Wednesday, 25-Jan-12 23:07:00 CET

The environment is so boring

This morning when I was taking my morning shower I was thinking that it would be so nice with a really long leisurely hot shower. Then it occurred to me that it is maybe not so good for the environment to take a long shower. With this I concluded that the environment is so boring. I even spoke it out loud “Booooooooring”. On average a shower consumes two US gallons of water per minute (7.5 liter’s) and then it has been heated as well.

When I was about to wash my hair I found out that the bottle of shampoo was almost empty. It is so unrewarding to leave the shower to get another bottle of shampoo.

Since time is scarce even for me I did not fulfill my dream of a long shower and instead I ended this ultimate luxury and proceeded the morning ritual. Deodorant.

I don´t use any fancy deodorant with a spray but an old-fashioned type with a ball. It turned out that it was also almost empty. These products are difficult to put upside down to let gravitation help the content out of the container. The deodorant has a round cap! The shampoo has a tiny little cap and that cap is half round too. There is no balancing possible here. It is hopeless.

This situation got me started. Here I had two almost empty products and both are extremely irritating with giving away all of the content. I bought this stuff, it is mine. Just give it to me without any discussion. Before this morning I was just thinking that “oh well, the manufacturer is happy that I toss away some of the shampoo or deodorant because then I will buy more of the products, this is logical”. This morning it occurred to me that this is the ultimate waste of nature resources. Just throwing something away because of bad design. A bad design just for the purpose to make it hard to use all of the product.

I go to the shop and I buy a product and then after I bought it I find out that the container is made in such way I cannot use all of the content. How much of natural resources and energy is being wasted on products because the container is designed wrong? There is no excuse for this, this is just plain stupidity!

Let’s say you fill up your car regularly and every time you do so you spill out some 5% of the fuel just because the pump accidently continue to pump when you pulled out the hose and you make a pool of lost fuel around the car each time and remember, you have to pay for it!

Another example, let’s say you buy a house or an apartment but you cannot use all of it because the architect made an error and put in a room without any doors or windows in the middle of the house. When you complain to the architect his reply is that it is not so bad because your neighbors have a much bigger blind room.

Then I started to think about how to solve this and would it not be a good idea to have information on the package saying how much of the content you cannot use so that you can stop buying wasteful packages? The bad thing with this is that it is yet another type of information to put on a package and there are already so many types of information on each package that confuse us so we don’t need yet another one. Not me anyway. And if it should be the best solution then it would take years upon years to make it happen and I want a solution today, not tomorrow. Today! From that perspective is the environment so boring. It takes so much time to solve things like these with politicians. Blah blah blah year in and year out and just really small things happens.

Tonight I had figured out that I am not a politician and I am not patient. I like to create things for myself so I am doing the things I am good at and that is not politics.

I just need simple solution to get that stuff out of the ill designed containers. So here it is. A wooden plank with two holes. One for the Andrélon shampoo and one for the deodorant. I used a special drill with adjustable blade. The hole for the deodorant is 40 mm in diameter and the hole for the shampoo is 31 mm in diameter. I can adjust the blade of the drill to make both these holes. The plank is 26 mm high. It is important to make the holes a bit bigger so that it is easy to insert and to remove the container.

With this plank the bottle can be standing upside down without falling. I leave it like so and the next morning I can use the rests of the deodorant and the shampoo.

In this way the environment is not boring. Now I have done something that works for me. I solved a problem, my problem. I made a better world!