Mother Jones: Why We're Doomed

[marmar]

Why We're Doomed
— By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Oct. 5, 2010 10:00 AM PDT


I don't typically weigh in on green consumer products or environmental marketing. But I'm making an exception given today's troubling news that Frito-Lay is ditching the biodegradable SunChips bag it unveiled 18 months ago because consumers have complained it was "too noisy." Seriously? The company is bagging the bag because American couch potatoes can't hear their TVs over the sound of their chip sack?

I don't necessarily blame Frito-Lay. It's a corporation and its job is to keep customers happy (and make money), so I can forgive them a little timidity on the issue, given that SunChips sales were apparently plummeting. What miffs me is that a little noise was apparently too much for Americans to handle. SunChips sales have reportedly declined more than 11 percent in the past 52 weeks because of the bags. The bags are made from plant-based materials and are 100 percent compostable, which was a pretty big deal—that means you can keep your chip habit without producing a ton of landfill waste. But due to the noise complaints, the company is pulling them immediately, USA Today reports:

The company is returning them to their former bags that can't be recycled — but won't wake the neighbors — while it works frantically to come up with a new, quieter eco-friendly bag.

The noise of the bag — due to an unusual molecular structure that makes the bag more rigid — has been compared to everything from lawnmowers to jet engines.

......(snip)......

I can't think of a more absurd example of how resistant to change Americans really are. It's not unlike the never-ending debate over compact fluorescent light bulbs; now that all of the other dumb arguments against the more efficient bulbs have been refuted repeatedly, the only one opponents have left is that they simply don't care for the way they look. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/10/snack-attack-sunchips-cans-eco-bag

[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. posh

The RW complains most green tech isn't cost effective/user-friendly.

We reply, very correctly, that it took time to get a space program, consumer level computers and whatnot but we did it.

They'll come up with a bag that is less noisy; and yes, the darned thing is pretty noisy but I love Sun Chips more than I hate the noise. It won't take as much effort as the moon shot either.

In the mean time we owe responsible companies our patronage. Frito-Lay is to be encouraged to renew its search for a biodegradable packaging.

[Pirate Smile]

2. Awwww. That sucks. It was cool putting them in with the yard waste. They were very loud but the

entire concept was awesome. :(

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. Just a wildly optomistic guess on my part

But I think they'll be back and once the design is improved I think it will catch on.

Let's face it, green marketing is much, much bigger than it was 10 years ago. It's one fo the few points of encouragement I see these days.

[SoCalDem]

17. Who knew that chip-bags were such a problem for society

:rofl:

Of course in this household, we don't eat potato chips that often. and I'm old enough to remember when they still came in those shiny waxed-paper bags that you could actually open without scattering chips all over the kitchen floor...or having to find a pair of scissors to open the damned thing:)

We americans are quite touchy when it comes to our snacks, aren't we:)

[Warren DeMontague]

It's second only to pressing crisises like consenting adults watching other consenting adults fuck.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/06/federal-porn-regulation-shelley-lubben

[tularetom]

4. I'll give you an argument against compact fluorescent bulbs

They don't friggin last. I have a big box of burnt out bulbs in the barn, all of which were supposed to last 8 or 10 thousand hours and some of which crapped out after 3 or 4 months.

Overall, I'm not getting the service life I was led to believe these bulbs would provide.

I'll assume that I'm getting the benefit of a decrease in power consumption so I'll probably keep using them but they should stop stressing the longevity of these things if it isn't really true.

I don't sit in front of the TV and munch on chips but I have to ask - don't the chips themselves crunch too loudly when people eat them? Maybe they need to check that out too.

I'd like to believe that the decline in sales of things like Sun Chips (whatever they are) is because people have decided to snack on things that are better for them or better yet to get off their fat asses and get some exercise instead of watching Judge Judy and Jerry Springer all day. But it's probably because more people are unable to afford them.

[Johnny Noshoes]

10. I have had a CFL bulb

for so long I don't even remember when I bought it. It might actually be because it was made in Hungary and NOT China.

[tularetom]

11. I probably have a few also that lasted a long time

I'll check and see where my bulbs were made.

But I still have a box full of them that didn't even last a year.

[ejpoeta]

12. maybe there is something wrong with your system. i have compact fluorescents in every

light receptacle i can put them in even leaving the covers off of the lights. i have had to replace 2 bulbs since we started using them which is saying a lot because we were changing a bulb every time we turned around in this house. and i mean we were changing a bulb every week.

[Bozita]

16. CFLs burn out quickly when operating under reduced voltage

I lost three within hours during a recent brown-out.

[tularetom]

24. There may be something to that - our house was built in 1912

And even though it's been completely rewired at least once, there are a couple of bedrooms where we still have 2 prong ungrounded outlets.
When I feel ambitious I replace a few of them with GFCI's which is allowable under the code, but the ceiling lights are wired into the part of the system that I personally have not replaced in the 22 years we've lived here. So it is possible that any CFL's in those ceiling fixtures may be failing because there is a glitch in the wiring.

But I dunno - they seem to burn out in lamps that are plugged into outlets in parts of the house where I have rewired in the past 10 or 15 years.

We have a lot of power interruptions and surges here - maybe that's the problem.

[Control-Z]

31. You know, I also had compact fluorescent bulbs

burning out early. At least that's what I thought, until something like the third bulb went out (in less than a years time). I accidentally bumped it and found it was just a tad loose. Tightening the bulb put it back in service and it's still working several years later. The same thing has happened with several more bulbs since. For some reason these bulbs seem to loosen up more easily than standard bulbs, so I check them when they appear to be burned out. As far as I can tell, this happens mainly with fixed lamps - wall mounted lights and ceiling fan lights - that are affected by household vibrations (from doors shutting or from the spin of ceiling fans, for example). But there have been other issues too.

There is a delay when turning on these lights that is not usually noticeable. I came close to throwing one bulb out when the light didn't come on right away and I had turned it back off before it had a chance to warm up. Fortunately I tried it again and gave it a moment to work. In this case it was a lamp that was plugged into the wall but controlled by the wall switch. This particular setup (or perhaps something with the lamp itself) appears to cause an extended delay.

After working through all the quirks, I have found the bulbs really do last. In my house it wasn't unusual to change bulbs every week on a regular basis so I feel like I'm saving a lot, just on the bulbs alone.

[Phentex]

14. I don't have a problem with the bulbs but they are hard to recycle...

the stores I buy them from don't recycle. That makes no sense.

So the ones that do burn out sit on the counter until we drive out of our way to recycle them.

[Kat45]

23. That's because the bulbs have mercury in them.

So it would be a special hazardous material type of recycling, and perhaps the store doesn't participate in that kind of recycling.

[prolesunited]

46. Your guide to CFL recycling

Lots of options
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/home-garden/recycle-compact-flourescent-light-bulbs.html

Also, Home Depot has an in-store program
http://www6.homedepot.com/ecooptions/index.html

[Carolina]

18. I had a compact fluorescent bulb burn

out and smolder.

I had such a bulb in a lamp on a timer for evenings when I work late and don't want to come home to a dark house. Got home, everything ok but then I smelled something burning. Checked all through the downstairs, felt the walls for heat. Then went upstairs where I discovered the bulb had burned out and was smoking making the whole house smell as though something had caught afire. Never had that happen with incandescent bulbs.

I like the idea of energy efficiency but am fearful. What if I had not been home; what if the smoking had turned to flame...

[tilsammans]

29. Whew! I'm glad you're okay!

I had CFLs in a two-bulb lamp on a timer, but weeks later I read that they aren't designed to be used with timers. So I replaced them with regular ol' standard bulbs.

[rucky]

19. Me too.

re: CFL. I started a thread about this, and low-voltage/brownouts are believed to be the culprit.

and the Sun Chips bags are too noisy for my fat ass - that's why. Whatever they made it with, it needs more paper - like the kettle chips bags.

[KamaAina]

37. Here's another

they're fluorescents. Many people can't tolerate the 60Hz flicker they produce. Some people with autism can actually see it. This is not a good thing. It's like being in a carnival funhouse under a strobe light. And now instead of just being everywhere else in the world, like schools, offices, etc., they're in people's hiomes, too.

[Caliman73]

39. I haven't changed a lightbulb in 3 years.

I have had one CFL for 8 years and another 3 for about 5 years. Perhaps there is something wrong with your wiring that is shorting the bulbs?

[Motown_Johnny]

42. most of mine are over 2 years old. none have burned out yet

[speppin]

5. good grief!

[coffeenap]

6. K, see, you open the bag in the kitchen,

pour the crap in a bowl, silent consumption ensues. Duh. Too much work for us?? (sarcasm?)

[jpgray]

7. Am I the only one who still pours chips into a bowl?

:hide:

[shimmergal]

26. No. My son-in-law does that, and

it drives me up the wall.

Here's why. First, it makes for extra dishes to be washed, and he seldom bothers to put the bowl into the dishwasher. Somebody else has to carry it in there for him. (One of those minor domestic irritants, I know).

But more important, there are always extra chips left in the bowl. They get soggy almost immediately. Who wants to eat soggy chips? So they go into the trash. With so many people going hungry, I think that's unjustifiable. Strange too, because he's not otherwise insistent on "gracious eating."

[JVS]

32. Oh look, the little prince has bowls that aren't crusted with filth!

How out of touch can you be, man? :evilgrin:

[jpgray]

34. I also make coffee on the stove! You are all brutes by convenience.

:P

[Warpy]

8. Middle America wouldn't dirty a BOWL?

Jeez, most of them have dishwashers, didn't it occur to them to use that big bowl they got for a wedding present or some guest abandoned at a pot luck supper.

There wasn't anything wrong with the bag, only the lazy slobs eating directly out of it.

[Johnny Noshoes]

9. How much bloody noise does one chip bag make...

you take the bag - open the top with scissors,dump the chips in a bowl, put the now empty bag in with your recyclables - DONE. I think its just that the average "couch plant" doesn't want to have to think about recycling ANYTHING.

[ejpoeta]

13. that would be too much work. then you would have to get up

and even WASH the bowl!

[rucky]

21. it's seriously noisy.

I'm not kidding. A really loud and annoying level.

[HughMoran]

15. OMG were they loud. People were joking about it in the supermarket

Everybody knew who was buying one of the noisy products!

BTW -

"while it works frantically to come up with a new, quieter eco-friendly bag."

so it's a redesign.

[Grown2Hate]

20. I guess I'm a weirdo, because I liked the sound. You can ask my girlfriend... whenever

I would pass the display in the store, I had to walk up and crinkle a bag or two. NOW what am I supposed to do!? :evilfrown:

[The Midway Rebel]

22. Too bad.

Those compostable bags work well. I have two or three mouldering down in my pile.

The bags are noisey though. My wife said she learned to get the chips out of the bag quietly of during a commercial. Not that hard to do.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

25. AHA! The REAL problem surfaces.

It was not that the bags were biodegradable, ergo noisier. The problem was they decided to make the SunChips themselves biodegradable and digestible along with the bags. No wonder their sales plummeted.

[Speck Tater]

27. I bought a bag of those chips. The noise was VERY obnoxious!

I'm very much in favor of recycling. I have a garden and I compost everything that's compostable. But that potato chip bag was just outrageously annoying. Why don't they just go back to waxed paper bags like they used when I was a kid? Those always were compostable.

[Tutankhamun]

28. I bought one of the noisy bags of SunChips a couple weeks ago.

I knew it was pretty much a given that the new noisy bags wouldn't last. I didn't mind the noise, but I figured people would be put off by it. It's amazing, the things that matter to us (and the things that don't).

[tblue37]

30. I want to use compact fluorescent bulbs, but one exploded in my

bathroom one day. Fortunately I was there, so the shards of glass and the toxic stuff inside didn't end up harming my cats, and I was able to douse the small flame it caused and get the bulb out of the socket fairly quickly. But if I had forgotten to turn off the light when leaving (which I usually don't forget to do, but when rushing to get to work in the morning, it could happen), there's a scary good chance that my apartment would have caught on fire with me not available to take care of things, thus killing my three cats and destroying everything I own. Another possiblity is that my cats would have been otherwise harmed by the glass shards and the chemicals.

As my compact fluroescents wear out, I am replacing them with incandescent bulbs. I want to be green, but I am now scared of compact fluroescents!

[Warren DeMontague]

36. Wait until the LED bulbs get cheaper.

Even better energy efficiency, and no mercury.

[JVS]

33. I'd have thought it was because sun chips suck.

I'll have to go feel the bags at the store to hear their noise making.

[Warren DeMontague]

35. Mother Jones also sides with ex-Bush DOJ Officials and the religious right on censorship.

Frankly, after their recent anti-porn hysterics, (paging Christine O'Donnell!) I tend to think their hand-wringing is a little overwrought. Take the supposedly "never-ending debate over compact flourescent light bulbs"; what never-ending debate?? Er, the incandescents are due to be phased out in a couple years. And not long after that, the CFLs- which do have a little problem called mercury- will hopefully be replaced by even more efficient, enviro-friendly LED bulbs.

But none of this, apparently, registers at mother jones, where we are doomed- DOOOMED!!!!!!!!!!!- due to American Couch Potatoes who simply refuse to stop eating potato chips and masturbating to pictures and films of consenting adults fucking each other.

[Warren DeMontague]

38. If useless harangues and soapbox superiority won't save the planet

I don't know what will.

Want to reduce garbage? Get a compost bin. You can't compost the sunchips bags- for now- but you can probably compost Mother Jones.

[marmar]

40. "useless harangues and soapbox superiority won't save the planet"

Quod erat demonstrandum for Mother Jones' point.

[Warren DeMontague]

43. Yes. We're "doomed" because sunchips changed their bag.

And, the geniuses at Mother Jones- when they're not busy cozying up to Ex Bush Administration officials and James Dobson to bleat and whine about how the Obama Administration is "soft" on consenting adults looking at pictures of nekkid women online--- can't be bothered to figure out that the "never-ending debate about Compact Fluorescents" is over, and the Compact Fluorescents have won.

Give Me a FUCKING break.

[Codeine]

41. I don't care about the bag, I just think they taste like shit. nt

[Zax2me]

44. Chip packaging is nothing...

I bought a bluetooth recently - you would have thought I just un boxed an unassembled airplane.
The packaging waste was absolutely ridiculous.

[Mimosa]

45. They should have introduced the product with an ad campaign saying crackling bags are earth friendly

[stop the bleeding]

47. They're smart with a lil $$$, they can figure something else out n/t