(Cross-posted from Commonplace)
Our mighty civilization, he says, strives for the production of commodities as impermanent as possible in packaging as permanent as possible. The impermanent product must soon be replaced by a new one, and this is good for the economy; the permanence of the packaging, on the other hand, makes disposal difficult, and this promotes the further development of technology and organization. Thus the consumer copes with each consecutive article of junk on an individual basis, whereas for the removal of the packagings special antipollution programs are required, sanitary engineering, the coordination of efforts, planning, purification, and decontamination plants, and so on. Formerly, one could depend on it that the accumulation of garbage would be kept at a reasonable level by the forces of nature, such as the rains, the winds, rivers, and earthquakes. But at the present time what once washed and flushed away the garbage has itself become the excrement of civilization: the rivers poison us, the atmosphere burns our lungs and eyes, the winds strew industrial ashes on our heads, and as for plastic containers, since they are elastic, even earthquakes cannot deal with them. Thus the normal scenery today is civilizational droppings, and the natural reserves are a momentary exception to the rule. Against this landscape of packagings that have been sloughed off by their products, crowds bustle about, absorbed in the business of opening and consuming...
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3 comments:
We have a vending machine in the library that dispenses pens, pencils, mini staplers, thumb drives, etc, & it's frightening just how much crap is still packaged in that thick, near-unbreakable plastic casing.
What I love is all the multiple layers of packaging some things have--an appliance wrapped in plastic packed in styrofoam wrapped in plastic packed in cardboard (each piece wrapped in plastic) in a cardboard box wrapped in plastic in a bag, and then when you buy it they put it in a double bag with a pile of coupons and brochures and a BPA-laden receipt that's eight miles long.
Don't even get me started on the packaging for children's toys. My mother bought our daughter a couple of (approved-by-us) dolls, and every part of the dolls' bodies was pinned into the other packaging, with very hard tie-wires. Took me far too long to free them from their bonds.
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