Green is the new black, and that is a good thing. Even a handful of years ago, who among us would have predicted the near-mainstream acceptance, at least on some level, of sustainable ideals? “Green” is so pervasive, in fact, that we now need to arm ourselves against potential abuse of the word and its synonyms to tout everything from produce to building materials to the business practices of behemoth corporations, lest we be taken advantage of. All of this, at least, is moving in the right direction, and it seems that while there are still kinks to be worked out, new, green, businesses are sprouting up everywhere, and any company that wants to stay in business is at last embracing some green practices, if for no other reason than to protect its bottom line, and to appeal to a consumer base that is becoming increasingly conscious.

Or is it?

There is another trend, on the opposite end of the spectrum, with a firm hold on the American psyche—competing for every mind and every dollar in the marketplace.

In order to illustrate, I bring your attention to Lunchables. You know—those ready-made kids’ lunches sold in the lunch-meat section of the supermarket. Take Lunchables Mini Burgers for instance (newly redesigned, mind you, to be “wholesome and nutritious”). Neatly packed into a colorful cardboard box is a plastic tray divided into sections, containing: two sickly patties of “meat” (with, let’s face it, enough preservatives to take the things to lunchtime at room temperature), two white mini-buns, two postage-stamp-sized slices of Pasteurized Prepared American Cheese Product, two packages of ketchup, a Nestle Crunch bar and a Capri Sun Fruit Punch, with plastic-wrapped straw. All of this is sealed in still more plastic. The idea is that after your kid spends, say, twenty minutes assembling his “burgers” and eating them, the box, the tray, the plastic wrapper, the Nestlé’s wrapper, the foil Capri Sun packet, the straw, the plastic for the straw and the foil ketchup wrappers all go into the trash.

While Americans are buying into the idea of sustainability in record numbers, there is a simultaneous obsession with the idea of convenience, and with it, disposability. At the supermarket, everywhere you look are individual, plastic-encased portions of just about everything: pudding, yogurt, fruit cups, fruit snacks, cereal, oatmeal, chips, cookies, raisins, nuts, candy and drinks of all kinds. Soup, which used to come in a 4-serving can for 99 cents, now comes in a plastic single-serve container for $3.49, as do various rice and pasta dishes. Then there are the cleaning products. Thanks to the success of products like Swiffer, you can now buy plastic or metal poles with replaceable attachments for the floor, the furniture and the toilet. (Price of a gallon of Clorox: $2.79. Price of a Clorox Toilet Wand with disposable heads: $11.69, plus $6.49 for refills. Little mystery as to why these products have sped to market.) You can buy individual cleansing cloths for everything from your face, to your countertops, to your baby, and you can even buy—I just discovered—small plastic tubes containing a single use of toilet paper.

Then there is the coffee culture, which arms commuters, shoppers and students, even in the midst of economic decline, with a four-dollar cup of chi or cappuccino—along with a carrying sleeve, lid, a stir stick or straw, packets for sugar or sweetener, napkins, and often a bag or cardboard tray to carry it all. You might also pick up several bottles of water during the day and toss those out too (or in a best-case scenario, recycle them). Which might explain why in 2008, bottled water sales reached over $11.7 billion, and why, in 2006, the industry spent $162.08 million on advertising.

Our increasingly mobile lifestyles mean that nearly everything we come into contact with throughout the day is disposable. Food eaten on the go trails reams of paper and plastic products destined for the garbage can. Then there are the electronic devices that fuel the mobile economy, which become obsolete the minute they hit the market: cell phones, iPhones, blackberries, laptops. Airlines, if they provide food at all, no longer serve meals in reusable trays. Now they sell individual packets of assorted snack foods in disposable plastic bags and boxes with plastic utensils. Even reading materials—newspapers and magazines consumed in a sitting—are sold with the goal of temporary diversion, fated for the trashcan.

While the world seems to have embraced certain green ideals, it is still clinging hard to the idea of convenience above all else, and to disposability. Biologist Edward O. Wilson said that if the rest of the world consumed at our levels, with existing levels of technology, we would require the resources of four more planet Earths. In reality, we’d need many more than that if they also disposed the way we do.

So the question is, in the LOHAS marketplace, how do we address the powerful urge towards convenience and temporary or fleeting use in our sustainability efforts? Or alternatively, how do we begin to change the mindset itself that links convenience and mobility with disposal on a wholesale level?

I believe we must answer these questions in order to fully realize the potential in the marketplace for sustainable products, services and practices, and in order to achieve a true—and viable—sustainability.


Abby Caran worked for many years in the advertising industry in New York City, where she saw behind the curtain of some of the world’s most powerful corporations, and where she became increasingly alarmed by the cost of business as usual to the environment. She has since gotten her MFA in the writing program at Columbia University and now writes about marketing trends from an ecological perspective while working on a collection of short stories, a childrens’ book and other projects…including improvements to her karma.