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.

Image credit

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.

Image credit

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

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.

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

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

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.