Consider This from NPR - De-influencers Ring the Alarm on the Environmental Impacts of Overconsumption

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

In the last few years, a new trend has emerged on social media: de-influencing.Instead of selling, de-influencers encourage their followers to stop buying things they don't need. De-influencers are also using this trend as an opportunity to raise awareness about the negative impact of overconsumption on the environment.From plastic packaging to useless gadgets that end up in landfills, overconsumption doesn't just have a negative effect on our wallets, but also on our planet and climate change. We look at what role de-influencers can play in helping to address climate change and spreading the message of sustainable living.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Even if you're not the kind of person who spends a lot of time scrolling through social media, and if you are, hey, no judgment, you probably know what an influencer is. Influencers are people who influence you. All right, all right, that wasn't super helpful. Influencers, what they do is they sell. Their goal is to get you to buy. I'm going to put a link in the description for you guys so you can shop all the looks that I'm showing. It's super easy to sign up and get matched with a therapist.

All you need to do is click the link down in my description or go to betterhelp.com. Now we'll add in our protein powder. Today I'm using Gorilla Mind. Code beef. They partner with brands from Amazon to Louis Vuitton to promote goods and services to their followers. They do it kind of more in the guise of being your friend or being relatable.

Diana Wiebe is 30 and lives in Columbus, Ohio. Wiebe is not an influencer, but she does use social media. And she says even though she knows how influencers work to convince their followers to buy, it is a lure that is hard to escape. For me, I got influenced mostly by like skincare stuff. And I watch an influencer and I'd be like, okay, yeah, this worked for them. I trust their opinion. Add to cart. I started to really realize how much I was spending because of being influenced by someone on TikTok. And Weeby then noticed the trend of come shopping with me videos popping up on TikTok.

People rolling through Dollar Tree or Target or Costco, pretty much any kind of big retail store, filling their carts with candy and clothing and cute little bowls for your ramen noodles and new makeup and yes, Stanley Cups. Really anything and everything. Come with me to fuel my unhealthy Sephora addiction. Come shopping with me at TJ Maxx. It's been way too long. Let's do shopping at Five Below. I heard that they have a lot of... And I just kept seeing stuff where I was like, this is garbage.

Like, why is this person buying this? So Weeby started to post videos on her own TikTok account. It's called depression.gov. Calling out, well, the garbage. Weeby's videos don't't influence they de-influence garbage who needs that did you even try this on more garbage that's gonna be out of style in like a year the trend of de-influencing emerged over the past few years and the hashtag on tiktok has 1.4 billion views now. Let's go shopping at Target,

except we're de-influencing ourselves. De-influencing you on travel stuff you don't actually need. And I think I'm here to de-influence you. Do not get the Aguinis. Do not get the Dyson Arab. Do not get the Charlotte Tilbury one. Do not get the Stanley Cup.

Do not. Initially, I saw the trend as something that was kind of like a response to the fatigue of influencing, of this constant messaging of buy, buy, buy, and sort of that hyperbolic language around products that get us tempted to buy them. Christina McCoss is a 36-year-old content creator living in Toronto, Canada. Even before the term de-influencing trended,

McCoss was encouraging her followers to buy less and make more mindful purchases. McCoss says she is a former shopaholic who had over $120,000 of student loan debt at one point. So she is totally here for the de-influencing trend. It was sort of a refreshing take to see this thing didn't change my life. This thing didn't work the way it was supposed to. It didn't live up to the hype. Save your money. But the consequences of overconsumption don't just have a negative effect on our wallets,

but also on our planet. With an online platform, influencers can spread a deeper message to their followers. How to live sustainably in a way that helps the planet and even the climate. It's got a little bit more interesting in terms of going, this isn't just about de-influencing, this is about using your influence in the right way. Consider this. Can convincing people to buy less actually help with climate change? And just how effective are de-influencers at convincing us that less is better?

We'll unravel these threads after the break. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Sunday, February 25th. It's Consider This from NPR. And before we get into the role that de-influencers play in addressing climate change, let's back up a bit. Not everyone hopping onto the de-influencing trend is necessarily trying to persuade people to buy less. Let's de-influence some skincare today and tell you what you should buy instead. Don't buy that. Buy this instead. Fragrance edition. Buy this. Not that. Louis Vuitton edition. People saw it as just another trend for them to hop on and figuring out how they can capitalize on it and using consumerism to capitalize on de-influencing,

which was just crazy. Michaela Farwick is a content creator in St. Louis, Missouri, and she says that while many de-influencers inspire people to make more conscious consumer decisions, like pretty much everything else on the internet, the trend came with a bit of bad too. I was just a little bit annoyed because it seemed like they were like, hey, I'm going to de-influence you from this lip gloss because this lip gloss is $42. How about you buy this $10 lip gloss instead? There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't think that that should have been the extent of

de-influencing. And that's what some people really thought. That was the extent of it. Like, I'm going to tell you not to buy this expensive product. Buy this dupe instead. It was still promoting this overconsumption. I think social media turns everything into a commodity. Like, is sustainability a new thing? Absolutely not. Aja Barber is author of the book Consumed, The Need for Collective Change. And she's kind of an OGD influencer.

She spent years speaking to issues of sustainability in the context of fast fashion. I do find the consumer goods topic is just like the best gateway to like being a more active citizen in general. And if you can get people to start thinking about the things that they buy, they start thinking about a lot of the bigger topics as well. De-influencers do get a lot of people to think about the impact of their purchases. And that's why the de-influencing conversation is being linked to addressing climate change and living sustainably.

Think about it. There's all of the packaging. There's all of the shipping. There's the fact that a lot of these products end up in landfills or end up being burned. All of that has an effect on the climate. So how exactly do de-influencers address these kinds of issues? How persuasive are they when it comes to influencing their audience to live more sustainably? What does that mean? I put all of these questions and more to Solitaire Townsend. She's a sustainability expert, co-founder of the change agency Futera, also author of the book The Solutionist, How Businesses Can Fix the Future. I started the conversation by just asking her to define what it means to be a sustainability expert. It's actually quite difficult being a sustainability expert because people expect you to sort of be the high priestess of all of this and they apologize about their recycling when you go to their houses and sort of

point out all the ways they're not sustainability perfect so I've got a master's degree in environmental science I've spent the last 20 years working with big brands and governments and communities on how we can live in a more sustainable way. But one thing is, I'm not perfect on this, and I know that nobody else is perfect on this. And so my business and my book is all about how this bunch of really imperfect people can try to make a bit of a better world. Yeah. So many things on social media are just sped up and more intense versions of what's happening in real life. Right. And and certainly the consumption on social media is that because you can see somebody try to sell you something

and just one or two clicks away, it's on its way to your house. You know, I have bought a lot of things I don't need on Instagram that seem really practical in the moment. But this also coincides with things happening in the real world. And given your work of sustainability, how did you respond to this moment when de-influencing became the hot thing on TikTok and other social media platforms? People making content, trying to get people to buy less things. So really exciting. And also only one part of the story. So you're absolutely right, Scott, de-influencing, big conversation, let's do less, let's do less, let's do less. But there's actually a whole lot of things we need to do more of. So one of the things which we started doing

was reaching out to a lot of these fantastic creators and saying, if you want to talk a little bit less about what to buy, can we talk a little bit more about how to live? Can we talk about sustainable lifestyles? And so what's happening now is that folks are beginning to do both. It's got a little bit more nuanced. It's got a little bit more interesting in terms of going, this isn't just about de-influencing. This is about using your influence in the right way. And what are some ways that what's going on in de-influencing ties into big questions about climate and how to live more sustainably for the climate? So for many of us, like, you know, we've known for a really long time that, you know, we've got to do our recycling. Maybe we've got to be a bit more careful with energy, about how we travel, about how we eat.

But the science, right up until recently, wasn't backing that. And then just in the last couple of years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, these are all scientists from all over the world, they're sort of the gurus of what's actually happening out there on climate. They included a chapter in the most recent report on sociocultural and behaviour change. In short, that means that what all of us people what all of us consumers what all of us um normal folks can do is we can make a real difference on climate change and they identified a whole set of behaviors which if done at scale if most of us did them would say five percent of demand side carbon now that doesn't sound like very much five percent until you realize that

the entire airline industry is only two and5%. So this is now huge. We've all got a role. And in that report, they mentioned influencers. They actually talked about the role of influencers and media in helping all of us to try to make some of these changes. And I understand Futera has done research on the effect that influencers and content creators can have here. Can you tell us what specifically you found? Absolutely. So working with various other partners, we were like, well, let's actually ask some creators what they think about some of this. And vast majority of social media creators, like these folks who watch online, who are talking

about shopping, who are talking about makeup, who are talking about food, who are talking about their kids, 76% of them really want to talk about sustainability more in their content. And over 96% of them say that when they do talk about this, that they get really positive engagement, that most of us who are following them really want them to help us with this. They want us to show them what to do. We want them to model these behaviors, but they actually feel discouraged from sharing this stuff because fear of greenwashing. Can you explain to people who might not be as familiar with the term what you mean when you're talking about greenwashing? Greenwashing is when you take a dirty product or you take something which isn't very sustainable and you paint it green, you basically overemphasize

or mislead by talking about something being sustainable when it's not, or when it's not quite as sustainable. As you're saying, there's new rules about greenwashing, the FTC here in the US saying that brands have to be really careful about how they talk about saying something's natural, saying something's green, saying something's eco-friendly. And they have to be really careful about how they talk about saying something's natural, saying something's green, saying something's eco-friendly. And they have to be able to prove that it is. You know, when you look at a lot of steps that people can take when it comes to climate, there's a criticism that there's steps that are a lot easier to take if you're more well-off, right? It's expensive to put solar panels on your house.

It's expensive to buy an electric car. What do you make of that criticism when it comes to the area that we're talking about here? People offering you more sustainable products on the internet or arguing about ways that you can change your online shopping habits on TikTok to be more sustainable. I think there's a bit of a danger

that lots of people are trying to sell us ways to save ourselves out of sustainability. You can't buy your way out of sustainability alone. Like, of course, we need to change our purchasing habits. But one of the things which we saw within the de-influencing trend was people saying, hey, yeah, consumption is bad, buy this product instead. And there's, you you know there's a bit of an irony within that so we've got to be really careful of the fact that actually sustainability doesn't just become an additional consumption trend where we're buying everything which we're already buying and now we're buying more sustainable products on top what you want to do is you want to

try to swap things out so find a sustainable version of what you've already got, swaps rather than additional purchases. Because I don't want folks to lose money trying to be sustainable. You shouldn't have to do that, not least because so many of the things which we need to do for sustainability, insulation, changing how we travel, changing our diet, they should actually save you money instead of being additional purchases. Do you see any downsides here when we're talking about this de-influencing trend? I think the downside I see is trend. Trend.

You know, this is a long-term change that we need to make to how our systems work and how we behave. But this is most definitely not a trend. And I think that's one of the things which we've got to be really careful on in social media is that this is a long-term support. And that's one of the things the creators can really, really do is to do this consistently over time until it's part of their lifestyles and helping it to be part of ours, which, you know, we all know that the habits can take a long time to change. They don't change in a trend.

Now, that's what I'm so excited about. It's why I don't want to see this as a trend. I actually want to see de-influencing becoming sustainable living. That was sustainability expert Solitaire Townsend. Reporting you heard throughout this episode was done by Brianna Scott, who also produced it. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sam Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Scott Detrow.