Hacking consumption to save our Planet

This morning, I saw a video about a drive to save India’s rivers. The solutions being advocated all revolved around trees. Plant more trees, create green belts on both banks of every river, and so on. That’s definitely an important part of the solution. But it’s not the root of problem.

Our planet is collapsing under the impossible task of satisfying our insatiable desire to constantly consume everything, and anything. We want things, and then, more things to replace those things, and more things to replace the things that had just replaced other things, ad nauseam.

So why does our generation have this unstoppable urge to consume? Why did our ancestors not have it? What made them so much more content with so much less?

I believe the birth of media and its unholy nexus with marketing is what changed us. Together, they have an insidious skill to first create artificial needs within us, and then point us towards equally artificial solutions to satisfy those needs. What we need to do is observe and figure out artificial needs that are being created for us, and work out how to avoid the trap.

Let me illustrate what I mean with examples from different facets of my life.

Let the trees be

Take those very trees. One reason they are being cut down is because there is a huge demand for wood. One way to hack this demand, is by scouting around for old furniture instead of buying new ones, avoiding printed books, magazines, and newspapers and sticking to digital copies, staying away from toys or anything made of wood. The fact that one billion Indians use water to wash in the toilet rather than toilet paper, has literally stopped many a tree from going down the drain.

If we can do all this, the demand for wood based products would go down. So cutting down trees would not be as profitable, and it would greatly reduce their destruction.

Toothpaste Overkill

Turn your gaze to that toothpaste beside the razor. Sure, we need to brush our teeth everyday. But do we really need to use so much toothpaste every time we brush? The marketing honchos show us ads with toothpaste being squeezed all along the length of the toothbrush head. They want us to do that so we consume more tubes of toothpaste.

There’s an interesting marketing story about how Colgate in the 1970s increased the diameter of the tube’s mouth by 2mm so more toothpaste is used every time you brush. More toothpaste consumed is bad for the environment, but Colgate couldn’t care less as tubes were finishing faster and sales shot up. I also once read that we ingest a little toothpaste every time we brush, and the chemicals in it are enough to kill us if we live till we are 200 years old. Obviously I can’t prove this.

My hack for this is to squeeze out just a small pea sized bit of toothpaste. These days, Colgate even mentions that this is all you need for a children below six. See the small type on the tube. I don’t see why adults should need more. My 100g toothpaste tube now lasts me over a year. I brush twice a day, and my teeth are in excellent shape, thank you.

Cruising out of control

Around 60 years ago, scaled down versions of today’s luxury cruisers used to be called a passenger ships. They were looked down upon by richer folks who could afford the faster and much more expensive air travel.

How on earth did this poor man’s transport turn into a luxury? It’s marketing of course, or the ability to create value out of nothing. The tedious, slow sea travel (often accompanied by sea sickness) was just repackaged as a luxury cruise by adding 5-star facilities and large doses of entertainment. On the other hand in air travel, competition beat down prices and passenger airlines became the common man’s mode of transport. Today, almost everyone has a luxury cruiser trip on their list of must-do holidays.

The marketing brainwash was so perfect that people are willing to buy high priced tickets to imprison themselves on a waterborne vessel for a week or so, doing more or less whatever they do on dry land. Imagine the tonnes of our planet’s resources that must be used up to keep those giant ships floating, and feed and entertain the thousands of people vacationing on it.

I would hack this by opting for a similar holiday in my vicinity. In my case, that would be the houseboats in Kerala’s backwaters. It’s not the same as a voyage in Europe, but it’s less destructive to the environment. Those boats reduce the resources needed to carry you to Europe, use but a fraction of the fuel of a cruiser, are built with local materials, give you local food, maybe fish caught from the waterways the boats travel on. If this does not satisfy my urge to see new places, then I would make a trip to an exotic destination like Iceland and take a basic tour, or visit Masai Mara in Kenya and go on a safari. It’s all a lot more environment friendly than travelling on that cruiser.

The Shaving Industry

Let’s look at something as mundane as that morning stubble on your cheek. I recall my Dad would just wet his face, pick up his razor, sharpen it on a kind of strop, and shave off that stubble. It was just that one razor which he reused every morning. These days, we buy expensive triple blade razors that have to be replaced once a week or more, shaving creams filled with chemicals, and after shaves filled with more chemicals, and probably a few disposable plastic razors for when you travel. It’s an almost never-ending waste of natural resources.

So how can we hack this? Going back to the old style razors could be impractical. But since a light fuzz on the cheeks is the current trend, maybe we can just compromise on closeness of the shave. How will that help? If we don’t insist on an extra close shave, then we can keep reusing that disposable razor for months instead of days. The shave is not smooth and effortless as a with a new razor. But if you repeat the strokes a couple of extra times, I can guarantee you will get a decent shave, as I have been doing this for a few years now. There’s a subtle shadow after shaving but it’s hardly noticeable. My razor is now six months old, and it will easily last another six months.

Shampoo Tales

There’s another marketing tale about shampoo sales shooting up after a single line of text was added on to the ‘Instructions for use’ on shampoo bottles. The line was, ‘Repeat if necessary.’

India is a dusty place, and you need shampoo to clean your hair. Though I use hard water, a few drops from my shampoo dispenser is more than sufficient to work up a good lather. I have never had the need to, ‘Repeat if necessary.’ In short, Amazon will have to wait till 2018 before I repeat the order for a new shampoo bottle.

An Apple a Day makes the earth sickly

This morning, I noticed that the apples in the local supermarket are from Chile. There were also oranges from Australia, ginger from China and more.

There is already a movement in India to avoid imported fruits and vegetables and instead stick to seasonal fruit grown locally, like mangoes, pineapples, watermelons, and guavas. If more of us join this movemnent, it will drastically reduce the consumption of scarce natural resources. Like fuel for transport, energy for refrigeration, cargo ships/planes to carry them, special packing and pesticides to ensure the fruits survived the long journey.

Two wheels beats four wheels

Cars are ridiculously inefficient as they generate a lot of pollution while carrying just one or two people most of the time. Two wheelers may not be as safe, but they are a lot more efficient. I do have an electric scooter. Unfortunately my 14 year old insists on being carted around town in the car.

Last week, I accidentally backed the car into a parked bike and knocked out the car’s cooling fan. The local dealer didn’t have a replacement in stock, and had to order it from Pune which would take a week to arrive. Fortunately, there is a bright side to it. We have been forced to travel on the scooter, and avoided one week’s worth of pollution by the the car. The bonus is the fuel savings of ₹1200 ($19) will reduce my repair bill by 25%.

Battery Overload

Many of us have battery operated machines at home like clocks that work with one-time use disposable batteries. One way to hack this poisonous waste is to switch to rechargeable batteries. Or look for other alternatives. I recently got an old style mechanical, winding alarm clock. It’s a bit painful to wind, and is not very accurate, but it sure does not pollute the environment.

I do have two other big battery packs at home, one for my solar panel’s energy storage, and another for my electric scooter. But I suppose they justify their existence by doing more good than bad.

Job Losses

There is another side to this issue. Our consumption is what creates industries, which in turns creates jobs. What happens to the shaving industry if we all went back to just using one reusable razor? Won’t tens of thousands of people lose their jobs?

Most probably, yes. But I think it’s unavoidable. If there’s no planet, they won’t be any jobs. Ideally, those laid off will be re-employed by industries that replenish the earth, or are at least less harmful to it. Like the organic food industry or the replenishable energy industries like solar or wind.

We are all need to pitch in

To be honest, I carry two mobiles as I’m a gadget freak so I shouldn’t be really be preaching about consumption. But maybe it’s that very guilt that I’m leaving behind a ravaged planet for my daughter that makes me try reduce my consumption wherever I can. And if I can minimise my contribution in so many ways, I’m sure that every one of us can find ways to do the same. It may not seem like much but all I can hope is that there is some truth in that old proverb that ‘tiny drops can fill an ocean.’

The clock is ticking. What’s your hack?