Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Plastic, the best thing since sliced bread

The Boston Globe has gone all plastic on us, gushing about the virtues of the ever-present menace.

Why an oil-sucking, landfill-clogging, non-biodegradable, it's-everywhere material is so good for the environment. Really.

With a campaign that seems as likely as a Barbie revival, the plastics industry is working hard at rehabilitating their image. Is it working? Well, they're gaining at least a bit of positive news.

It's a transparent ploy, as if we didn't really know that plastics are really quite lightweight and sturdy. Golly, that makes plastics quite convenient, doesn't it?

Forget the ocean plastic problem, let's just listen to Mr. Shrinky Dink and go plastic. It's green and lovely.

1 comment:

David J. Hirsh said...

It's not just the plastics folks working on their image to protect their product. The corn refiners have just launched a huge campaign including primetime TV ad buys on the networks and cable news networks.

You know the corn refiners... they're the folks that bring you modified corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, and dozens of other ubiquitous corn-derived sweetners that in large part underly the obesity epidemic in the U.S.

To me this is yet more evidence of why free-market capitalism ultimately fails consumers. I am not surprised that the corporate and political representatives of products that are harmful to us and our environment are so-profit motivated that they will lie to the very source of their profits (consumers) to protect their market share.

In a properly operating market, such proprietors would be drummed out of existence and lucky not to be strung-up.

David

David