Waste Makes Haste

By David Wann, AlterNet. Posted June 16, 2003.

Speed is irrelevant if you're traveling in the wrong direction.
-- Mohandas Gandhi

I had an unsettling thought the other day as I wrestled, scissors in hand, with the fortress-like plastic packaging around a new electric razor. I wondered if anyone had accidentally taken his own life trying to unwrap a consumer item like this one. If a person's flustered grip on the package slipped, I thought, those sharp scissors could plunge into vital organs. Cause of death: thick, stubborn packaging.

I knew the packaging was as much for the manufacturers' and retailers' benefits as mine, and in a way, I resented that. They were making the money, I was spending the time -- first the work-time to buy the expensive razor, then the fluster-time to penetrate its package.

I'd bought the electric unit because I was tired of buying and throwing out blades. I wanted something that lasts longer than refrigerator leftovers.

I hoped to do less damage to my checking account and to the environment with the electric razor, but considering all the electricity the razor would use and all the energy that had gone into its manufacture, I wasn't completely certain. Still, it did feel better than the prospect of tossing another five thousand blades (and all their packaging) before I die.

I thought about the man who got me into this shaving jam to begin with -- King Gillette, who, at the end of the 19th century pondered what sort of business he should launch. Why not sell an essential but flawed product, he reasoned, that would be thrown away after a few uses, providing a steady stream of profits? In a sense, Gillette and people like him were responsible not only for the disposable razor blade but also for the calculated, costly, disposable culture we're tangled up in.

To obtain the "convenience" of those throwaway blades, how many hours do we spend prowling supermarket aisles in search of new cartridges? How much "hidden" time do we spend in the car and at work? And of course, it's not just razor blades but computer equipment, frozen dinners, paper towels, tape dispensers, batteries, even cars and houses, all of which typically have short and shoddy lifetimes.

Aren't we hurrying partly to overcome the hidden costs of these disposable, poorly designed products?

Frozen dinners, for example, seem to be quick and easy but there's much more time involved than meets the eye. The packaging is programmed for a shelf life of maybe six months, a cook time of two minutes and a landfill dead-time of centuries. A surprisingly large percentage of the product's price is for packaging, then we pay ongoing energy costs to keep it frozen, and health costs from air pollution related to manufacture, distribution, and disposal.

Or take computers. They're incredibly fast, but their speed is sometimes a liability. For example, home computers not only enable workers to extend the workday into their personal lives, they also enable us to shop 'til we drop in the privacy of our own homes.

Unless we choose the often-unavailable option of ground delivery, our Internet orders will be sent airmail, five times as energy-intensive as delivery by truck. When Amazon.com pledged to deliver copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the book's publication date, a squadron of airplanes distributed 250,000 packages to readers anxiously sitting by their mail chutes.

Computers have other hidden costs, which we pay for by working longer and longer hours. To take advantage of the computer's racehorse speed, we pamper it with the latest software, which takes time to download. We wait for it to boot up, and we wait as it steeplechases to a desired web page. We "defrag" it, upgrade it, forgive its inopportune crashes that leave us helpless, and like a protective, anxious mother, we shelter it from viruses. These are some of the hidden time costs.

Then there are the many hidden ecological costs, well explained by Jim Fisher in a web article titled "Poison PC's:" "Along with the lead in its cathode ray tubes and circuit boards," he writes, "my computer was loaded with chemicals that have documented risks to public health and the environment: There was cadmium in its semiconductors, mercury in its switches and position sensors, chromium in its steel housing, brominated flame retardants in its circuit boards, nickel, lithium, cadmium and other metals in its batteries. All that was missing was a 55-gallon drum."

It's not likely computers will ever give way to index cards and typewriter ribbons again (that would be a return to the Dark Ages), but since they contain 700 different materials, computers must be designed for effortless recycling. And since they require so much energy to manufacture, our product strategy needs to change from obsolescence to durability.

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