I keep a pair of scissors in every room of my house. There are scissors in my car and always always in my checked bag. (There are also mayonnaise packets in my purse and carry-on.) I don’t go anywhere without scissors and mayonnaise. The mayo is just because it’s delicious and makes even cardboard sandwiches from a gas station edible. The scissors are because every blasted thing one comes in contact with these days is packaged. Wrapped in hard plastic or layers of cardboard, which are encased in endless tape. Every gadget in one’s cart, every item that magically appears on one’s doorstep … packaged. All of it wrapped up tight and I cannot for the life of me open it. Not any of it.
I have the hand strength of a three-year-old. No, come to think of it, I got accidentally punched in the nose by a three-year-old once and it hurt for two weeks. So let’s go with a two-year-old, a toddler. Watch me try to pry apart a bag of potato chips sometime. There is actual entertainment value in it if you love exhibitions of sheer determination, contortions of frustration, and ultimately failure. No chips for me. This is probably best anyway, because at 63 keeping my girlish figure takes a lot more effort and requires that I eat a lot fewer salty snacks.
Why must the two doses of my allergy nose spray be contained in a hard plastic case, which is barely penetrable even with my trusty scissors? Once pierced, the thing becomes a minefield of sharp edges. All it takes is a good sneeze while trying to wrestle one spray bottle from its plastic prison and there will be blood.
I use a brand of toothbrush, which sends me a new brush head and battery every three months. It is a torturous device in many respects, and that is just one of them. It also demands that you brush for exactly two minutes which is a whole lot of brushing. It beeps every thirty seconds to remind you to move from the front of your teeth to the back from the top row to the bottom. I hate it but I use it dutifully and obey its commands because:
Teeth. I need teeth.
I recently traveled to visit my sister Laura in California. I brought the new brush head and battery with me because I had tried every way I could think of, every day for a week but my kiddie mitts would not budge the old one. My sister had to defer to her wife Sarah who is blessedly younger, with a good pair of hands, before we could finally accomplish the task. My oral hygiene is now a multi-state, three-person family affair.
There is a jar of pickles in the fridge which has been there unopened for a year because yeah, no. No possible way. Not with pliers or that weird disk thing that’s supposed to give you leverage. Not after prying at the lid with a butter knife, trying to break the seal, or banging the thing on its head repeatedly, hoping to loosen it. It just sits there taunting me and of course I have thought of asking a visitor to liberate my dills but, while my hands may be 2 years old, my brain is 63, so I never remember to do it.
So pickles, along with most jarred foods, are off the list. No chips or other packaged food on the fly. If I cannot cut it open, whatever it is, then I cannot have it. My doctors now order my prescriptions without childproof lids because those are also Bethproof. Thank God for airplanes and sisters, or what would become of my teeth?
The most recent statistic from the EPA regarding the amount of packaging that winds up in landfills is from 2018. There appears to have been a lack of political will or perhaps of funding to bring it up to date. The most recent former president was not a fan of environmental protections and it shows. The United States created 82 million tons of waste from packaging in 2018. A huge percentage of that went into landfills, where is will sit rotting and, worse, much of it never rotting. It will sit there until that meteor they keep warning us about finally strikes our planet. Then it will become space-fill, just floating around in perpetuity, millions and millions of tons of that devil styrofoam and a bunch of sharp-edged packaging eternally circling with the stars.
It is horrifying to contemplate how much that amount of waste increased during the pandemic., when every damned thing had to be delivered in a package lest we come in contact with the residue of a fellow human’s touch. When everything was delivered by many a brave masked soul and every delivery was wrapped and packaged and plasticized. When people were wiping down their groceries and letting the dry-cleaning sit in the garage for three days lest it contaminate their homes.
I said it then and I will say it now. If your box of Cheerios could kill you, we would all be dead.
I take a medication that has to be shipped to my door. It also has to be kept cold. In order to achieve this the suppliers wrap one syringe at a time in, first, a box, and then, of course, plastic. They are then set inside a styrofoam container that is at least fifty percent larger that the single dose. This is then nestled in between multiple packs of dry ice which is wrapped in .… well I’ll bet you can guess. I have begged the pharmacy to reduce the packaging, to no avail. I have offered to pick it up, but the Specialty folks explained that they would then ship it to the local pharmacy in the same manner. One dose at a time shrouded in toxic waste. This is a medication that I MUST take for reasons we can discuss another time, so in order to maintain my health, I have to participate in making the planet sick.
There are so many insidious ways that we are trapped into continuing to pollute by scenarios such as this. There must be a solution out there for most of them. There must be a way to deliver our goods and gewgaws and gadgets without all of this excess and waste. I don’t know the answer, but I think I know whom to ask:
Dear Sharks of Shark Tank,
I like your show. You all seem real smart and it’s fun to watch you make deals for so many new gadgets and gewgaws and inventions. Let’s face it, though: Most of this stuff will, at best, become a short-lived fad (though that Sponge Daddy thing is a keeper.) Many of your goods will at some point just sit in our over-stuffed garages waiting to be donated to a charity which will warehouse them until they can be deposited into, yup, landfills. We’ve all watched you invest in fat-burners and new magic diet gummies. Ah, to dream. but their efficacy seems dubious in the face of a mounting obesity crisis. Some of the stuff you promote is really cool; I’ll give you that. But let’s be honest: Most of it is not needed.
So here is what I humbly propose:
“Shark Tank Solutions”
Now that’s a catchy title, you have to agree! Just think of it. All of your brainpower and financial brawn going into solving some of the big problems we face in our day-to-day existence. Surely you all could invest in a more eco-friendly packaging material than those damned peanut things or that bubble stuff. There has to be a better way to deliver refrigerated medicines. Maybe you guys can find a way to safely recycle a few trillion tons of landfill waste? If any group of folks could pull this off it is you all. You are daring, caring, innovative and rich as blazes and you put on a real humdinger of a show. Shark Tank Solutions is one that I would dearly love to watch.
I thank you in advance for your time and attention.
Beth
P.S.
I think you should keep working on those miracle fat-burning ideas just in case, because we Americans are on the plump side. The diabetes-causing, blood pressure-raising, heart disease- risking side of the scale. So by all means keep pursuing that.
Also, if you could find a jar-opening gadget that actually works, I would be forever grateful.
On we go …
I'm always amused by how I relate to things you write about. I keep scissors in my car as well because of all the god awful plastic...and mustard is my packaged choice for sandwiches. lol.
My favorite example was when I once saw a post with a peeled orange in a plastic box. The caption read: If only there was a natural way to preserve an orange.