Plastics put choice ahead of quality
This Toronto summer will probably be like other summers — and winters — in being the hottest in human history. There will be sudden floods. Smoke from distant North American fires will darken our skies. Trees stressed by years of drought and extreme heat will finally have nervous breakdowns just like humans and fall on cars and car thieves alike.
You know all this. But what are you doing about it? Individual effort doesn’t matter much. That said, I do my tiny bit, as do you, by not flying, earnestly recycling and not buying plastic. But you have to buy plastic. It stuffs itself down our throats. We look at it through acrylic glasses. Objects that use to sink can only float now.
Cheap and stretchy, versatile and protective, lightweight and quickly created, plastic invades everything around us. It sneaks its way into denim even.
The stuff lasts 1,000 years, poisons oceans, kills fish, overpowers city streets with bins and bags, causes cancer, pollutes air, water, and soil, and gives the built world a harsh ersatz flimsy look that began deteriorating while still in its factory in China.
So. I try to buy only objects made of metal, solid wood, paper, wool, cotton, silk, ceramics and glass, materials that last longer and will do the decent thing, rot in a dump rather than squat until 2904. And they can be repaired, as plastic cannot.
It’s hard work. It is almost impossible to buy a wool sweater or cotton pants. And it’s no longer the problem of fast fashion from Shein or Zara or H&M. It’s everywhere.
“If you’re buying a $20, brand-new sweater, what you’re getting is terrible quality. But there’s not any guarantee that if you’ve spent $3,000 on a sweater that it’s going to be markedly better,” Atlantic journalist Amanda Mull says flatly.
Take my forever coat, Canadianbrand Smythe’s Crombie winter coat, bought online, and made in Canada. But it’s not wool. It’s 41 per cent polyester, 21 per cent acrylic and 21 per cent wool. That makes it a plastic coat. I should have checked the label. I love Smythe, always have, always will. They do sell other fine wool coats.
My comfort is that the Crombie wasn’t made in China by grotesquely underpaid exhausted workers and shipped overseas in a tanker packed with plastic washer-dryers, siding, fencing, auto dashboards and fake wood. At least it won’t have to be off-gassed like vinyl carpeting.
It will take time for manufacturing to change and localize, not fast enough for the climate catastrophe. But the economic inequality of the Western nations was, I think deliberately, softened for decades by the advent of cheap household goods.
Workers who should have been striking for higher wages were able to buy a plastic version of the good life. It soothed them as unions vanished and the gig economy appeared. We were given choice instead of quality.
The mania for cheap manifests itself elsewhere. Virtual classrooms are cheaper. They are also worse. Houses and contents aren’t repaired because the skilled trades were abandoned. Cars with digital dashboards can’t be easily or cheaply fixed. Best buy a new car.
We’ll spend this burning summer sweating over how to fix the situation we placed ourselves in. If I may stretch the analogy, we have to read the label on everything, on household goods, politics, journalism and ultraprocessed food.
Social media is free but it’s not real journalism that you subscribe to, quite cheaply. You can build up Trump-style cartoonish versions of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in your head, emotionally sensed in a flash.
Look more closely. What are these two men and their voters actually saying and doing? How will this affect your future and your children’s future?
Don’t just say the coat looks good, matches how you see yourself. Check how it was made and of what. Study that label.