I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in products lately. After the early 90s and its “green” period, we’ve come full circle and seem to be making more disposable products than ever.
To wit: Swiffer Dry, Swiffer Wet, Swiffer Dusters, Swiffer Mitts, Pledge Grab-It, Saran Cutting Sheets, GladWare, Windex Wipes, Tostitos Snack Kits, and Tostitos dips in “ready to go” bowls (the one I couldn’t find a link for).
Of course, the last one is what got my goat: salsa and nacho cheese dips in ready to go bowls, because it was so very difficult to take them out of jars and provide your own bowl. Gee whiz. Between the glut of convenience foods and disposable items, I can’t imagine how our landfills are looking these days.
When did this all happen? It seems that Swiffer started it, and then everything was in wipe form: toilet bowl cleaner, furniture polish, dusting stuff, chocolate…. Of course the disposable food items aren’t as new – but they seem much more common now.
Disclaimer: I do use Swiffer products (or store brands, truthfully) and enjoy them. But I still see the problem with them.
Posted in Everyday Life
darrell February 18, 2007, 3:57 am
I had a buddy one time refer to the trend to dispose of things as the bic lighter syndrone. So I did some research on it and the trend as far as I could tell came from the soda industry, when I was a kid you could always go hunt for soda bottles to get a little cash, but then they went and got smart… hey lets not bring all those bottles back and clean and refill them, it cost too much lets put the responsibility on the consumer, they can just throw them away.
My information comes from the late 70s but i found that there was enough aluminum to rebuild all this nations airlines 21 times, enough glass for 4 glasses for every man woman and child on earth, enough copper to strech from here to the sun, and enough steel to rebuild Manhattan Island, not to mention paper and plastic
seems to me that in the future when all our resource have been depleted we may have to start mining the landfills