Throwaway Culture, 2.0

There’s a video posted on LinkedIn where a woman shows the camera a Brita pitcher, the kind with the built-in filter holder. The post says something about microplastics. She wags her finger at the camera wearing a censorious expression, pitches it into an open trash can, then reaches off screen to grab a glass carafe, shows this to the camera and gives a thumbs up and a big smile. The very picture of consumer satisfaction. The video is a very funny example of consumeristic pride, but she is not a particularly benighted practitioner. She is right in step with the wellness-driven re-energizing of throwaway culture. 

If you want to dive into the theory around it, throwaway culture in general is pretty well described here. The trashing of the Brita filter fulfills a few goals and emotional needs for people who throw them away. It demonstrates that they are up with the trends around the supposed hazards of microplastics. It signals their belonging to a group, which group depends on what exactly they are throwing away. It indicates that they are wealthy enough to replace whatever it is they are throwing away, because goodness knows they are not going to do without. All of these things are important entries in the consumeristic status competition that forms a part of modern life. And it obviously has to be done out loud. If a Brita pitcher is thrown away in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did you even throw it away?

(Before proceeding, let’s stop to say that there is no real hazard that meets any rational understanding of the word “hazard” in using a Brita filter. The opening and closing of the top and the retraction and insertion of the filter itself are the only moments of friction in the life of a Brita filter. These frictional moments would cause particle shedding, but infinitesimal and our bodies are well adapted to deal with non-digestible particles that we happen to eat or breathe in. I cover these elements of the microplastic panic in a couple of blogs, here and here, so jump there if you want my take on all that.) 

For what seemed like five minutes, the idea of not throwing things away and replacing them constantly, but rather acquiring gently used things and repairing those you already own gained a bit of momentum. There are still Buy Nothing groups and local repair clinics doing the good work. But throwaway culture has retaken its position at the top of the cultural hierarchy under the aegis of a wellness movement that finds everything under the sun to be toxic. (This Forbes article gives a good recap of the viral nonsense alleging that Girl Scout Cookies were toxic, something that is easily debunked by the complainants own data. Spoiler alert, they tested only 23 cookies using EPA not food-safety standards.) 

Aside from this recent advice to throw away your Brita filter, there have been a couple of recent consumer throw away orgies. An Atlantic article in October 30, 2024 was titled Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula. It was immediately debunked, here, and in mainstream media a few months later, here. The article that the original research was based on contained a math error and the fire retardant in question was at a level ten times lower than the one published, so well below levels for safe consumption. I've made math errors. It happens. When you make an error you have to reconsider your conclusions. In this case, when confronted with the error, the scientists stuck by their recommendation that people should throw away their black plastic spatulas, even though the scientific basis for this recommendation had evaporated. This is throwaway culture at its best: “Throw this out because it’s bad. Oh, it’s not bad? Well throw it out anyway.” The researchers were from an organization called Toxic Free Future, whose tagline is "Science, Advocacy, Results," so they were not doing science disinterestedly, which is the way to do good science. (Here is a link to their presentation of their research.) Their "science" is a tool for advocacy and aimed at obtaining results that propel throwaway culture. Part of their rhetoric is meant to create fear and uncertainty around recycling, which is where I start getting mad, because we need to recycle and reuse the things we make in the world. Buoy is based on all the positive effects of recycling. 

One problem is that testing methods are so sensitive and getting more so daily that you can practically find any toxin anywhere. Here's an article about how stainless steel pans release Nickel and Chromium into foods. Nickel and Chromium cause cancer too, but NGOs can't get you to throw away everything at once. Once they decide to get mad at Stainless Steel, some special interest group will start angling for throwing these away too. 

The concerns around non-stick cookware are creating an almost infinite throwaway culture as scratching and overheating of non-stick coatings in laboratories are illegitimately extrapolated to normal kitchen use. The non-stick pan thing is going to work out like this: people are going to buy and use non-stick pans, because they are convenient, but if they get one scratch on them, they will feel righteously justified in throwing them away, because if they don’t, they are poisoning yourself and killing their family. So this provides a perpetual opportunity to throw things away and buy new ones, which is glorious. Even if you don’t scratch a pan, the existence of a slightly better pan that has a slightly better coating can justify you throwing out the perfectly good pan you have and buying a new one, because... health. This is consumer / throwaway culture heaven. 

Maybe you think, "So what? I can afford it." And congratulations for that. But many people can't and these people are already painfully aware that they don't have as much as others, so can we not deceptively pile on top with the idea that their lack of resources is literally killing them. And can we stop pissing away the earth's resources based on unjustified health panics.

Finally, let me proffer an argument about the health benefits of using recycled and previously used goods. Buoy makes its water bottles out of recycled milk bottles, juice bottles and horchata bottles. These are food-grade plastics that don't contain many additives anyhow and not the usual suspects like BPA (bisphenol A) because they are not needed. But say you still think there are additives in there that you want to avoid. Well the good news is that those additives would have leached out into the original product: the milk or juice, and are no longer there or are there in much lower quantities by the time Buoy gets them. Similarly, the Nickel and Chromium stops leaching out of Stainless Steel pans after a bunch of uses, so old stainless steel is better in that way. As another example, new carpet gasses off harmful VOCs (volatile organic carbons), but it doesn't gas off forever. The off-gassing peaks in the first days, then steps down and is essentially done in a year, see here. Thinking logically, nothing can be an infinite well of toxic compounds. If you get used carpet or, god forbid, keep the carpet you have, the off-gassing problem doesn't exist at all. 

Bottom line, we need to stop throwing things away every time an NGO with an agenda tells us that something is giving us cancer, because it very likely is not and your emotional energy is better spent cooking a meal for your family, taking a nap, reading a book that doesn't tell you you're going to get cancer, taking a walk or almost anything else.