business. Even during economic downturns, people don’t stop spending. In our experience, instead of wanting more, they value better. Consumers should demand — and companies should deliver — products that are more durable, multifunctional and, crucially, socially and environmentally responsible.
Government has a role, too. We need a national revolution around quality — backed by policies and legislation that prioritize the most sustainable raw materials and best manufacturing practices.
We can’t eliminate every environmental threat overnight, but we can weed out some of the worst offenders by imposing steep tariffs on poor-quality imports. We know we have to phase out using fossil fuels, but where do we start? Let’s start by banning petroleum imports from areas like the Amazon, the tar sands in Alberta and the swamps of southeastern Nigeria, one of the most polluted places in the world.
We should build on the work of the Inflation Reduction Act to reorder our system of taxes and incentives around what is most important: products and a planet that can survive for the long haul. We know we need to reduce manufacturing’s carbon footprint, so let’s start by taxing industries like apparel and steel production based on their emissions. In agriculture and energy production, the government currently subsidizes some of the most ecologically damaging methods of making our food and powering our lives. Let’s acknowledge that corn ethanol is not green and is an irresponsible source of energy. It wastes precious topsoil and water, pollutes our oceans and contributes more to climate change than gasoline.
A quality revolution will require a huge shift, but it’s been done before. Early post-World War II Japan was known for making flimsy, inexpensive products. But in 1950, an American statistician named W. Edwards Deming introduced a system that emphasized consistency, continuous improvement and the importance of sourcing the very best materials. His principles transformed Japan into a manufacturing gold standard, but they didn’t catch on in his home country. Frustrated with U.S. companies’ lack of interest in his methods, Deming told a reporter he’d like to be remembered “as someone who spent his life trying to keep America from committing suicide.”
If we can embrace quality as the key to living more responsibly, choosing the carbon steel knife that lasts decades over the ones that have to be replaced each year, we may just get to keep the one thing we can’t toss out: Earth.
