Monday, July 19, 2004

New and Better Disposable Products

"Screw the Planet, I'm an American, Life is Good!"

See, now, the happily narcotized, entirely sexless, vaguely bulbous modern housewife in the recent TV commercial as she finally tosses away her angry, growling, animated (!) toilet brush (see how it snaps and snarls at her like a drunken deadbeat dad! See her toss it into the trash can and then plop her butt down on it in satisfied glee!) in favor of -- say it with me -- disposable toilet scrubbers you use once and throw away!

Scotchbrite Disposable Toilet Bowl Scrubbers, when you care enough to dump a bunch of toxic crap down the toilet only to have it be pumped through the sewage system and get filtered through the City's already heavily overburdened sewage-treatment plant and intermixed with 10,000 other toxic deadly chemicals and then pumped out to sea in a swirling nauseating stew of stickygross human by-products. Oh, and those plastic handles last about 2 million years in a landfill. Sweet!




The entirely silly and pointless Swiffer family of totally toxic landfill crap you really don't need but millions of people are apparently buying via some mass genius PR-marketing delusion that somehow tells them this junk might somehow be better than a really good broom or mop, despite how it's basically nothing but a plastic rod and an electromagnetic sheet worth about half a cent and if you want the same damn effect just take one of your fabric-softener sheets out of the dryer and put it on the end of a broom handle. VoilĂ .

Mark Morford


This gives me pause for thought cause I'm all for saving that tree and the rain forrest, but my first thought was how much do these products cost?

The Clorox ToiletWand starter kit, which includes a ToiletWand and six single-use sponges, has a suggested retail price of $9.99. Single-use sponge refills, sold in packages of six, have a suggested retail price of $2.99.

Compared to the plastic toilet brush that I bought at Freds for .98 which is good for several years and is easily disinfected with bleach, which sells for less than $2 a gallon (a gallon of bleach goes a longggggggg, longgggggggg way), it's like comparing the price of gold and silver.

But what about those icky germs, you say? Well my friends, chlorine bleach will kill most anydamnthing. Even AIDS, if you could drink the stuff without it killing you!

I refuse, however, to give up my handy little Swifter Duster. Even if I do cry when I have to pay the price of a nice roast for the refills.

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