Look around a typical modern household and you'll find three of the worst environmental offenders known to mankind. Electrical outlets (which enable us to tap into jolts of power at our whim), water faucets (which distill copious amounts of free flowing liquid whenever we desire) and bath tissues/towels (which allow us to use and discard perfect squares of bleached white compressed wood pulp for countless messy jobs) are the basic tools that Western consumers chew up and spit out without a second thought. They've been at our fingertips for as long as we can remember and define the very notion of consumer convenience, and yet having them within reach is perhaps the major reason why we are more inclined to take them for granted, ultimately squandering our resources. If you doubt the legitimacy of that statement, take a moment to imagine if walking 5 miles to the nearest well pump would cause you to modify your consumption patterns. In that admittedly extreme case, do you actually think while brushing your teeth, you'd still allow the water to run in your sink?
Like water, paper doesn't magically rain down from the heavens, nor does electrical energy. Both conveniences require raw resources, the processing of which yields the final products that we covet along with unfortunate environmental consequences such as pollution and resource depletion. Paper making entails cutting down forests and chemically pulping the wood...and electricity is no better since it's produced when fossil fuels are burned to create steam from water. Considering all the above, is there really anything that we can do to limit the negative impact that consistently consuming these 3 resources has on our planet? Sure, we can seek out "greener" alternatives or significantly modify our lifestyles by making conservation our main focus...but not everyone is great at staying the course, plus the financial cost oftentimes dictates what our ultimate decision is. That Eco-Greenie toilet paper would sure be nice, but Cheap-N-Junky oftentimes wins the race when it's easier on our wallets.
If you're not self-motivated enough to make the most eco-responsible choices on a daily basis and you can't imagine modifying your daily behavioral patterns any more than you already have, then Nika Rams' might have the answer to your green conundrums. Think design, or more appropriately, the RE-design of our household staples. Maybe all any of us needs to do is think twice before we use something, and that's where Rams' line of USE LESS products comes to the rescue. Melding humor and modernity with an equal dose of eco-practicality, her revamped resource trinity offers a stupid-simple solution to our innate consumer-wasting ways that may not actually move mountains but at the very least, it may prompt all of us to take pause and reconsider if we really do need what we think we really want. From her USE LESS faucet (complete with a threaded cap) and electrical outlet "cover" to her multi-sized, modestly pre-portioned paper towel rolls, each revamped design slightly tweaks our access to what we perceive to be conventionally plentiful conveniences. Do you think that this very minor adjustment could result in far less consumer waste? Would seeing these 3 items every day in your household help you to rethink your lifestyle habits?
Comments
Leave a comment