By Sarah Currie-Halpern
How do you raise awareness around something as enormous and complex as consumerism’s role in the global waste crisis? Where do you even start the conversation? Oversimplify it, and you run the risk of failing to convey its urgency. Overcomplicate it, and you’ll make people feel helpless or frustrated, both of which lead to inaction.
Finding the sweet spot in between is tricky, but the new Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy manages it well. Its thesis is straightforward: the biggest corporations in the world are powering the global waste crisis by manipulating consumers to always be buying, and they’re doing this to maximize profit.
Director Nic Stacey isn’t pedantic in his approach. He frames Buy Now as an instruction manual for corporations eager to make as much money as possible while keeping consumers in the dark about the environmental costs of overconsumption. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stacey described the film as designed to “take you from the selling all the way through to the end result” by “using the language of advertising—the colors and nostalgia used to sell us stuff—and to turn it back on itself and use it to critique the system.”
Stacey’s film doesn’t rely on these slick visuals alone. It includes interviews with the (now reformed) architects of this system, such as former Adidas Brand President Eric Liedtke and ex-Amazon UX designer Maren Costa. Their insider perspectives are deepened by input from the system’s longtime opponents, such as iFixit CEO and right-to-repair advocate Kyle Wiens, recycling expert and chemical engineer Jan Dell, and waste activist, Anna Sacks, aka The Trash Walker (who is a former Think Zero employee!)
Together, the interviewees of Buy Now paint an ugly picture of how corporations encourage overconsumption. It begins with clever advertising, super-engineered UX, and the constant creation of new reasons to buy. In tech, it often takes the form of planned obsolescence or devices engineered to be impossible to repair. Using greenwashing tactics like printing virtually meaningless recycling symbols on packaging, the waste this overconsumption creates is concealed from customers before the product has even been thrown away.
Buy Now follows tossed products through the waste chain to the toxic tech landfills of Thailand and the clothing dumps of Ghana. These are striking scenes, but not exactly unprecedented ones. So Stacey goes one step further, using animations to illustrate the film’s most concerning statistics in a surprising way. Millions of shoes, phones, and clothes pour onto the streets of New York City. 400 million tons of annual plastic waste land on Paris, one mound heaped as high as the Sacre-Cœur. Electronic and plastic waste buries half the Sydney Opera House and swamps metro Tokyo. It looks apocalyptic.
These CG animations are what makes Buy Now stand out from other environmental crisis documentaries. Stacey recontextualizes the material reality of waste in the cities and environments not where it is discarded but where it is initially created. In doing so, he avoids the trap of apathy bred by familiarity.
Framing the documentary as an instruction manual for greedy corporations and visualizing global waste in the streets of major cities is a shock to the viewer’s system. Still Stacey is careful to end Buy Now on a hopeful note, or at least an actionable one. Corporations can be pressured to do better, its interviewees insist, and fighting overconsumption begins at home. Without being preachy, Buy Now is the kind of awareness-raising documentary that can win converts to the cause. Let’s hope it does.
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