Nylon?!?!!? My fancy lunch bags are lined in Nylon. A fricking plastic. Well, I'm not going to throw them out til they're old and then replace them. But really, nylon?
I'm going to have to bring a real bowl, glass, to work for my cereal. And real silverware. Metal.
The seats on the train are Plastic! So's my Breeze card! Darn you MARTA! I would like metal tokens back now, and wooden seats. Or metal. Or plush ones like on the express bus. Can plastic ickiness seep into my skin through my pants?
O GOD THE COMPUTER IS PLASTIC. So is my cell phone.
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yup. i'm that nutty.
ReplyDeleteAlso quite possibly a good portion of your eyeglasses, your car (if you haven't blown it up), any clothing which contains polyester, identification and bank cards. . . yada yada yada blah blah blah
ReplyDeleteWoohoo! I'm your first follower! I'm also something of a devil's advocate sometimes, even though we generally agree.
ReplyDeleteWith what do do you think your lunchbox should be lined? Would you be happier if it was, say, rayon made from bamboo fibers? Would you still have bought it if that material wasn't waterproof?
How do you think the total environmental cost of producing and using a metal token (mining, smelting, production and stamping of the coin die, producing the heavy machinery to do all of the above, labor and energy costs of managing tokens within the transit system) compare to those of a reusable, reloadable Breeze card (that doesn't need to be physically moved from the turnstiles back to the vending machines 10 feet away)? What about the economic cost to MARTA, which now needs a Save MARTA group on FaceBook? Is the economic tradeoff to reduce operating costs a responsible one?
Could the card be made from more environmentally friendly material while retaining the properties that make it beneficial? Probably, but given the relative maturity of any companies that produce stored-value cards from such materials, would the cost of that technology be a responsible choice for struggling MARTA?
Aside from methane trapped within permafrost and Arctic ice, automobiles are considered to be the single greatest source of greenhouse emissions. Is MARTA's use of less expensive, old-technology plastic for Breeze cards a preferable tradeoff to drastically reduced transit service and the corresponding increase in (admittedly metal) automobile traffic in Atlanta? What if (imaginary) 100% green Breeze cards cost more than Atlanta's EPA air-quality fines for an entire year? Where would you cut MARTA's budget to pay for them?
Jeff :-)
Nick - My glasses are metal, I already checked this one out. However, I'm betting the lenses are plastic. The car, yup, that import is totally plastic. I think the wheels may be metal, but that's all I'm betting on. However, I do not wear polyester :p
ReplyDeleteIn other news, I don't have credit cards or a bank card, so those don't pertain to me, just the ID and Breeze card. Those are plastics I rid myself of a long time ago. If I don't have the cash, I don't need it. My way of budgeting.
Which leads me to Jeff. MARTA already has tokens. That's how they operated. And you can buy a lot of 100 off of ebay for $50. Therefore, not that big a deal to go back, right?
The point of this blog is that we are living in a plastic bubble, nearly our whole world is plastic. Hence the Epic Struggles, which will be a regular feature, to poke fun at myself (was that whole point lost? I mean, wasn't it funny? Freaking out about the plastic-encased computer I'm using to write my plastic-hate blog?).
I know that we can't can't live in a plastic-free world. I am partial to my cell phone and computer, but I can try to reduce my impact. That's what we're going for here, folks. Plastic-lite.
Can ickiness seep through my fingers from the keyboard?
Your car's body and interior may be plastic, but if there wasn't an awful lot of metal, parts would either melt or the car would be unsafe to drive even in a parking lot. The fact that they have hidden any metal from you with a layer of plastic is sort of like LCD computer monitors with a gloss finish: bad technical idea (added glare and eyestrain, undoing some of the end-user benefits of an LCD monitor), good marketing (they were in demand).
ReplyDeleteI live so far outside of metro Atlanta that I seldom take MARTA, unless my destination is accessible directly from a transit station. The buses are not rigged for wheelchairs, and I'm halfway to my standard metro destination (on Clairmont just SE of N Druid Hills) by the time I reach the transit station nearest to me (H.E. Holmes). When I lived in metro Atlanta (before I graduated from cane to mostly-metal wheelchair, I used MARTA as exclusively as possible). Because of all this, I was not aware that one could even use tokens still, but you help make my point by mentioning the availability of a roll of 100 tokens on Ebay. Why not Kroger or the the Ride Store at Five Points? I can find all sorts of obsolete items on Ebay. I found the laptop I use daily, a pre-loved, VERY out-of-production IBM Thinkpad T30 on Ebay. They're perfectly great laptops, especially running Linux, and using one beats leaving it to be disposed of as HAZMAT, wasting all of the energy and material inputs that went into its construction, and buying the latest-and-greatest T-Series - consuming the energy and material inputs that went into ITS construction. (For the same reason, I insist on repairing and continuing to drive, rather than replacing, a car that competes favorably with recently manufactured gas-engine cars, but that was manufactured early enough to have a distributor cap and rotor for ignition, though too late to be completely computer-free and therefore tunable for maximum efficiency. I guess if most people were like me and DID enjoy manually tuning their cars for max efficiency, carmakers would not have needed to add expensive computers in order to do it for us and comply with federally-mandated fuel economy standards. Too many people used the freedom to tune their cars for max power without regard for fuel economy, but it was still a freedom that car-owners no longer have at all. Sad, in that respect.
I didn't lose the irony or your using plastic to blog against plastic. I just think that, once humor gets someone's mind on something, hopefully they'll start thinking about the serious implications of that thing. What material is the best to use for product X is a an important, REALLY complex question. It's not as simple as ordering an organic hemp shirt from a website, if the wastewater from the plant that produces the shirt practically sterilizes the river downstream, especially in a nation or region with lax environmental laws or enforcement.
The excitement of being the first follower of this blog is not diminished by the fact that we have different ways of trying to draw attention to the same thing. :-) You rock!
Uhm, those MARTA tokens don't still work, they're just hanging around. It's lame :p
ReplyDeleteI think you're right, though. People don't realize the implications of their stuff. The stuff website is great. That might be my next post, actually. Thanks!
PS - Have you considered signing up for paratransit service?