Monday, September 24, 2007

Renew crap

This blows my mind. According to the Engadget article,

Memorex is hitting all the right buzz words with its new line of "ReNew" products, unfortunately the company forgot to spend much time thinking about the products themselves. Sure, it's all packaged in recycled cardboard and egg carton recycled paper, built with recycled plastics, meets RoHS standards and all that jazz -- Memorex will even plant 75k trees through the Arbor Day Foundation with a portion of the sales -- but unfortunately the products themselves scream "cheap crap."


So, how, exactly, will creating more products that will quickly end up in the landfill save us from filling up our landfills?

It reminds me of a shopping bag from the Gap I noticed in our house the other day. It was a heavy paper bag with think ink printing, coated in a heavy plastic-like clearcoat, with rope handles and metal grommets. Totally not recycleable. However the text on the bottom of the bag stated "made from 100% post-consumer waste paper. Please reuse this bag". So in other words, "we made the bag in an environmentally friendly way, but it's up to you, Mr. Consumer, to keep it out of the landfill. It's not our problem any more. Deal with it."

Sigh.

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