Updated September 19, 2020

We live in a convenience-loving society. And so naturally, we want lots of conveniences at home.

I read about a young grocery store clerk who told an older customer to bring her own bags. After all, plastic bags aren’t good for the environment.

The older lady said, “We didn’t have this green thing in my earlier days.” The clerk actually blamed the customer’s generation for not caring enough about the environment to preserve it for future generations! Inexcusable!

Suppose the older lady was a baby boomer. In that case, she actually represents the first generation to get excited about environmental issues. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, not a baby boomer, first conceived of an environmental teach-in. Then he hired a bunch of baby boomers to run it. They came up with the name “Earth Day.”

If she was older than baby boom, she remembered the Depression and the rationing during World War II. Everyone practiced green habits in those days, but no one called them that. They were times of deprivation. Once they were over, everyone rushed to take advantage of all the latest conveniences

Awareness of eco-friendly practices might have begun with Earth Day 1970, but many and perhaps most of our least green habits as a society started since then. In fact, the environmental movement itself bears some responsibility for one of our most serious ecological disasters through passage of ill-conceived legislation about bottles.

Plastic bags

Take those plastic bags, for example. They came along some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Before that all stores used paper bags. That meant a lot of dead trees, but at least they were biodegradable. I remember well the first time I encountered plastic bags. I lived across the street from a grocery, so of course I walked.

By that time, I owned a car, but I had gotten it only recently. So I had long either walked or taken public transportation to the grocery store. I always had to ask the cashier to put all of my purchases into one bag so I could carry them home.

When my store switched to plastic bags and I could carry several in each hand, I was ecstatic. Understanding the environmental cost of that convenience came to me–let’s confess, to our whole society–only years later.

Now we know that they clog pipes and waterways and make flooding worse. They make their way into the ocean and join one of five garbage patches. On land or sea, animals become entangled in them and die.

Household appliances

Electric dryers, the biggest energy hogs of any household appliance, predate the first Earth Day. Nonetheless, we use them more nowadays.

Not long ago, everyone had clothes lines. I remember when I first moved to Chicago and started taking the el. It went behind lots of three-flat apartment buildings.

All of the outside stairways, and the clothes lines attached to them, were exposed to plain view. Actually, I didn’t notice the lines themselves unless laundry was hanging on them, but it frequently was.

My mother used the dryer only when it was raining. If she could, she hung the laundry out to dry. Why? Partly because she grew up in the Depression and partly because she liked the smell and feel of line-dried clothes better than what came out of the dryer. We even had clotheslines in the basement so she could at a least hang the sheets and pillow cases when it was raining.

She long ago stopped using clotheslines and uses the dryer all the time. After all, she’s 99 and needs a cane to walk. But I wonder if that’s the only reason my parents took down the clothesline in the back yard. There is no homeowners’ association in that neighborhood, but plenty of associations forbid clotheslines.

Some people think they’re ugly. So now everyone has to use a wasteful appliance to do something the wind and sun can do for free. Just because some folks don’t want to look at what was so common not long ago.

Smaller appliances

We didn’t have food processors or blenders when I was growing up. We did have electric mixers, but Mom didn’t always use them. If stirring with a spoon was easy enough, she used it. It was a lot easier to wash a spoon than the mixer and all the stuff you have to use along with it.

I have a blender, but I seldom use it. I confess that I didn’t have much use for it besides making milkshakes after I got my food processor. And I still remember how to make shakes by letting ice cream soften in a glass, adding milk etc., and stirring with a long spoon.

Actually, I don’t use my food processor very much either. I know how to use a whole array of knives, my potato masher, and other hand tools. Unless I have a task the food processor can do a lot better than I can, it stays in the cabinet.

Every year, it seems, some company comes out with some new gadget they tout as so much more convenient than what everyone already has. So they want everyone to rush out and buy the latest whatever it is and get rid of whatever was the latest and greatest just a year or two earlier.

I still see nice sets of knives in stores. Some people must still know how to use them. Same with other tools that don’t need to be plugged in. But the new gee-whiz gadgets always seem to use more power than whatever they want to replace.

Disposables

Once upon a time, not all that long ago,

• If an umbrella, pen, clock, or other common item broke, you took it somewhere to get it fixed.
• When a man’s razor got dull, he replaced the blade instead of throwing out the whole razor. Actually, before that, my grandfather and lots of other men still used straight razors and sharpened them with a strop.
• When a pen ran out of ink, people put in a refill. They did not discard the whole pen. Some people actually still used fountain pens.
• Parents of babies either laundered cloth diapers themselves or used a diaper service. Disposable diapers might be much easier to put on, but they’re still every bit as nasty to change. And they take up lots of space in our landfills.
• Paper plates and plastic “silverware” were used only at picnics and cookouts. Never for ordinary meals at home.
• Water came from the tap. People poured it into a glass, which then got washed. If they were away from home, they drank from a water fountain. If they went for a walk or something and wanted to take water, they put it in a canteen.
• Milk and soft drinks used to come in glass bottles. We paid a deposit and returned them to the store when they were empty.

One misstep of environmentalism

Unfortunately, then as now many litterbugs simply dumped bottles on the ground when they were finished. Litter has been an eyesore since the first time someone thought to object to it, centuries ago.

Glass bottles didn’t stay on the ground for long, though. Children and poor people used to look for them, collect them, and turn them in to get the deposit.

That was altogether a more environmentally friendly practice than we have now, and the environmental movement is at least partly responsible for its demise.

It mounted successful bills in many states to ban those bottles. I can’t remember for the life of me why it seemed like a good idea, but I actively circulated petitions in favor of Iowa’s bottle bill.

When it passed, I immediately found the consequences most disappointing. Vending machines no longer offered glass bottles. Instead, they sold cans. Gone was the rack where we used to put empty bottles. Did anyone put recycling bins in their place to collect the cans?

No. Recycling hardly existed until 10 or 15 years later.

Eventually, even the aluminum cans began to disappear from vending machines and some convenience stores in favor of plastic bottles–smaller than the two-liter size, but larger than the cans.

Not long after that, some marketer got the bright idea of selling water in plastic bottles, claiming that somehow it was safer or better tasting than tap water. In fact, a lot of it actually is tap water.

Your municipal water system has to tell you. Water bottlers don’t. And since water in plastic bottles became so widely accepted, they have replaced a lot of drinking fountains.

There’s no need to explain here how badly the environment has suffered from the glut of plastic bottles. After all, they’re lighter, they don’t break, and you can just pitch them instead of returning them for the deposit. And that last “advantage” is the whole problem.

Other disposables

Cooking seems too inconvenient, so we get takeout or buy prepared meals from the freezer section of the grocery store. Along with the food, we get lots of packaging, table service, straws, and a bigger than necessary stack of paper napkins.

And it’s too inconvenient to make a pot of coffee. No. We have to get single-serving coffee pods.

Even 20 years ago, who thought of clothing as disposable? Fast fashion means that we get cheap clothing that will wear out about the same time as it goes out of style. Then, it’s convenient to throw it out.

We have long used pens, razors, and such once and thrown them out. Now, with COVID-19, we can add masks and gloves to the list of trash littering the landscape or taking up landfill space. Launder a cloth mask? Too inconvenient.

So, can we go back to the ways of the past? Why not? The past, after all, isn’t that long ago. The thing is, our present wastefulness crept up on us slowly. It’s somehow more convenient than the more eco-friendly life styles that are still within living memory.

Some of us–well, millions of us–will have to decide to give up these “conveniences” cold turkey. And that will be difficult unless millions of us can successfully cry out for manufacturers to put some of the old reusable, repairable products back on the market again.

Check out the rest of the posts in my occasional series The Cost of Convenience.

Photo credits:
Plastic bag in garden. Some rights reserved by Julian Stallabrass.
Clothes line. Some rights reserved by Ben Lucier.
After the London Marathon. Some rights reserved by Paul Simpson.