Shopping, Ecology, and the Economic Crisis: A Paradox

Two recent posts from my friends over on Opera have stirred up mixed emotions and thoughts. This World War II-era poster (posted by Wicked Lizard) captures my feelings exactly. In fact, I've even been working on a new weekly feature about buying less and clearing out clutter. Certainly, the "reduce" part of the "reduce, reuse, recycle" equation is better for the planet. And I'm ashamed when I read in this article that "the average American consumes about fifty-three times more goods and services than someone from China." Alas, the entire Western world, and China itself, are quickly catching up.

But my friend Richard points out that when consumers stop buying products, the people who make, package, ship, and sell those products suffer. Factories turn off their machines, businesses close, jobs are lost, people go hungry. In his post he shares an email he received from a record company practically begging people to buy CDs to keep the economy rolling. Buy a CD, they plead, and keep us in business.

They have a point: According to this article in the Christian Science Monitor, consumer spending has dropped to levels not seen since 1942, (the era of that white elephant poster.) "When necessity or worry causes most consumers to save money at the same time, it causes a problem known among economists as the 'paradox of thrift.' Consumers are acting rationally to safeguard their financial health in a recession, but their collective action may hurt everyone by shrinking the economy even more."

So what's a responsible world citizen to do? Please share your thoughts. How are you responding to the paradoxical crises affecting our world? Read more!

Caveat Emptor: Four Commandments of Consumption

Dear Readers: The theme of this blog is things--things that tell a story about life, relationships, society, culture. Things that are in some way significant, beautiful, historical, necessary, or useful. But the fact is, some things are just things. (Or, as George Carlin would say, “stuff.”) And some stuff is, quite simply, annoying. This is a rant about annoying stuff. If rants aren't your cup of tea, I hope you'll scroll down and check out some earlier posts. :-)

A week or so ago I got a new frying pan. Our old one, a copper-bottomed pan that belonged to my mother, had become warped and didn’t cook evenly.(I have a theory that there are two kinds of people: the Matching Pan People--who refer to it as "cookware"-- and the rest of us. We are proud to be among the Unmatched Pan People.)

So anyway, I bring the new pan home, remove the cardboard covering, and peel off the label, which is taped smack in the middle of the pan. I start washing it so I can make a nice veggie and scallop stir-fry. A full thirty minutes later, after scrubbing with boiling water, soap, a scouring pad, and Comet cleanser, I have finally gotten rid of the sticky residue left from the tape, or at least enough of it that I am fairly certain it won't form a chemical reaction with my ginger sauce and kill us. I fail to notice that the pan also has tape on the bottom, so now it is permanently scorched in.

Which leads to one of the vexing enigmas of modern consumption: Why do stores ruin products by attaching labels that damage the things they are selling? For example, those little T-shaped plastic strips holding price tags on sweaters and socks that pull the threads when you try to remove the last little sharp bit that is always buried in the fabric.

Even more annoying are the deliberately shoddy products, where the manufacturer’s only goal is to get you to buy the item, like a fly-by-night snake-oil salesman who will be in the next county by the time your hair turns green and the diarrhea sets in.

Such companies put all of their effort into marketing. What do they care if the thing falls apart or doesn’t work after you’ve paid for it? How many people will take the trouble to return a $1.99 utensil? Example: We have a pasta spoon that is so heavy on the handle end that if you rest it in a pan or bowl, it flips out, flinging sauce and noodles everywhere.

The most annoying of all are the stealth-crap products, those whose shoddiness doesn’t become apparent until a few days or weeks after you buy them. The pants with the hem that falls out after the first washing, the jackets that lose their buttons, the new shoes that lose a heel when you're walking down a flight of stairs (it happened to me).

Case in point: I bought a silver metal bathroom set that included a soap dispenser (the spigot broke in two weeks), a toilet brush and a toilet paper holder. Now, I may be missing something here, but what is the one purpose of a toilet brush? To scrub the toilet. And what is one thing that is always in a toilet? It doesn't take Helen Keller and Teacher to spell out the answer: W-A-T-E-R. So wouldn’t you think a container designed to hold a dripping toilet brush would be made of stainless steel? No such luck. It is made of a metal that rusted through in just a few months, leaving marks on my floor. (I apologize for this graphic photo. I swear the stains are nothing but rust!) Of course, it has no manufacturer’s mark and I can’t remember which of the ubiquitous box stores sold it, so I can't file a complaint or get a refund. Instead, it is one more piece of trash for a future Wall-E to compact and stack into a massive pyramid of waste.

Such experiences have led me to create the Four Commandments of Consumption:

The First Commandment: Thou Shalt Buy No Crap. I will buy quality things that will last, or I won't buy them at all.

The Second Commandment: When Possible, Thou Shalt Buy Used. It's better for the environment -- no packaging to dispose of and it keeps perfectly useful stuff from ending up in a landfill. Best of all, there are no labels to remove!

The Third Commandment: Thou Shalt Ask 'Can I live without it?' Shopping for shopping's sake seems to be the new national past-time, encouraged by shows like Sex and the City and stores piled with doodads so cheap that we figure, well, why not? But a little item that seems to cost just a dollar has hidden costs, from cluttering the house to clogging landfills.

Which brings me to the Fourth Commandment: (non)-Garbage In, Garbage Out. For each new item that comes into the house (excluding groceries and cleaning supplies), at least one object must go, either in the garage sale, Ebay or charity pile, or in the trash. The result? Equilibrium, Koyanaskatsi, Life in Balance, Less Stuff to Dust.

Do you have any Commandments to add? What is your most frustrating product story? Post them in Comments
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That's Quite a Package!

Sometimes the most important part of a thing is the decision not to buy it in the first place.

At the grocery store the other day, I was in a hurry and thoughtlessly grabbed a couple of packaged noodle dishes because the picture on the box looked good. As soon as I got home, the noodles sat on my counter mocking me. I don't exactly wear a green halo, but I recycle, use canvas grocery bags when I can remember them, and try not to buy products that come in layer after layer of packaging like Russian stacking dolls.

When I opened the noodles, I was ashamed and appalled. The outer package was a cardboard box. Inside the box was a plastic bowl, with a plastic lid, both shrink-wrapped in a plastic sheet. Inside the bowl, there were -- count them -- four separate packages, two foil, two plastic, containing peanuts, noodles, sauce, and "vegetables" (some weird powder that looks nothing like any vegetable I know). To top it off, there was a tiny plastic fork. All this for 8 ounces of lunch.

Why do we buy these things? Do we really need the momentary convenience of a disposable bowl that will languish in a landfill for a thousand years once we're done with lunch? After all, since the product must be microwaved, most of us will be eating it at home or in an office, where it shouldn't be all that hard to find a real, washable bowl. Ditto the plastic fork. And why all the separate packages for the ingredients?

I've also noticed a disturbing trend in take-out food.

Take Applebees for example. The food is fine, but the packaging is horrible: Three-inch deep oval plastic trays as big as serving platters, covered in plastic lids, all packed in a giant paper bag, with forks, napkins, and little packets of salt and pepper. I like take-out, but geez...couldn't they at least use coated cardboard? More and more, I resist the urge to order out because I can't justify the waste.

When I came of age, casual drug use and sex were completely acceptable but wastefulness was a sin. I lived with parents who had been Dust Bowl and Depression babies and had experienced real deprivation. My own teen years coincided with gas shortages and President Jimmy Carter asking us to turn our thermostats down to 68 degrees in winter. I learned to turn the water off while I brushed my teeth and to rinse and reuse aluminum foil and baggies. I read books like The Population Bomb and Diet for a Small Planet-- which led me to become a vegetarian -- and The Monkey Wrench Gang, which made me fantasize about chopping down billboards that marred the landscape. We called it environmentalism, now shortened to the more colorful "green."

It may be pure nostalgia, or maybe guilt at my own backsliding ways, but it seemed like consumers had more of a voice back then, or more of an environmental conscience. I remember the public outcry against the plastic eggs that contained L'eggs pantyhose, which forced the company to start putting nylons in cardboard boxes. A few years later, public pressure persuaded record stores to stop selling CD's in those over-sized plastic "jewel cases." But somewhere along the way, in spite of all the talk about global warming and buying green, we seem to have become blase about wasteful packaging. The one exception is bottled water, which has recently gotten well-deserved scorn. But meanwhile, we keep dutifully buying salads in foam clamshells, tomatoes in plastic boxes, and toys that are wrapped more elaborately than an Egyptian mummy. Just today I bought some antacid. The box was twice the size of the bottle, which was 10 times larger than necessary to hold the pills it contained. Why? The answer, no doubt, is shelf space. A larger container is more likely to catch our eye as we pass by, pushing our grocery cart, which itself was designed to get people to buy more stuff.

At any rate, the saga of the plastic noodles has reminded me to be more conscientious when I'm shopping. Now, about those billboards.... Acetylene torch, anyone?

Links: Population Timb Bomb
Recipes for a Small Planet
The Monkey Wrench Gang
History of the shopping cart Read more!