Excerpt From The Author: It’s all the stuff you asked me about! After launching the Story of Stuff film, I received tens of thousands of emails asking for more information than I could possibly fit into the film. I wrote this book to explore these issues further with you and to share a journey both personal and material. While exploring where our t-shirts, laptops and books come from, I also share my own journey along the way. I share stories of how I went from being a high school kid interested in forests to an adult fascinated with garbage to realizing that the real solution lay beyond either of those issues in isolation.

The book has all the information from the movie, plus:

Much more detail about the stages of the materials economy — extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal; more facts and examples from all over the world. We visit Nigerians resisting oil extraction, garment workers in Haiti, Zero Waste activists in the U.S. and more.

More signs of hope with reports of real people working to make real change right now at the local, national and international level.

More examples of solutions, descriptions of how we can do everything from invent chemicals to build communities which support environmental and social well being. This includes lists of policies and practices that any of us — hopefully all of us! — can start working on right now to make the materials economy safe, sustainable and fair.

And finally, my own journey. I share stories of traveling in Bangladesh, South Africa, India and other countries, visiting the factories where our stuff is made and the dumps where it is dumped. I share stories of pollution as personal as my own toxic body levels to the site of the largest chemical industrial disaster ever — Bhopal, India. And I share why, in spite of all the dire environmental data emerging every day, I am full of hope that we can turn things around.