Fred Pearce is well-intentioned and good hearted. He cares about the environment, and he cares about the third world citizens making all of the things he buys in order to maintain his cushy first world lifestyle. In the global economy, where does all that crap come from anyway, and can we trust greenwashed labeling, and has environmental fervor overshadowed concerns over ethical working conditions? These are important questions, and I’m glad this was written. But I’ll be happier when another wri More...

Fred Pearce chooses some of the "things" in his life and tracks down their source, exploring the people and places affected for him to get his stuff. It's truly fascinating to learn where things from gold to shrimp to cotton come from and what it takes to get them to us. It's also truly horrifying, for the most part.

I don't know anyone who is willing to trade someone else's misery or destroyed land for the ability to buy food or clothes cheap ... but it seems that is what most of us are doing. More...

I never knew it was possible to learn so much about the stuff we use. This author has done it, tracking computers, gold, diamonds, socks, and even green beans back to the sites of their production--and to where they end up. He made many sobering discoveries, including the warlords fighting over rare metals all of us use but have never heard of; the ecosystems destroyed by prawn farming in Bangladesh; the desertification of the Aral Sea, whose water is being diverted to cotton fields; and the ten More...

Superb: relevant, readable, stimulating, thought-provoking, funny. The tone is that of 'honest journalist ventures into environmentalism jungle', and he brings it off well. A mixture of fact, investigation, hard-headed realism and confessional - Pearce is a well informed science writer and environmentalist, and it's meant to be a wake up call to thinking about our impacts on the planet, but there's a minimum of right-on preaching.

My only criticism is that after a strong series of opening chapte More...

The neoliberal culture has led to our complete disconnection from the food we eat, or the clothes we wear. We merely consume, never thinking of where our goods come from, only that they’re in our hands.

With this in mind, Fred Pearce wanted to explore the paths of everyday items, the totems of every day life, from the gold in his wedding ring, to green beans, to our furniture, to the cotton from which his socks are made.

Without agenda, each territory is explored with gentle facts: a pint of mass More...

Reading this book is like trying not to scratch a particularly annoying itch, and then doing it anyway - and finding it just makes it worse.

Part of me really wants to know the truth behind the riduculously cheap jeans and the veges flown in from half way around the world, but when I do find out it makes me so depressed I wish I didn't know. I actually couldn't finish the book because it was really starting to get me down. And I did already know a lot about what he was talking about anyway. I kn More...

If you have any pet prejudices that you are determined to hold on to, then this may not be the book for you! It allows me to go back to buying those wonderful green beans from Marks and Spencer (as long as they're from a company called, ironically, Homegrown), whilst confirming some of my other environmental actions as justifiable, even desirable.

Fred Pearce is a scientist who writes for New Scientist magazine so his credentials for writing this book are excellent and he approaches the subject f More...

An interesting, if somewhat depressing book about the cost of consumerism. I learned a lot and the earth seems doomed. I'm not as optimistic as Fred Pearce appears to be about the future.

I disagreed with him entirely on the matter of overpopulation. At the time of writing he said the population was 6.5 billion and that it would take 14 years to reach 7 billion. The copy of the book I read was published in 2008 and even allowing a couple of years before that he's grossly underestimated the growt More...

This book goes into great detail about the lifecycles of a handful of consumer products - food, clothing, electronics, metals, etc. While very interesting, I found this book lacking in the bigger picture of what is wrong with over consumption. The author paints a picture where our problems can be solved with the right mix of biofuels and ingenuity and doesn't take on the fact that the problem is that we live in a consumerist society where people buy too much crap that they don't need because com More...

Another for the "everything you are doing is wrong" shelf. Pearce decided to investigate the ways his consumer goods were manufactured and disposed of. The usual suspects are on display here, and some less usual. It's always a little troublesome to see someone log tens of thousands of air miles to report on how the environment is going to hell, but it feels like his motives are pure- and points to him for acknowledging his footprint as considerably larger than average for his cohort.

There are a More...

preso in biblioteca

Reportage interessante sulla vita delle merci di uso comune.
L'autore fa riferimento alla situazione inglese che, in alcuni casi, differisce da quella italiana in quanto a provenienza e tipo di prodotti consumati, ma il discorso rimane sostanzialmente valido.
Ho apprezzato la scelta di fornire anche esempi virtuosi, oltre alla tristemente nota valanga di oscenità legate alle nostre merci, anche se non condivido il suo entusiasmo e ottimismo nei confronti del mercato equo-solidal More...

A collection of journalistic pieces in which the author traces the origins of his "stuff" - the food he eats, the clothes he wears. Beyond his carbon footprint, the author takes a special interest in the social impact of his purchases, and I found him more compelling when he wrote about people than about things. His conclusions are often surprising. His jeans, for example, were made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, under conditions that most Westerners would find appalling. But for the women who st More...

When Pearce wrote this about 5 years ago, it was news. Now the "news" is how little things have changed.

He does a great job of exploring our material needs and desires and giving us a more complete picture of what it took to put that cell phone in your pocket, that gold chain around your neck, that coffee in your cup. It's a real eye opener and he names a number of people and corporations.

His stories are intersting, though they could be told better. His writing could have used a better editor. I More...

Fred Pearce looks at the stuff he eats/uses/discards in his own life and travels the world to find out how it is made and what happens to it when he is done with it.

The first couple of chapters were a bit too shallow for my taste. Later in the book some of the chapters were very fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about things like the perilous situation of the banana (something I knew nothing about), the green beans farmers in Kenia, fair trade coffee and chocolate, what happens to the g More...

“What does chocolate taste like?"

An unexpected question, and one that’s all the more poignant
coming from a little boy whose father works on a West African
cocoa plantation. It's one of many revelations uncovered by Fred Pearce as he tracks the lifecycle of his belongings, from the shirt on his back to the coffee in his cup.

Much of what he finds is grim. The prawns in his takeaway come
from Bangladeshi farms, cultivated by poor villagers and controlled
by gangsters. His t-shirt is made of cotton, th More...

There were a lot of things I liked about this book, but one of the things I didn't like really dominates my perception of it. This is it:

"I estimate that I traveled more than 110,000 miles on this journey,visiting more than twenty countries." (p. 4)

"The one area where there are no technical fixes at hand is air travel, which is the biggest source of emissions from many people with the biggest carbon footprints, including me. We simply have to give up flying as much as possible." (p. 250) More...

The title is a little melodramatic, but the stories are stunning. Each chapter is a brief overview of the journey he went on to discovery the origins of things like his jeans, his wedding ring, and his coffee. He's a journalist who loves to travel ("So I decided to spend a week trekking across Uzbekistan...") who feels a healthy sense of responsibility for the way his purchases affect the lives of real people in real places. Not a guilt trip, just a fascinating one.

An interesting journey of discovery about the supply chain that provides and deals with many first world products - from food, to electronics, to energy to waste. An eye opener as to just how global our society, or rather, our economy, really is these days. Told with a lot of human interest angles - not just looking at ecological sustainability but social and human sustainability. Also very well written with a light but engaging tone and a hint of optimism.

A book I would recommend over "No Logo". Pearce travels around the world getting to see the facilities that produce the gold in our computers and your wedding bands, the cotton in his socks, his third world green beans. And what he sees is different than the major corporations who send their social responsibility inspectors see, particularly in Bangladesh. And he even traces organic cotton which had the best treated workers of all, I think, in India. I am so glad he stuck up for the fair-trade c More...

I did not read this entire book but picked chapters that were interesting to me. Pearce traces the origin of his "stuff," and chapters are organized around what "stuff" he is researching --- food, computers, oil, etc. While you might thing it would be all doom and gloom, it wasn't. There were some bright spots, some surprises, and some horrible abysses. He is British, and it had an Anglo slant. Plenty of food for thought!

This is a book I think everyone can learn from. It's informative, very eye-opening, thought-provoking, and written in a wonderfully engaging style. It covers a huge amount of territory, both geographical and informational, yet it is quite concisely written. I thought I had already been fairly aware in terms of my shopping habits, but this book clearly showed me that I still a lot more to learn! I haven't read anything else by Pearce, but I'd definitely like to - he's a very enjoyable writer.

Pear More...

This book is a fascinating look into the obscured origins of the products and foods we see in our lives. The author is an accomplished journalist who actually traveled all over the world to see for himself the people, conditions and impact of the industries behind his possessions. It begins with his descent into the most productive gold mine in the world, three miles into the earth's crust in South Africa.

A good, balanced look at where our stuff (including food) comes from, where it goes, and the environmental & human impact it has. The author does not ignore the social good that sometimes comes with environmental bad, nor does he gloss over the horrors of international trade. The last few chapters are a little overly optimistic, as nothing has gotten better over the few years since this was written; but it does outline a potential path forward.

I read this several years ago and still think about things that I read in it. Fair trade coffee isn't so fair, aluminum (boxite) production wreaks havoc with the environment, and if there is one thing that needs to be recycled, it's aluminum. People taking apart cell phones to extract tiny bits of precious ingredients. Very informative.

The author travels around the world to find out where his household goods and food come from, and how they are made. The book is depressing at times as he clearly describes the environmental and human toll of factories, sweatshops etc. in far away places. This book will open your eyes and make you think about your consumption habits.

I found this book relatively easy to read, although it took me a while to get all the way through it because of the somewhat poignant/sad mini-chapters. The various topics (coffee, sugar, green beans, cotton, aluminum, "rubbish" paper, computers, cell phones, etc.) were all covered in their own chapters, which made the book relatively easy to follow. Some of the chapters were very short - just when you were getting into the story, the chapter ended. I appreciated the human story that was brought More...

An interesting book, but, formatting wise it felt like there should be large, over-saturated and sharp National Geographic style photographs accompanying every essay.

My favorite factoid from the book; Asustek employs 85,000 people at its main plant by Shanghai. Crazy.

Just couldn't get into it. Maybe because I'd already read You Are Here The Surprising Link Between What We Do and What That Does to the Planet and loved it. Maybe I just didn't take to Pearce's writing. Don't know.

I thought I was a fairly eco-aware shopper, choosing Fair Trade and avoiding brands with poor environmental records... until I read this book. Confessions of an Eco Sinner will make you feel guilty and despairing of our throwaway culture while making you think about where the products we buy really come from.
I for one will be changing my shopping habits and recycling a lot more. Definitely a book to make you think about the impact of your lifestyle on this little blue planet.

Yes, it's gimmicky that Fred Pearce tracks back the things in his house to the places they came from. But this book is incredibly compelling, easy to read, and has a lot of surprises even for someone like me who thought they knew a lot already about where things come from.

All of Pearce's books I've read are among my favorites, but I think this one is his most accessible, and will be most compelling to a general audience. Everyone who can afford this book is deeply embedded in the network of stuf More...