Thursday, February 19, 2009

Green and It's Clean, by Quickie

Whilst shopping at Wal-Mart today, I was perusing the cleaning aisle for more scrubby brushes. I used my kitchen one to scrub the grout on my bathroom floor tile. I tell you, grout is a pain in the rear to clean and I was desperate so I used whatever would work. I was not about to put the scrubby back into the kitchen, so I needed a new one. I grabbed one I thought would work and as I did so, I saw there was a cheaper one a couple racks over. Hmmm, cheaper by a few pennies doesn't always mean better but when I saw it was a GREEN product by a company called Quickie, I thought I would give it a try. After all, saving me a few pennies to help the environment doesn't sound too bad. I can look past the fact that it looks brown, I don't care as long as it gets the job done. I saw there was a pot scrubby too so I snatched that and felt really good about doing my part.

I got home, unload the groceries, and tossed the Wal-Mart bags into the trash - yes, I know, I can recycle those, but it is just too much effort to store the bags until my next trip to place into the recycle boxes in the entrances. Besides that, I did my part by purchasing two
GREEN products, so it all evens out. Right? Some might argue that I can save the bags and reuse them for things around the house such as: packing material for when I mail packages, padding for storing Christmas decorations, taking up knitting and make a wedding dress out of them for when my girls get older, carrying wet clothes home from the pool, crochet some sandals, liners for bathroom trash cans, or even knitting purses with the many, many bags I go through. And while I am all for being more environmentally conscience, some of them just aren't feasible for me or are just too close to flashbacks of the macrame projects of the past. While macrame has its place in the plant holder arena, I don't feel the look of crocheted clothing from plastic bags - too close to macrame.

"Am I just being too pessimistic or just not ready to go GREEN?" I wondered to myself as I snipped off the hemp twine to release the tags from the scrubbies. Before chucking those into the trash too, I took a closer look at the tag. The tag boasted of "working together to save the earth(tm)" but my keen eye picked out something that just tossed all this "Earth Friendly" GREEN attitude into the garbage with my other never-going-to-be-recycled-and-sent-to-a-landfill-to-rot items.

Three simple words: Made in China.


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Loved your post. Youre so funny. You totally get it. I have been "recycling" my whole life by not being wasteful, and now finally it's not "nerdy" to reuse the cottage cheese containers because now Oprah does it too.