Category Archives: Wrongest Product Awards

Wrongest Product Awards nominee

It’s been quite a while since we posted a Wrongest Product Award nomination. Our self-appointed mission to publish positive environmental news has, since you-know-when, become both more important and more difficult, and has pushed the nomination of award recipients to the back burner. But, still, or perhaps even more so, we all need some diversions.

And so a recent – not tongue-in-cheek, I should note – post in Gizmodo (a blog that serves up a surprising amount of environmental news) prompted this new nomination.

In our hyper-partisan world, many of us have felt the need to sharpen our knives. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. But sharp knives – the real kind, not merely for verbal jousting – can, obviously,  be dangerous to users. That must be the impetus for this product: the JosephJoseph 8515 Blade Brush Knife and Cutlery Cleaner Brush. (Yes, it has “Joseph” and “brush” twice in its name. Just to make sure, I guess.)

As I see it, this falls in the same category as egg slicers and bagel slicers. You can do the same job perfectly well without accessory gadgets. (Is an accessory gadget akin to an accessory to a crime?) I slide a sponge – or a rag if you’re being more eco – along the knife with the edge pointed away and my fingers safely away from the edge. No problem.

On the flip side, I have to mention that, for reasons I still haven’t quite figured out, we were recently given a hand-me-down hamburger patty maker and, yes, it actually does do a better job than my two cupped hands can. Maybe it’s significant that the people who gave it to us also have a bagel slicer.


The
Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

More Wrongest Product Nominees from Skymall

cat pod

A recent flight home from New Orleans where we attended Greenbuild provided another excuse to plunder Skymall for Wrongest Product Nominations. The winner by unanimous acclamation (that is, my wife and me) was the “Serenity Cat Pod.”

The primary photo on the page was for the people version: The “Serenity Pod Bed.” Looking like something from a low-budget SciFi film, the description boasted “you’ll float away … into a blissful state with calming color changing light, relaxing music and soothing vibration.” (Sort of like our flight. Not.)

Almost the nominee

Almost the nominee

While this alone could qualify as a Wrongest Product, the dog and especially the cat versions take it to another level of wrong. We could, I suppose, be convinced that the cat would appreciate the circadian rhythm benefits of the color changing LEDs, but what really got us about the $1000 pet toy was the question of how the cat would get in and out of it. The trauma of being stuck inside is sure to necessitate years of pet therapy.

Skymall abounds with pet product potential nominees including the heated cat house and the dog umbrella.

Skymall abounds with pet product potential nominees including the heated cat house and the dog umbrella.

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

Laser Schmaser

laser pizza cutter

I’m picky about pizza. I’ve lived nearly all my life in New York City — home to pizza meccas John’s, 109 year old Lombardi’s, and block long lines in Brooklyn for newcomer di Fara’s – along with hours logged in New Haven, another pizza culinary center. Back here in NY, we not only have a favorite local pizza joint mere blocks away, but know and love Sal, the incredibly colorful only-in-NYC character who owns it.

It was at his place, where the tables are no-nonsense Formica but the eggplant on his slices escapes deep frying, that we taught one of our nieces the right way to eat a slice. I’m waiting for her pizza-off with Donald Trump on The Daily Show.

Folded and forkless (and laserless).

Folded and forkless (and laserless).

 

I try not to get too tied up in traditionalism with my food. I’ve openly accepted the outlier cinnamon raisin bagel as legit. (Hey, even Russ and Daughters sells them.) Blueberry, though, is another story. Similarly, I don’t turn in elitist disgust from most pizza toppings — so long as “most” doesn’t include pineapple.

Nor do I knee-jerk reject modern improvements. I make my knee wait a bit past the initial reflex until my head can tell it what it really should do. (I’m getting to the point. Promise.)

Add to this acceptance and open-mindedness to technology that lasers, are really, really cool. I get off on using my laser “tape” measure, especially as it’s an extremely handy tool when you happen to be an architect. But here’s where things cross the (uncut) line: a Tactical Laser-Guided Pizza Cutter.

Now a tactic is, more or less, a means to achieve something. Since the laser doesn’t actually divide the pizza into equal size pieces, which I could see as a valuable goal in some competitive or jealous families, I’m not sure this device is actually tactical at all. Unless the goal is simply some sort of nerdy coolness.

Alongside this object’s nomination as Wrongest Product nominee, I wonder if a better version might be a Strategic Laser Pizza Cutter. Its mission: to disintegrate by laser any wayward pineapple bits. That I could get behind – although, really, a fork would still do.

The next step? Illustration by Lori Greenberg

The next step?
Illustration by Lori Greenberg/Bergworks

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

 

Scent and Non-sensibility

Hana Yakiniku-1

Our Wrongest Product Award nominations have featured several products based on dubious additions of media, notably shower heads, toilets and even coffins that add speakers. But this may be our first nomination for a product that adds scent. The Hana Yakiniku (which apparently translates as “Nose Grilled Meat”) follows a long tradition of odd mashup devices from Japan, including the aforementioned toilet with speakers.

It works by means of a scent-filled accessory that plugs into your cellphone’s earphone jack, enabling you to smell two choices of red meats. A purpose of the device, they say, is for students on tight budgets so they can eat something cheap like rice while smelling savory roasted animal.

Hana Yakiniku-2

Perhaps, then, there is a better, more environmentally-minded application in aiding meat lovers to go vegetarian: it might enable those tofu or seitan meat substitute dishes to seem more satisfyingly meat-like.

via LaughingSquid

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations 

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

Superfluous Fluids

We’ve had a number of Wrongest Product Award nominations for kitchen concepts: the waffle batter dispenser, the breakfast sandwich maker, a duo of products intended to increase the efficiency of our  banana consumption (here and here), and for the dog owners among us whose canines start slobbering while watching us consume the perfect waffles enabled by our waffle batter dispenser: the pet treat maker.

So it seems only fair that we give bathroom products some equal time.

Those water-proof shower radios dangling off the pipe have always seemed pretty amateur looking, more evocative of soap-on-a-rope than 21st century cloud-stored digitized music. Kohler has the upgrade with their Bluetooth-enabled “Moxie” shower head/speaker. Now you don’t have to interrupt your morning serenade as you make your way from bedroom to bathroom and back. And lest you think this dual-function gizmo is too single-purpose, the speaker can be removed and played anywhere near its wireless source, which you presumably have not dropped in the toilet.

Kohler shower headI guess the sunglasses make sense with the dance moves?

And you really don’t want to do that, because then your smartphone-controlled toilet (also, by the way, equipped with speakers) will revert to a dumb piece of porcelain like the one you grew up with and most of us still have. The “Satis” toilet comes to us from Japan (of course). With its app, you can raise and lower the seat, flush the toilet or control the bidet. But wait, there’s more, and I’m not just referring to the built-in speakers. You can monitor its water and electricity consumption (I guess that makes it “eco”) … and “you can also record your daily bowel movements with the app’s “Toilet Diary,” and provide your doctor with a detailed account of your dirty business.” A steal at $5,686. I think I have john envy.

satis toilet
I think this image says it all.

There are other mashup plumbing inventions we could include here, like the Axor “Waterdream” portable combo light fixture and shower.  Currently still a prototype, Waterdream is intended to bring “bathing into the living room, with all of its emotive, sentimental objects suggestive of home.” It sounds more like a water nightmare to me, especially for the inhabitants of the apartment below it. But maybe it’ll distract Fido from the pet treat maker.

axor shower lightBest reader comment: “Once in a while we see true genius at work.  Minds that take us to creative heights and make us ask “why has it taken so long”. This isn’t one of those times.”

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

Jolts That Last Too Long

Image; Wikimedia Commons

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Wrongest Product Award nominations fall roughly into two categories. One is those in which the product itself is a contender: something that isn’t needed or perhaps goes about fulfilling a need using questionable materials or method. See banana slicers.  In the other category, the products themselves may be perfectly reasonable, but their packaging qualifies them as award fodder. More bananas, this time peeled and wrapped.

Coffee offers us examples of both. One could argue whether coffee is actually needed, but some would say much of the Western world’s productivity would be in jeopardy without it.  One wonders whether the debate could even occur without being fueled by caffeine.

More questionable might be the methods we utilize to fulfill the “need” for coffee. The way most coffee beans are grown and roasted, for example, causes a great deal of environmental and economic damage. A relatively easy solution, if you can remember all the criteria, is to buy organic, shade-grown, fair-trade, bird-friendly (am I leaving anything out?) beans.

That leaves us with packaging. Disposable coffee cups and lids have long been the scourge of the environmentally minded. The focus on them has gotten to the point where it’s no longer unusual for even non-Treehuggers to use refillable containers.

But a relatively new plague in the form of single-serving coffee pods has befallen us in the last 15 years. K-cups from Keurig were the original, but they’re now emulated by many other manufacturers. In case you haven’t seen them because you’re not one of the 10% of households that have them, they are all-in-one pre-packaged and sealed measures of coffee grounds for one cup with a filter built in. So all one has to do is drop the thing into the coffee maker, talk to your office mates for a minute (or to yourself if you work at home or are antisocial), and off you go, infused with new-found vitality, hopefully at least in a reusable cup.

My first exposure to these was at a large brunch at a friend’s home where he went on at length about how great they were while several guests in succession made their own servings (and the trash piled up). I elected to not deflate his balloon with my ever-helpful greenie insights.

The problem, of course, is all that packaging. Eight of the pods comprise many times more material than would result from a standardly-brewed 8 cup pot of coffee (even one pod may be more compared to a pot brewed with a reusable filter), and the leftover is a difficult to recycle composite of things making up the vessel, the filter and the air seal, along with the used grounds.

A few recycling programs have been started, but they usually involve shipping the stuff long distances and then downcycling them into lesser materials. As my favorite cut-through-the-BS writer, Lloyd Alter, puts it “This is the worst kind of phoney feel-good environmental marketing, designed for the sole purpose of assuaging the guilt about consuming overpriced and unnecessary crap.”

(Or you can make batteries out of them.)

Refillable and reusable pods (mini filters, essentially) do exist, though I have a suspicion they’re encountered far less frequently than their sealed-for-freshness brethren. If I didn’t already have a coffee maker, I might even go that route for my own home and office where, for the most part, I’m the only consumer and brewing a pot can be a waste of water, electricity and beans. But I’d be sure to have locally-purchased, multi-hyphenate, politically and environmentally correct beans so all the bases are covered and my caffeine jitters can be offset by a peaceful conscience.

Image credit: ZeroWasteEurope

Image credit: ZeroWasteEurope

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

Nature Unnaturally: Wrongest Product Awards nominees dropped from the sky

Having recently returned from a conference in Mexico City, my EcoOptimism topics list is overflowing with ideas for posts. One of them appeared in the seat pouch of my return flight.

The conference topic was “Restoring Paradise,” with a focus on bringing nature back to the city. So it was with amusement that I mindlessly scanned the Skymall catalog while waiting for takeoff and found some, shall we say inventive, ways to reincorporate nature in our lives.

In my talk at Mexico City, I discussed, among other forms of urban greenery, living walls and vertical gardens. But they require so much effort (not). Here’s the answer for the true urbanite, the kind who has genetically evolved without a green thumb:

Faux nature in Skymall

Faux nature in Skymall

Next nominee:

Here in NYC, we don’t often have utility boxes on our lawns, in some cases simply because we don’t have lawns. But we do have the rather disgusting system of putting our garbage out on the sidewalk in  big  black plastic bags. Well, now we can hide them in “natural” elements, if by natural you allow that they can be made of polyethylene.

Added benefit: helps keep rats out.

skymall2c-72

I also spent some time in Mexico City talking about biophilia, the theory that says we all have an innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. Here’s a way to focus on the lifelike aspect without the encumbrances of actual life. Note the presumably Faux Ivy Trellis (see above) in the background.

skymall3d-72

On a separate note, but still related to the Wrongest Product Awards, Lloyd Alter over at Treehugger.com, expounds on the Holstein Pet Treat Maker. He had submitted it a few days earlier for the Wrongest Product Awards, which he linked in his post.  So I’ll officially add it to the nominations, though I’d have to say it’s a tad premature to declare, as his post concludes, “we just won.”

PetTreatMaker

Holstein Pet Treat Maker/Promo image via Treehugger.com

 

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

 

 

 

From Our Factory to Your Kitchen. Then the Landfill.

What are the odds of two Wrongest Product Award nominations dealing with bananas? It’s not like bananas are iconic fruit as, say, apples are. Apples have played a part in the Bible, in William Tell, in American patriotism, in New York City branding and in computers and cellphones worldwide. Bananas? Aside from slapstick comedies and the occasional bad R-rated joke, their lore is lean. But I guess bananas are, um, compensating with their prolific progeny.

The second Wrongest Product Award nomination (following the inaugural nominee, plug-in air fresheners) went to a grocery chain that pre-peeled and then plastic-wrapped bananas. Presumably, it’s too much trouble to peel your own banana, and then you have to protect it because it no longer has a peel.

This nomination addresses the next step: the burdensome ritual of cutting the banana into slices for your morning cereal or for your Elvis peanut butter and banana sandwich. For my own part, I’ve perfected the method of partially peeling the banana, leaving one side unpeeled so I can hold it in one hand while safely slicing through the peeled part with the other. But I guess others are not so adept and hence the Hutzler banana slicer had to be invented.

Banana Slicer

Banana Slicer

Lloyd Alter of Treehugger.com first brought this emblem of modern convenience to our attention over a year ago when he reviewed it as another one of the “marginally useless things that fill our drawers and bloat our kitchens.” But then he was forced to withdraw the criticism (at least he says he’s withdrawing it; his mea culpa, I suspect, is more than a little tongue in cheek) when the many pages of Amazon reviews were drawn to his attention. The ingenious comments must there comprise some sort of gauge of both the human intellect and our capacity to waste time (while writing reviews of time-saving items).

Kitchen accessories seem especially ripe for both unnecessary and humorous (intentionally or otherwise) designs. You know, the stuff of late-night infommercials. Or Saturday Night Live spoofs. From Gizmodo, we recently received a digital gift basket of Wrongest Product Award nominees in a post titled “15 More Insanely Specific Kitchen Gadgets.” Among them, the hot dog gets its version of the banana slicer in the “dog dicer” – provided, I assume, so that, in case you don’t have a can of SpaghettiOs handy but you do have spaghetti and a hot dog, you can make your own.  Calamity averted.

Eggs must be a very inconvenient form of food. How else to explain the numerous egg devices in the Gizmodo post: hard-boiled egg molds, egg boilers and egg crackers? (Store them with your Egg Topper Cutter, also available in a more phallic and less threatening version, and your egg slicer.) Then there are several items to ease our constant battles with produce: cucumber and apple slicers to add alongside the banana guy — all stored, of course, in your drawer devoted to specialty slicers — an orange peeler thingie, a mushroom cleaner and, yes, a pomegranate “deseeder.”  My favorite, though, has to be their headliner, the s’more maker, bringing you the rewards of camping (or at least of getting the fire in the fireplace started) without the hassle, via your microwave.

Form follows function: “Arms prevent marshmallows from over expanding and overcooking.” Image: Amazon

Form follows function: “Arms prevent marshmallows from over expanding and overcooking.” Image: Amazon

 

We have a rule in our house that anything we want to own has to have been needed at least three times and anything we keep has to have been used at least once in the previous three years. (Don’t hold me to it, though; we do break the house rules sometimes, as some of my wife’s many collections will attest.) Yes, we actually have used our fondue maker (itself purchased used) more than three times, and perhaps we’ll make s’mores at home more times than our self-imposed pre-purchase minimum. But I prefer my s’mores made with both less convenience and less plastic.

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

The opposite of multi-tasking?

A Wrongest Product Award nominee

We’re all in favor of multifunction products, as in having one product that can do many things, thus saving material as well as, perhaps, precious space in micro apartments. Think of a day-bed or a camera-smartphone. But this thing, a “Breakfast Sandwich Maker” by Hamilton Beach, strikes us as almost the opposite: many products – albeit stacked – to do one just thing. And probably not well.breakfastsandwichmaker

My favorite reader comment:

Another $30 countertop appliance that I will inevitably purchase, use 5 times and leave it in a state of utter neglect in the bowels of my cabinets, and bitch about how it does nothing but collect dust and take up space for a minimum of two years. At that point it may be brought out to the back, shot, and buried.

Found on hiConsumption.com (which looks to be an appropriately named treasure trove for Worst Product Award nominations!) via Gizmodo

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

iRobot (No, not that one)

A new Wrongest Product Award nominee

I’m a fan of robots – miniature or otherwise – as much as the next eco geek raised on science fiction (interspersed with a suitable amount of actual science). Though I haven’t bought a Roomba (our dog does a pretty good imitation of one, at least as far as edible dirt is concerned), I do show photos of a robotic lawnmower, solar powered of course, in some of my ecodesign classes. And I can sort of see the value in a silicon-based life form that cleans the crud off barbeque grills.

But this one, a small robotic cleaner for smartphones and tablets, nominated by EcoOptimist reader Wouter Ulburghs, defies any attempt at justification. While I’m intrigued by the idea of robot window cleaners for tall buildings and nanobots that eat dust (so long as they can differentiate dead skin from live and don’t lead to “gray goo” apocalypse), it’s not exactly a burden, as Ulburghs notes, to wipe the schmutz off your iPhone screen.

robot tablet cleaner

And while we’re at this, let’s take a moment to note how many of the Wrongest Product Award nominees originate from Japan, land of the Unuseless inventions.

 

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations

The Wrongest Product Awards will go to those products (and their designers) that embody the least amount of redeeming value while incurring the use of unnecessary, often gratuitous, materials or energy.

How is this relevant to EcoOptimism, you might ask? Easy – it shows how extraneous so many products are, often in a “what-were-they-thinking” sense.

Nominations are open. Send yours to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.