Are you, by any chance, brushing your teeth with the most resource-wasting,
overcomplex piece of gadgetry that’s been witnessed by internet voters in
the past 12 months? The £179 Sonicare electric toothbrush, made by Philips,
has just been voted the winner of the first annual Landfill
prize, the award for Britain’s cleverest rubbish – unnecessarily
convoluted consumer inventions that help to increase the teetering junkpile
of refuse we Britons produce every year.
Nominations from the thousands of visitors to the Landfill Prize website
(including a great many Times Online readers) have now been judged by
a panel of four, in which I joined Mark Watson the comedian, Carl Honoré,
the author of In Praise of Slow, and Anna Shepard, The Times’s
ecology columnist. Below, the Philips' brush, along with its fellow top-ten
nominees in the Landfill Hall of Shame are luridly exposed in all their
guilty, planet-draining detail.
There’s a serious side to this lampoonery. I launched the prize to coincide
with my new book, Enough: breaking free from the world of more, and
both aim to highlight the fact that, thanks to modern high-tech, we should
now have all the gear we need to enjoy comfortable, contented lives. Our
culture is easily capable of producing myriad consumer items that are
durable, reliable and useful enough to give years of great service.
It's not like that, though. We're beset with messages that tell us that the
stuff we've got now isn't good enough – that we need more stuff, that we
need stuff that's somehow improved, with ever more extras and options. It's
all got to be new, too, rather than, ugh, so last year. We've got fixated on
producing and consuming ever more wastefully complex stuff that has no
future. It's there to take our money and time on its brief trip from factory
to landfill. Strange genius, indeed, as you’ll see from these…
1. The £179 toothbrush
The Philips Sonicare Flexcare brush comes with it’s own ultraviolet-light
sanitising equipment, as well as a whole lot of other bells and whistles
such as three cleaning modes (including “massage”) and different brushing
routines. But a survey by Which? in November 2007 found that it performed
only as effectively as a well-wielded £4 electric brush. Ordinary manual
brushes can prove just as effective as high-end electrics if used properly,
the survey adds. http://www.argos.co.uk/
2. The ijoyride
All home-exercise equipment tends to be used little and discarded often,
according to research surveys. But the ijoyride caught our nominators’
attention for all the wrong reasons. To quote from a Saturday magazine
advert, it’s "a new exercise machine that gives you all the
benefits and none of the costs of owing a horse". It looks more like a
bucking loo, though. See the website: www.ijoyride.co.uk
3. Ambi-Pur plug in “three-fragrance” air freshener
All plug-in fresheners are effectively devices that suck electricity while
spreading synthetic chemicals around your home. The Ambi Pur 3volution is
the pinnacle of this plug-in mania, a unit that contains three vials of
perfume which it emits in rotation every 45 minutes, so your nose never gets
“tired” of the smell. The refill bottles make for good instant landfill,
too. http://www.choiceful.com/
4. Gillette’s six-bladed, battery-powered, wet razor
Welcome to the Gillette Fusion Power Razor. We’ll let the company’s blurb
explain this one… “Battery-powered shaving system emits gentle micro-pulses
for an incredible shaving experience. Now with Low Battery Indicator Light
and Automatic Shut-Off. The front of the razor has 5 Blade Shaving Surface
Technology with five PowerGlide blades spaced closer together to help reduce
pressure. The back of the razor has 1 Precision Trimmer Blade... built into
the cartridge.” How on Earth did mankind manage to evolve without all that? http://www.mygillette.co.uk/
