Biodegradeable

I'm all for saving the environment. We have spent thousands of years messing up this planet. It's time to right the wrongs, stop plundering the planet get the place back in order. It's time we cleaned house.

There are things that one can do to facilitate this: drive eco-friendly cars (or ride a bike), recycle glass, plastics and paper, and buy environmentally friendly toothpicks (see: Spirit of Nature).

But there are some environmentally "friendly" products out there that make no sense at all. Take, for example, scented plastic bags used for disposing dirty diapers. Living in a household with small kids, I understand the whole nappy sack thing: you want to keep the smell in the bag. I relate to that. So why would you want to buy biodegradeable nappy sacks? Your Huggies won't biodegrade for a thousand years, yet the nappy sacks take only 60 days to turn to dust. What a great invention! I suppose that 60 days is long enough to get the sack out of your house and into landfill. That might be okay for you, but think of future generations!

In a thousand years archaeologists will excavate our current rubbish dumps to determine what sort of society we lived in. And what will they find? Dirty, bagless nappies! Their conclusion will be that we were an unhygenic society that disposed of dirty nappies without enclosing them in a scented bag first, like any normal futuristic parent would. Of course they wouldn't know that we first wrapped the nappy in a bag because it degraded 1,000 years ago (less 60 days).

So by using this product, you are actually destroying the reputation of an entire generation of people. We will be viewed in the same light as those from the middle ages who thought it was physically dangerous to wash yourself.

In fact, the whole biodegradeable business is a disservice to our society. If you buy all the biodegradeable stuff out there on the market, in 60 days there will be no evidence that any of that stuff actually existed! Let's say that we all go pro-biodegradeable to "save the environment" - there will be nothing left for future archaeologists to find.

Now that I think about it, how do we know that what we dug up from 1,000 years ago is really indicative of that society? What if they were really an advanced culture? What if they actually used only biodegradeable products and all the evidence of their society disappeared 60 days after use? What if the fragments of clay utensils that we found are really museum pieces that they found in their excavations of societies that existed 1,000 years before them?

It is therefore irresponsible to use cutlery made from corn or disposable plates made from sugarcane. It would be a travesty of history to buy biodegradeable pencil sharpeners or biodegradeable refridgerators.

Give future historians a chance to learn the truth - and keep those 1,000 year old nappies away from me!

Comments

  1. The nappies remain. Every nappy comes with a biodegradable filling though. Archaeologists from Homo Replaco will spend hours trying to figure what religious rituals required us to dispose of unused nappies!

    Isn't it worth it to torture them like that?

    ReplyDelete

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