Causecast

by JESSICA WOLF, Contributing Writer

America may be the land of ingenuity, but perhaps we are often too ingenious for our own good. Perhaps sometimes we should leave well enough alone and stop inventing things that are unsustainable, irresponsible or even outright environmentally damaging.

Take this new craze in business cards—your name and information carved into a slice of beef jerky.

This isn’t as eco-offensive as it is disconcerting (though likely tasty). However, you run the risk of a potential business partner ingesting your information on a busy day when in need of a snack, so the effectiveness of such cleverness is questionable.

Other things, even simple, everyday ones, when you really stop to examine them, are equally baffling to consider from an environmental perspective.

Witness the newest in “unprecedented comfort” for tanning beds. Tanning beds in general are one of those inventions that really don’t make much eco-sense. After all, the sun is free, it comes up every day (in most parts of the country anyway) and it’s getting hotter all the time.

What makes the tanning bed an overall head-scratcher is when you start mentally adding up the energy usage of the tanning bed industry as a whole, manufacturing costs of the massive devices, the amount of money Americans spend to lay in a “comfortable” coffin of artificial light, and the unlikelihood that such a device is disposed of efficiently when its lifespan has run its course.

Here’s another device we created to do what nature often does all on its own—the gas powered leaf blower. This noisy device, according to the Clean Air Foundation, emits the same amount of pollutants in one hour as driving a car for more than 300 miles. This, all to do what a few more minutes, muscle and a rake can accomplish and that a good breeze can dismantle.

There are far too many wasteful culprits in the food category to mention. Individually sized products—from cookies and crackers to single-use bottled water are inherently wasteful and largely unnecessary beyond the hyper-packaging-laden convenience factor.

One big winner in the food and beverage industry for wasteful inventions has to be the single-use coffee maker. A coffee maker itself isn’t that eco-offensive, but many of these contraptions require single-use containers made of tiny plastic cups with foil tops. More fodder for the landfill.

Way to enhance something that was already pretty easy to downsize for one person and also incredibly biodegradable and turn it into yet another useless, waste-generating device. Regular coffee grounds and filters are completely degradable, especially when composted. (Kudos to this reusable version of a single-cup coffee filter though).

Overall, when you take a minute to think about all the little ingenious modern conveniences in the context of the planet at large, it starts to make Al Gore’s little PowerPoint presentation that much more appropriately named.

Image by whatshername, flickr