Convenience Culture is Actually Really Inconvenient
The proof is in the pollution.
Photo by Mara Mahmud via A Greener Future
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Life moves so fast in 2024. Everyone is hustling to make their dreams come true. Well actually, a lot of people are hustling to keep up with their basic needs and the fundamental components of life. It’s really tough for working people to manage their time differently or better due to these heavy responsibilities. So when we look around the world of consumption these days with this perspective in mind, it’s not surprising that we’re absolutely surrounded by evidence of convenience culture.
There’s a strategic marketing tactic consistently being thrown at us by all kinds of companies and corporations, intent on selling us more and more stuff. It’s a constant bombardment of things that are meant to make our busy and overwhelming lives easier. “Nowadays, convenience culture can be seen as a reaction to this fast-paced, materialistic lifestyle. Rather than embracing the traditional values of hard work and thrift, the allure of convenience encourages people to seek out shortcuts” (Michael Ofei, 2023, The Minimalist Vegan).
Realistically, there are a lot of inventions that have made our lives easier for the better. Like washing machines, dishwashers, and even the wheel. It’s hard to imagine life without these conveniences for a lot of people in the Global North. We’ve become accustomed to the time and functionality they add to our lives. It’s true that these inventions have afforded us so much more time in the day to dedicate to other things. But at the same time, we have to consider how convenience culture is changing our relationships to stuff and ultimately affecting the planet.
Amy Sayce (2019) said, “technological advances and a more globalised world have allowed companies to reduce customer effort to a whole new low.” These days, you can spend thousands of dollars right from the comfort of your home through online services. You can have everything delivered right to your door, from groceries, to clothing, to food delivery, and beyond. If you think about the work day and how busy it can be, conveniences like Uber Eats are huge time savers because they eliminate the need to stop working to prepare food. However, as has been shown, the monetary cost of food delivery services can often outweigh the convenience.
To be sure, delivery apps are convenient. For this ease of use, customers are painfully up-charged. Menu prices are almost always more expensive than ordering directly from restaurants. Then there are the line-item fees that appear on the receipt. There’s the delivery fee, but also the frustratingly generic “service fee” that could cover anything from keeping the apps’ servers up to paying their drivers. (Whizy Kim, 2024, Vox).
Unsurprisingly, we are paying for convenience — but in more ways than you think. The environment is paying a huge price for our convenience, something that isn’t talked about enough.
Image by Ivan Samkov via Pexels
Before we get into the grit of this conversation, let’s acknowledge the matter of accessibility. For many different disabled people, certain convenience-focused items are extraordinarily helpful. Items such as pre-chopped and packaged vegetables, food delivery services, and automatic coffee makers are just some examples. When discussing the environment, it’s important to use an intersectional lens.
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 to describe the notion of overlapping social identities and systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. Simply put, intersectionality is a manner of looking at the world, experiences, and people in a way that acknowledges the many different factors that make up those experiences and perspectives.
Image via A Greener Future
When we apply intersectionality to environmental activism, we can begin to see where people get left out of the movement. Ethical Unicorn (2018) said, “we have a problem when someone’s activism ignores intersectionality.”
Take the example of plastic straws. Many have called this out as a symbolic movement that ultimately didn’t change much in the overall production and consumption of single use plastic. However, we are often missing the fact that “this movement is [also] blatantly ablest because it ignores those who need such a tool to eat” (Mara M. & Audrey H., 2020, BackToZero). Convenience, for some, is necessary to navigate the world and life with functional ease — this is a very different experience from the majority of able bodied people.
If you want to read more about Intersectional Environmentalism, here’s a crash course written by Mara Mahmud and Audrey Henderson (2020).
Image via BackToZero
Okay, so let’s really get into it. Convenience culture creates a lot of waste. Packaging and containers being one of the primary culprits. The origin of the single-use plastic drink bottle was introduced as a less labour-intensive alternative to previous glass bottle return programs. Corporations like Coca-Cola benefited immensely from this, making their products easier and cheaper to produce and disseminate. Plastic bottles also mean that manufacturers can create market-specific packaging that supports the convenience cultures in different countries, such as the tiny Coca-Cola bottles in the Philippines we mentioned in our previous article, Plastic Is A Multidimensional Issue.
It is incredibly convenient to be able to purchase a packaged beverage or food item when outside the home, and dispose of the packaging once you’ve consumed the contents. It’s as simple as throwing it away. Right? Wrong! There is no such thing as away.
Single-use items are the epitome of convenience culture. The main culprits are plastic cutlery, coffee cups and straws. These items are usually just used for a few minutes and then mindlessly thrown ‘away’. However, there is no such thing as away. Single-use plastics can take decades and even centuries to degrade in landfill, or worse, our environment (Amy Sayce, 2019, Connected Port Phillip).
Erminio, June 7, 2024 | Image by Mara Mahmud via A Greener Future
The same goes for online shopping. We’ve seen those massive online shopping hauls from well-loved retailers such as Amazon. Though the company has made moves to reduce the packaging used to ship products, it doesn’t eliminate the plastic that comes from different manufacturers, nor does it make up for general trend of overconsumption. Everytime you go on TikTok, there’s so many videos of online shopping hauls where each individual garment is wrapped in plastic. Why?? But it got shipped right to them in a matter of days and now they have a whole new wardrobe for this season! Right?
Again, wrong.
Huge upward trends in consumption denote an evolving relationship between people and stuff. Because it’s so easy to acquire things, there’s not as much thought and consideration being put into how we consume or why. Impulse purchases and the convenience of online shopping have made for a lot of compounding problems, including the effect of all this plastic packaging waste on the environment once it’s discarded.
The topic of overconsumption is hot, especially in the zero waste community, where many strive to remove single-use disposable items from their everyday lives completely. Many of us have seen Lauren Singer of Trash is for Tossers talk about her jar, which for many people seems like an unattainable goal to achieve within the context of our own lives. This isn’t an irrational feeling, but one that deserves merit and deeper discussion.
Lauren Singer via Trash is for Tossers
It’s important to recognise that the level of convenience we have access to in the so-called developed world is relatively new. Plastic only really became mainstream following World War II, making the possibilities of convenience that much more endless. As we head into an ever more alarming climate crisis, we all need to take a step back and reevaluate our decisions around consumption. The truth is, we don’t need this much of anything.
Many of the things purported to make our lives easier actually don’t, they just add to our collections of stuff.
Exhibit A: prep my Stanley tiktok
Exhibit B: excessive shower routines
Exhibit C: Watertok
All these trends have extreme levels of consumption and wastefulness in common. They’re also all very popular online, further encouraging others to partake in the same trends of consumption.
We also have to take hold of the fact that a lot of what we consume today isn’t built to last and is complicit in the trend of disposability that’s so obvious when we talk about things like packaging.
TikToker Jennifer Wang, is well known for reviewing seasonal drops of clothing from popular retailers such as Artizia, Oak and Fort, and Zara, often highlighting what is worth buying based on the materials and construction of garments. In a recent video, she noted that you can tell when a brand is producing trend-focused items based on the fabrics they choose. She points out that plastic-forward textiles like polyester and acrylic indicate that the brand will likely not produce these styles for long, otherwise they would invest more into better quality materials like cotton and linen like they do for their staple items.
Clips from @wangjenniferr via TikTok
This level of awareness and thoughtfulness when we think about buying is imperative if we actually want to resolve many of the problems that are contributing to the collective climate crisis.
The proof is in the pollution.
Every time we at A Greener Future facilitate a litter clean up, across all the regions we cover, we’re bound to find evidence of convenience culture. Plastic packages, bottles, dental flossers — and then there’s stuff that’s degraded to the point we don’t know what it is, but it’s still plastic in our environment that needs to be picked out, sorted, and hopefully recycled.
Ultimately, we’re not saying don’t buy anything for convenience. Instead, we’re encouraging people to examine the consequences of overconsumption and overuse of convenience-oriented services. Our individual choices do have collective consequences and consumer power is very real. Affordability and accessibility are important factors to consider, but there are many different ways to navigate the world of consumption that are more mindful and aware of how to avoid unnecessary waste. Finally, some of what we’re talking about really isn’t that inconvenient, it really comes down to our priorities. The planet we live on should always be one.
Written by Mara Mahmud | Social Media Manager, A Greener Future