Convenience is Killing You

When you factor in the true cost of convenience, is it worth it?

Photo by Zoran Borojevic on Unsplash

Plastics aren’t the only symbol of our convenience culture that is destroying our environment, but if there is a poster boy for this topic, it is plastic.

If you go hunt and gather at your local grocery store, try to feed your family without getting anything that comes in plastic packaging. It’s damn hard. Even things that come in cardboard containers – like crackers or cereal – will likely have a plastic bag inside that holds the food. Your toilet paper likely comes in plastic, frozen foods are almost always wrapped in plastic, most dairy products are in a plastic container, and your eggs very well may be. A recent report surveying the aisles of Canadian supermarkets found that over 70 percent of the items in the produce department and the baby food aisle were packaged in plastic. I live in America and have shopped in supermarkets in Europe, and Hong Kong as well. I didn’t find that story on Canadian supermarkets surprising in the least. Plastics are nearly everywhere you get your food.

Plastic is durable and it lasts forever. That is the upside and the downside. Yes, it’s cool that your kids can play with the very same Legos that you did when you were their age, but it’s not cool that the plastic container you bought those Legos in is in a landfill somewhere and has a couple hundred years left until it is completely decomposed. Most single-use plastic has a lifespan that far outstrips your own:

Plastic bag lifespan – 20 years

Plastic spoon lifespan – 20 years

Plastic straw lifespan – 200 years

Plastic cup lifespan – 450 years

Plastic water bottle lifespan – 450 years

Plastic milk jug 500 years

Microplastics – 1,000 years +

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash (I added the expiration dates)

Plastic and your health

Oh, and here are some of the fun side effects of plastic use (mileage may vary); cancer, birth defects, genetic changes, bronchitis, ulcers, skin disease, vision problems, indigestion, liver disfunction, endocrine disruption, asthma, birth defects, and reproductive problems. Although the health impacts of this build-up in humans are unknown, experts have linked microplastic pollution to inflammation, infertility, and cancer in animals. Sperm counts in men around the globe have halved in the last 50 years. Do you just want to assume there is no correlation between the explosion in plastic and chemical use in our environments and the cratering of global sperm counts?

Plastics and in particular microplastics are everywhere. A 2020 study showed that about 60% of fish in the world have microplastics in them. Microplastics are in our blood, in the rain, and even in the air we breathe.

The EPA estimates that in the United States, about 14,530,000 tons of plastic containers and packaging were created in 2018. Of this number, about 14% was recycled, about 17% was burned for energy and about 70% ended up dumped in a landfill (numbers don’t add up to 100% because of rounding).

In Germany, the recycling rate grew from 3% in 1991 to 66% in 2017, due to the German Packaging Act, which requires retailers and manufacturers to pay a recycling fee for all packaging for consumer goods. The fee is based on the weight and type of packaging. The law incentivizes the use of lighter and more easily recyclable plastics. Also in Germany, paper has begun to replace plastic in frozen food packaging offered by some companies.

Feel free to reach out to me and let me know if Germany is truly a low-plastic paradise or if I’ve just come across two anomalies in my research. Germany is a lovely place to visit, but I couldn’t live there. Ich spreche kein Deutsch.

Personal choices won’t stop the problem. Collective choices can.

We can individually shop with our canvas bags, fill up our metal water bottles all we like, use paper straws, and even bring our own cutlery with us out to eat (I do not do this last one, but I’ve heard whispers). That will make a very small dent in the plastics problem. As with many large intractable environmental problems, we need governments to act. Governments aren’t the solution to everything, but they do set the rules of the road. It is no coincidence that Germany has a law that encourages plastic recycling, and the recycling rate is about 66% for all plastics. In the United States, such incentives are likely set at the state level, and they are rare. As a result, the plastic recycling rate is under 15% in the United States.

Governments setting the rules of the road for plastic production, use, and recycling could go a long way to addressing the issue. Overall, substituting materials that will break down in a human lifetime is the place to start. Nothing has to be recycled if it was never produced in the first place. Most plastics, even those in your grocery store can be replaced by paper, glass, aluminum or the products can simply sell without plastic containers. Why is my grocery store trying to sell me apples in a plastic bag right next to the same apples that are not in a plastic bag? The answer - convenience.

In many cases, these substitutes will cost more, and that is where the tension comes in. A politician doesn’t want to be the one to make your milk, butter, bread, or peanut butter cost more. So, we must tell them that this is what we want. We have to communicate that we believe our collective long-term well-being is more important than our near-term convenience. We have to communicate that some conveniences have a cost that we are no longer willing to pay.

I didn’t come here to just pick on plastic.

You can theoretically never leave your home or car and still be adequately fed and clothed. You can have all food delivered to your home, or if that is too inconvenient, yell into the clown's mouth, pull your car around, and pick up your food at the window. The same goes for your clothing.

You never have to walk or bike anywhere to get what you need to survive. Roads from the farthest flung suburbs can carry you into town to pick up one lone nail you need to finish a project, or you can just order that nail online and have a big truck deliver it too you the next day.

Our transportation system is designed for ultimate convenience, but aspects of that aren’t good for us in the long run either. Walkable and bikeable neighborhoods and cities cut down on pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and keep us healthier by making us move more.

But that takes time. Many people don’t have this time because they must get things done in a hurry. They only have a small amount of time away from their jobs, and they need a convenient world to get things done in a hurry.

But what if they didn’t?

Societies that value convenience over well-being perpetuate this problem. Convenience isn’t a dirty word, but we need to stop and think about what price we are paying for convenience, whether it is worth it, and why we need that convenience in the first place.

Do we need a service that delivers our groceries and our clothing to us so that we never have to leave our homes? We can do that. But it’s not good for us. That life is likely to be more sedentary. Fruits and vegetables don’t travel as well as processed foods, so our diets will not be as healthy as they could be. We will not get out in the community as much and interact and connect with real people, which is where most satisfaction with life comes from – human connection.

We should look to build societies where well-being trumps convenience.

Walking down to the grocery store where you buy local produce, support a local business and interact with the people in the community that you know is better for your physical health, the business of the local farmer, the business of the local supermarket, and the social fabric of the community. And it costs you less because you don’t have to pay the DoorDash delivery fee.

You can say that you are taking away a job from the DoorDash employee who brings you your food. That may be true, but that DoorDash job is a bullshit job.

Bullshit job: Work that is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth (David Graeber from his book: Bullshit Jobs).

But I’ll wait to write more about that next week.