Low Quality Living

I’m reading Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel, and so far I’m struck not by the toxic effects on the environment that I expected but by the love story.  To me, plastics are like people. They can be good, like bullet proof vests and the police officers who wear them, or bad, like the many cheap, single use products and people who toss these products out the car window when they’ve finished with them. 

Plastics have a pretty bad rep thanks to all of the environmental damage they do.  If there was a cotton candy to plankton ratio of 46 to 1, we probably wouldn’t like cotton candy, either. But what doesn’t get as much press is that one day, long long ago, plastic was envisioned as a solution to many of the problems inherent in other materials.

The problem happened when we started using plastic not just where it should be needed, but in everything. The problem was when everything became plastic, and when a lot of that plastic was crap.

Freinkel writes “Today’s flood of cheap, disposable products mocks early utopian hopes that plastics would fulfill all our wants and needs. Instead of feeling fulfilled, we now often feel chocked by an empty abundance.”

And in fact, this empty abundance is one of the things most wrong with our SUDs culture. Instead of relying on well-designed, made-to-last products, we use crap. We don’t pollute the environment with our opulent and aesthetically pleasing lifestyle, we pollute it with our reliance on crap!