Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Sunday, February 24, 2008

The most wasteful product ever?

The American consumer seems to have a tremendous capacity to buy the most amazingly useless junk.

Now, this may not actually be the worst product ever, but it certainly is one the most wasteful ones I've seen in a long time. I saw this while shopping yesterday and I had to stop and actually take a look at it, mostly because it was just a strange product to begin with.

It's called the Lucky Break Wishbone and is, essentially, a plastic wishbone. "Making your wishes come true is a snap with our 99.999% realistic synthetic Lucky Break Wishbones." No more fighting over the wishbone! Great for vegetarians!

So, you spend approximately 3 seconds snapping this thing in two and it's utility is over. Do these actually bestow any luck? And once you snap it, then what?

The clincher is on their website's FAQ page, where they have the question and answer:

Can I recycle Lucky Break Wishbones?
Yes, of course. We are very conscious about our global environment. Both the packaging and wishbones are recyclable.

Umm. Okay.

What's your "favorite" wasteful product?

31 comments:

DC said...

Snap. I wish for an end to stupid, wasteful consumer products.

Greenpa said...

wow, I love it! So did you BUY one?

I confess I would have- just to show people- who would believe it, otherwise?

And how CAN you say it's useless? Look at all the conversation mileage it's getting! The jobs it has created! :-)

Anonymous said...

Plastic aquariums with plastic fish, or maybe bird cages with fake birds, or fake hamsters in plastic balls, not sure.

Anonymous said...

definately one of the silliest products invented and marketed by a genius!

Shannon said...

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad!

As inspiring as always! I just nominated you for the Blogging with a purpose award! I know you get a ton of awards but I could not leave you out...who else does one think of when you say Blogging with a purpose!
Check out my blog to see your award!

e4 said...

How about Fiji Water?

caress said...

what gets me are those plastic crock pot liners.. ugh.

Anonymous said...

Omg, horrible! And that plastic on the cover is so NOT recyclable, either... liars! I think one of the most wasteful products I've seen are those floss "sticks" -- you get a stick of plastic with half an inch of floss in it, which you then throw out every time you use it. Can we not just wrap the floss around our fingers? Why is that so hard?

Also: yogurt in plastic tubes.

Anonymous said...

The gasoline powered blender is another contender.

Jennifer said...

Wow.... what can I say!

Just buy the CHICKEN!

Olive said...

plastic bags. at least kroger will take them back and reuse them. we are off that wagon and onto cloth ones though thankfully.

Anonymous said...

Any one-use-only appliance has to be at the top of the wasteful list, I think. I mean... I kind of understand a rice cooker if you're into eating rice every day, but a soft-serve ice cream maker seems a tad self-indulgent unless you're running a restaurant, don't you think?

Take a look: http://www1.macys.com/catalog/product/index.ognc?ID=214600&CategoryID=32711&LinkType=EverGreen

Anonymous said...

let me try that again:

that ice cream maker thingy

Anonymous said...

How 'bout the plastic caps on "waxed" milk cartons/juice containers?

Anonymous said...

bullets

Wendy said...

Yogurt makers. You still have to heat the milk to 150° and manually add the "starter", which is the hard part. The only thing the yogurt maker does is to keep the stuff warm while it does whatever the mixture does to make it yogurt. Keeping it in a cooler with a bottle of hot water does exactly the same thing.

Anonymous said...

I love my ice cream maker! It was a gift to the kids from the grandparents. Its not the best use of electricty but its worth it. They love making fresh fruit icecream - Blueberry is fantastic! (Plus I get to control what goes into it) And I can make sorbet in it - mmmmm fresh mango & mint sorbet totally tastes like summer :)

Anonymous said...

I second the crock pot liners. I saw some of these at the last potluck we had at work and made a comment about the liners being kind of irresponsible for the environment. Of course someone had to defend them - because they are SO convenient. And then I realized: the people who use these are too fricking lazy to do things right. They'd rather have a convenience. Frankly they don't care what happens to their garbage when they are done with it. It makes me very sad. Especially since much of the garbage in the county where I live is being hauled weekly to the county landfill where I grew up. We produce more garbage here than we can accomodate. It makes me want to cry.

Natural Louisville said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Natural Louisville said...

Whoops, screwed up my post.

How about dog neckties?

Dogs in clothes are one thing, but this is ridiculous.

That website has some fabulously useless crap.

Kelsie said...

Flushable toilet brushes!

Not only do you just release the sponge from its little wand and flush it, you also flush all of the fun, toxic cleaning chemicals that the magic wand has been imbued with!

And once you've cleaned your toilet four times and used up all of the little sponges in your package?

You get to throw away the handy plastic wand, too!

This is the product that always springs immediately to my mind, especially when I'm ranting at my students about wastefulness.

Sharon J said...

Well if nothing else, that made me laugh.

And to think people actually buy these things!

Natural Louisville said...

Does anyone by chance launder their Swiffer sheets? I bought them on doctor's orders (severe dust allergy) and have a zillion of them piled up to try to wash ... just wondering if they'd survive a gentle cycle.

Anonymous said...

Anything disposable is wasteful. To me, it is also like throwing money away. Disposable bathtub scrubbers and all that drive me nuts. Regarding swiffer : I made my own reusable pads out of old towels. You can also buy then on Etsy. Oh: absolutely hate companies that make things non-reusable on purpose. In my former lifestyle, I bought swiffer cleaning solution. You can not take the cap off to put in your own. They make it so you HAVE to buy another bottle. Since the cap is stuck on, you cant recycle the stupid bottle. I now just spray my own cleaner and mop up.

Natural Louisville said...

Maybe a washable electrostatic cloth would work better than Swiffer cloths.

If I can, I'd like to reuse the Swiffers I have, since they already exist ... sigh!

Anonymous said...

Batter Blaster comes to mind today, since a reporter from the AP contacted me out of the blue for my opinion. I guess I'd commented about it on a blog somewhere before. But yeah, that gets my vote. She asked me about it from a "slow food" perspective, and I was all "Pancake batter isn't even slow food! Pancake batter takes a minute to make. Okay, it's a little longer than squirting it from a disposable can, but come on! The hard part isn't making the batter, it's flipping the damned things!"

April said...

You mean that we use, right?

Clorox wipes. I really can't live without them until my sons move out or stop pissing on the toilette seat.

Anonymous said...

All the plastic and paper that is associated with baby showers.

Anonymous said...

Wow that wishbone is great.
America truly is a cartoon of real life.

My two cents:

http://www.onederwear.com/

Disposable cotton underwear: who has the time to wash or the extra .003 square nanometers of space in their luggage?

Anonymous said...

Ok, that is actually pretty funny! I mean, really, really funny. Wasteful to be sure, but funny. At least no chickens or turkeys were hurt to make it. :)

Segwyne said...

I found at my supermarket a handle for carrying plastic bags. It ws kind of 5-shaped, with the bottom curve being more V-shaped. You are supposed to loop the plastic bag handles onto the V part and carry them altogether that way. My first thought was, "Don't the bags already have handles?" This link http://www.minimus.biz/detail.aspx?ID=7400 shows an example of the same concept, just different design.