The most wasteful consumer products that we use everyday
Death to flossers
This past weekend was my daughter’s birthday, and birthdays cannot exist without cake. And birthday cake cannot exist without candles and singing Happy Birthday. While we sang and I watched the candles burn, I was reminded how wasteful birthday candles are.
I try to be a responsible consumer. I buy very few things besides food, and I always pay attention to packing. I frequently ask myself, “Do I need this?” and most of the time the answer is no. Often if the answer is yes, I’ll think about it a little longer until the answer becomes no.
Birthday candles might be the most wasteful purchase that I make on a regular basis. (Although, truth be told, I often forget the candles and have to scrounge through the cabinets looking for strays, or be saved by someone more prepared than me.) Who decided that birthday candles need to be so tall? Is that for safety reasons, or is it just so the birthday candle company can make us feel like we’re buying substantial candles when we’re forking over three bucks? Ninety-five percent of a birthday candle is waste. You stick it in the cake, light the wick, sing a short song, and then the birthday person blows/spits on them to extinguish the flame. And that’s the end of the road for the birthday candle even though you’ve only used a single-digit percent of it.
However, as I thought about birthday candles, I realized there are plenty of other contenders for the title of Most Wasteful Consumer Product.
Drink carriers – Few things annoy me more than drink carriers. I’m talking specifically about those little cardboard trays designed to let you carry four fast food drinks at once. It’s like some mad scientist decided to invent the shortest life-spanned, most needless consumer product, and this was the result. Imagine a world without drink carriers. What would happen? If you’re in a drive-thru you’d have to reach up to the window with one hand and grab a drink four times instead of reaching up once with both hands, grabbing the carrier, and then trying to navigate it through your car window without hitting the top of the drinks on the car door and spilling them everywhere. If you’re in the restaurant, you’d have to make a couple of trips from the counter to your destination, and you’d miss out on the excitement of whether the flimsy carrier is going to collapse at its singular moment of performance. But whether it performs its lone job flawlessly or flawfully, the result is the same: the carrier goes in the garbage. Production, storage, 10 seconds of use, garbage. What a life!
And don’t even get me started on those “helpful” employees who double up the drink carriers. I swear every time they do that they look in my direction and wink at me as if to say, “Take that, single-drink carrier.”
Styrofoam packing peanuts – I’m glad that these are being phased out, or so it seems. Did anyone ever test these environmental abominations to see if they actually provide extra padding for the item being shipped? They’re so flimsy that it seems like they’d just scatter when faced with the force of a heavy “protected” object hitting the ground in the box it’s being shipped in. Does anyone have evidence of packing peanuts making a difference? If not, don’t fret. Those damn things aren’t going to decompose for about sixty-six million years, so they’ve got plenty of time to become useful.
Straws – This is a tough one for me because there’s no doubt that this is my worst environmental atrocity. The number of straws that I use for just one Diet Coke and then throw away to outlast all of us in a landfill is insulting to Mother Earth. I need to do better. I’m looking for reasons to stop drinking Diet Coke, and if filling my body with questionable chemicals isn’t good enough reason, then maybe the straws will do it.
Plastic utensils, plates, cups – These are the ultimate short-term convenience, long-term ruin item. Let’s pollute the air and water to manufacture items that already exist in repeat-use form, but make them single use, and non-biodegradable, so when another non-human animal takes over the earth, my red Solo cup from Super Bowl XXVII will still exist if they want to dig it up in a landfill somewhere.
Flossers – I have no proof, but I think the devil invented these. We’ve somehow accepted that a perfectly usable product (floss) should be “improved” by attaching a small piece of it to a piece of plastic with something like a flat toothpick on one end so we can clean our teeth. God forbid we wrap a piece of floss around our fingers. Give us a floss handle.
Toilet paper – I know, who wants to do without toilet paper? It’s one of those necessary evils. But 90% of toilet paper is handle. There’s the part of toilet paper that we use, and then the rest is just protection. There’s a reason why bidets exist.
I realize change is hard, and it’s unlikely that you’re going to stop using any of the products above. But I’m going to try to do better. And even if you can’t make any big changes, at least forgo the drink carrier. Just once. Try it. You’ll be surprised what you can do with your own hands!