I’m a big fan of Mother Earth—I don’t litter or snack on baby seal or anything. But I’ve noticed some “eco-friendly” products that are just plain obnoxious. Here are 8 of the most annoying planet-friendly products.
1. Stuff Made Out of Hemp
Walk into any Whole Foods and you’ll find box after box of hemp cereal, hemp seed crackers, and hemp hummus, all touting the “health benefits” of the plant. You know what the number-one benefit of the hemp plant is? Getting people high. Paying $7 for a box of Hemp Loops is a complete waste of money unless it makes you see double rainbows.
Even worse than the people who eat hemp are the people who wear hemp. And I’m not just talking about those dumb necklaces. People are actually wearing hemp shirts and hemp dresses and carrying hemp purses. In my research I discovered that there are even hemp tampons out there.
2. Burt’s Bees Products
Have you ever taken a good look at Burt? He is terrifying, like an evil, meth-lab-owning lumberjack. Nothing about that face makes me want to rub his lotion all over my body. Even more disturbing is that the company recently rolled out a line of baby products. All I can say is Burt and his bees need to stay far, far away from my future children.
3. Hand Dryers
While they may save a tree or two by depriving you of paper towels, they all sound like a spaceship launching and take forever to actually dry your hands. You use enough energy to power a small city and still end wiping your hands on your hemp pants anyway.
4. Tom’s Shoes
They go to a good cause, but let’s be real here–these are some weird-looking shoes. Plus, they were designed for children skipping along the African savannah or Silicon Valley executives skipping around their offices. In Chicago, we go straight from flip-flops to snow boots. A puny layer of eco-friendly canvas is not going to protect your feet from drifts of slush and garbage.
5. Smart Cars
These are great for carpooling to work at the circus with your colleagues Bozo and Krusty, but if a Smart Car gets into an accident with an SUV, we all know who’s going to win. It’s like putting Mark Zuckerberg in the ring with Mark Maguire.
6. Organic Toothpaste
Tired of brushing with regular toothpaste? Now you can use all-natural paste made out of things like orchid or aloe that have the efficacy of chewing on a flower. Too bad it will eventually make all your teeth fall out until you look like Burt.
7. All-Natural Deodorant
The equivalent of rubbing an evergreen branch under your armpits, this only seems like a good idea if you live alone in the woods with no one but the chipmunks to smell your pine-scented BO.
8. Biodegradable Sun Chips Bags
Over the summer, Sun Chips rolled out a new kind of bag for its chips that’s 100% compostable. Hooray! But there was just one problem: the new bags were really, really loud. Crinkling them could reach a volume of over 95 decibels, louder than the willypit of a fighter jet, according to this Wall Street Journal article. All I can say is the bags made it exponentially more difficult for me to steal my roommate’s Sun Chips while she was asleep.
Responding to criticism, the company scrapped the loud bags in October, which makes me kind of sad. In theory, these bags were actually a pretty good idea (unlike hemp pants or lumberjack lotion) and would have stopped a lot of garbage from piling up in landfills. I mean, sure they cause hearing loss, but maybe a little annoyance is worth saving the planet sometimes.
What do you think?
