by Valerie Yule
It is the New Year – not to be wasted. Let nothing new that you buy be wasted. I have things I use daily that are fifty, a hundred years old. They have lasted well.
Careful buying is needed more than ever, for so much is sold that will not last. They are advertised as cheap, but if you work out their daily cost in terms of how long they will last, they are not cheap at all. Even guarantees may not last: you will look for the firm or the maker, when something breaks down, and lo, they have flitted. They may have a new name, but they make sure that you do not know it.
Advertising something as cheap should not send you rushing to buy.
Things that are not cheap:
1. Too much packaging to deceive the eye. Packets that once contained four sachets of soup, now with only two. Packets that once contained goods that fitted them, now containing half that. Cleaners with unnecessary plastic spray fittings – sometimes almost as big as the bottle.
2. The “consumables” you must buy later make up for in price the cheapness of the hardware. Printers and such cost a song, but you soon pay the extra in the cartridges they need.
3. One part that is not replacable will give up before the rest of the product. Elastic in clothes, parts of a washing-machine.
4. The price that is least at point of sale is greatest in the long run. Interest piles up, for the thoughtless buyer.
5. The clothes at the height of fashion that will be old hat tomorrow. The rag trade at present also makes clothes that look like rags after the first wash.
6. Clothes that must be ironed or dry-cleaned. So many materials need neither, it is thoughtless not to look at the tag to see whether there are only instructions for dry-cleaning. (And why machine-spin clothes that will not need ironing if drip-dried?)
7. Expensive advertising sometimes reduces the price of goods because of the greater turnover resulting. However, in cosmetics, the advertising often accounts for most of the cost. You may find that cheap is just as good at the cosmetics bar.
8. Future cost. You often don’t pay the full cost of what you buy. When you buy products made with resources soon in short supply, you are charging the future. You might not be buying tiger products hoping to sustain your virility and sending tigers to extinction – or white rhinoceroses or other animals in short supply. That may fill you with horror. But you may buy furniture made with tropical woods from an old-growth rain-forest; thousands of hectares of forest are going to make the furniture of the west.
There are also things you need not buy at all. Why do you need a new envelope with every letter? What you can do instead?
a) Many window-envelopes can be used again. Write on the envelope. Put a stamp on the “Postage Paid”. Cross out the sender on the top left-hand-side.
b) If window-envelopes were standardised, in several sizes, then different businesses could use them again and again.
c) You can put labels over addresses, and write a new address. I have some labels put out by the British Conservation Society which adds pictures of trees and “Save Paper” on the label too. They have a piece you can fold over the top and stick, if you have cut the envelope to open it.
d) When you send envelopes yourself, make it easy for the envelope to be re-used. For example, don’t stick it all the way, so that people can open it easily.
e) One British initiative is envelopes with three places to write addresses, so that the envelope can be re-used three times.
Now that governments and public are more aware of the cost of emissions and the loss of resources what else can be done? Can people make a New Year’s Resolution to shop wisely, not just to shop? Can the Office of Fair Trading insist that instead of containers being filled with less, price rises be honestly computed?
Each contribution is multiplied by millions, because there are millions of us shopping without thinking, and then millions of us sending what we don’t want to landfill. Most of the things we enjoy most, money can’t buy. Think of these things.
This article may be Grandma telling everyone to suck eggs. But don’t waste it. There may be something useful in it.
© Valerie Yule 2010
This entry was posted by vyule on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Waste Nothing.
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