Why Suds?
In some parts of the ocean, in waters thousands of miles from the nearest shores, the volume of plastic particles outnumbers zooplankton, oxygen-producing microorganisms, by a factor of 40 to 1. Ancient forests, which form the infrastructure of delicately balanced habitats that have been untouched for thousands of years, are now cleared to produce paper napkins and fast food sacks. Landfills across the world are overflowing with the many objects we use and throw away, often in under an hour.
Clearcut old-growth forest in the Gordon River Valley, British Columbia.
But when you get down to it, what we really have is a problem caused simple, every day objects. It’s a problem caused by single-use-disposable items, or SUDs for short. What’s a SUD? Any item designed to be used once, or for an otherwise short lifespan, before going through a magical transformation in which the object becomes garbage. Bottles, bags, and napkins are among the most common SUDs.
Of all the problems out there, why should we focus on kicking the SUDs habit? We’ve got hungry people all over the world, global unrest, and climate change to worry about! Well as it turns out, the problems associated with SUDs represent a microcosm of environmental problems more generally. From start to finish, the lifecycle of a SUD touches on many of our less environmentally friendly habits. They are made from nonrenewable resources, like the ancient forests that take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to grow and form the habitat that is home to many species. SUDs then travel hundreds of miles to reach their user.
For instance: many aluminum cans are mined in Australia, processed in China, and filled with soda in Canada. They are then shipped all over the world to satisfy our fleeting need for portable water or a stack of napkins. Sometimes we’re smart enough to put our SUDs into recycling bins, after which time they’re often sent back overseas to be processed yet again, and are often turned into inferior products. If we throw them in the regular trash, they sit in a landfill forever. And if we throw them on the street, they wind up in our oceans and forests, our fields and neighborhoods. SUDs do a lot of damage, all to satisfy a fleeting need for so-called convenience.
Each and every one of us interacts with SUDs on a daily basis. And each and every one of us has the power to choose alternatives like reusable bags and bottles without causing any great inconvenience—and we’ll all be better off for it. Here’s why we need to kick SUDs, one of the most needlessly wasteful consumption habits humankind has ever known.
1. Suds waste money: When we’re spending our money on throwaway lunch bags and bottles, we’re throwing our own money away so that we can’t spend it on things that matter. Sure, maybe it costs a few extra bucks up front for that reusable water bottle or the 8-pack of cloth napkins. And maybe it requires an extra step in the weekly chore schedule. But the true cost of convenience is too much to spend on things that will be trash so soon after we purchase them. The average American purchases 167 plastic water bottles each year, and stands to save about $300 a year by using a reusable one instead.
2. Suds waste resources: Most SUDs have a useful life somewhere in the range of 5 minutes to a half hour. After that, they’re trash. But before that, they were made in petrochemical refineries or made from ancient trees. They require endless gallons of fossil fuels to ship them from their point of origin in the distant reaches of Canada or Australia, to their processing plants in New England or China, to their end user in America, and finally back overseas to be turned into something else—or dumped into the ocean to clog our waterways. For a society living on a finite planet with finite resources, it isn’t just bad for the environment—it’s bad business.
3. Suds are cheap: And yet, for all the economic and environmental damage SUDs do, perhaps the most distressing part of our SUDs habit is what it does to our way of life. In a disposable culture, it’s impossible to escape trash. In a world populated by as many disposable objects as ours is, nearly everything becomes trash; nearly everything becomes disposable. Where we once treasured special objects and passed them down from generation to generation, we now spend a large chunk of our money for the perception of living a more convenient life. While we once lived in homes filled with made-to-last tools and objects that would live to see another generation, we now usher in a new round of SUDs with each grocery trip and usher it back out when we take the garbage to the curb. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.
But here is the upside: it is within the power of each and every one of us to rid our lives of garbage. We can cut our grocery costs and live a more sustainable life without any great inconvenience. In fact, once we get into the habit, we find that using fewer SUDs is actually more convenient than living life according to a throwaway model. Go figure, right? It’s not about sacrifice, it’s about living better. And it’s easy to start doing. And so it is our mission to spur families and friends, businesses and schools, children and grown-ups to kick the SUDs habit. Our mission is to show that living without SUDs isn’t a compromise—it’s actually a better way of living. By taking even small steps to throw away less, we can do good things for the environment, save money, and live a life that appreciates the value in objects instead of fleeting convenience.
We’re here to kick SUDs.
