merefaith: salvation in the desert

I was in the grocery store yesterday when I noticed Dial had some liquid hand soap available in bags instead of bottles. Displayed prominently on the front were the words "Eco-Smart Refill." Dial claims that these bags tout a number of green credentials. First, because they are lighter and thinner than refill bottles, they use 67% less plastic. Their lighter mass means less energy involved in manufacture and transport and they take up less space in the landfill.

But wait a minute...the refill bottles are recyclable (although the tops are still not, I believe)! They don't have to go into the landfill at all. We may kid ourselves into thinking that improved standards and reduced volumes are environmentally-friendly, but there's nothing "green" about dumping garbage that will remain in place for thousands of years. The bag will be useful to human beings for about 1/10,000th of its lifetime before it is entombed - and that "lifetime" is only counting the years that the plastic holds together. For a long time after that, the broken down pieces of polymer will be present in nature and potentially dangerous.

If you want a more "eco-smart refill" then the bag needs to be re-usable itself, and Dial needs to set up a station at the store where you can take the bag to a spigot and pour soap into it again - rather like the grain containers at Whole Foods. It's a sign of our collective insanity that we slap the label of "refill" on something that is itself un-refillable.

Moreover, as long as we continue to use fossil-fuel-derived plastics there is nothing "eco-smart" about us. Plastics are based on an unsustainable process of extraction and refining and, even when many of them are recyclable, they still end up on the side of the road or in the great floating trash gyres of the oceans. Plastic pieces now outnumber phytoplankton in some areas of the sea, threatening to collapse the aquatic ecosystem. And, so those of us who recycle don't get too full of ourselves, it is important to realize that "recycling" of plastic often really means downcycling it into something that cannot be further recycled, only eventually dumped.

But people will probably fall for Dial's marketing in their efforts to match unwavering consumerism with twitches of do-goodism. So go green everyone - just destroy everything around you at a somewhat slower rate.