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| The savy consumer can buy a bag of 200 of these tiny plastic babies online. |
“It cannot be right to manufacture billions of objects that are used for a matter of minutes, and then are with us for centuries.”– Roz Savage
This month's DCIM entry is more of a category rather than one product.
However, in order to show the potential for dumbness, I highlight one example - tiny plastic babies that come in a pack of 200.
While plastic is an incredibly versatile material that allows the manufacture of many useful things, it also has caused a tsunami of crap to inundate the marketplace.
I suppose there is a reason why someone might want to buy a pack of 200 tiny plastic babies, but I can't think of a single one myself.
And who would actually think to produce such a product?
You know where every one of said tiny tots is going to end up.
Some will be found littering the ground, often in the most unexpected places. Like in the formerly unspoilt wilderness.
Sweet! Just what I want to see when trying to get away from it all.
Many of these radically reduced rascals will end up in the ocean. And then in the guts of hungry gulls and sea turtles.
No doubt some of the plastic babies will make their way into the digestive tracks and up the nostrils of real babies.
Obviously the system has not thought this plastic crap crescendo fully through to its logical conclusion.
Which is, there is no need to manufacture (or buy) about 95% of the plastic (and non-plastic) items on offer in today's consumer marketplace.
The amazing thing is how they have made us desire and pay our hard earned money for useless crap in the first place.
Buying hundreds of miniature maternal masses of plastic? It's not normal.
Some may even say it's dumb. I'll leave that up to you to decide.
Grrrr! "SINGAPORE, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Plastic use in G20 countries is on course to nearly double by the middle of the century unless a comprehensive and legally binding global treaty to curb consumption is drawn up, according to research published on Monday." We are insane.
ReplyDeleteMy anti-plastic journey began way back in the early 1960s with an article in a battered Reader's Digest I picked up and read in the waiting room of a dentist's office. I think I was about 10. The article gave a brief history of plastics to date, then went on to extoll the virtues of plastic, how plastics would reduce the costs of production for many products and especially the costs of shipping product, and how plastics were the answer because they were virtually indestructable. Even at 10 years of age a red light went off in my brain (I was the kid who drove people crazy by always asking, "Why?").
The next jolt came when I was in my early twenties and attending a convention in Arizona. Another attendee excitedly invited me to spend the afternoon with her visiting a place that was "so cool it's gonna blow your mind." The mind-blowing place was wholesale/retail outlet in a huge building, easily the size of an airplane hangar, packed floor to ceiling, aisle after aisle, with so-called beauty products from around the world, all in brightly-coloured plastic bottles and packaging. My mind was blown - to the point I became one of those annoying anti-petrochemical industry letter writing, "anti-progress" environmental crazies. I even ran a Facebook page for a number of years but closed it down when it came to the point where all it really seemed to do was attract droves of "yes, but-ers."
So, there I am. Sadly it has become more and more difficult as the years have gone by - even for those of us who are not big consumers - to avoid the scourge of plastic. But, we true crazies still do our best.
Plastic babies indeed.
I long to be true crazy like you, but I can never seem to stay of that path. I'll keep trying though. Doreen USA
DeleteWe are indeed insane when we package something we use in minutes in plastic containers that last a thousand years. What?
DeleteIn the beginning (the 50s?) it was all about "Better Living With Chemicals", and plastics must have been part of that. Well, we can all see how that worked out.
Linda and I have been working to de-plasticize our home. We found that most of the plastic that came into our house was in our grocery orders. I remember when we said, "No more hard shell plastic", which meant no more stuff from the bakery, because almost everything they sold came in hard shell plastic containers.
One reason we like making our food from scratch is that we no longer need to buy those same foods in plastic containers from the store. So few things are sold in glass containers any more. So, we just make our own stuff and use canning jars like crazy to keep it all in.
Thank you for your efforts to de-plasticize the planet. It is an epic undertaking, for sure.
- Gregg