I’m all for saving the environment as long as the consumer doesn’t have to pay significantly more for the “upgrade,” financially or otherwise.
But I’m still baffled by how most water bottle companies have switched to eco friendly, smaller sized bottle caps and flaunt a reduction of 20% in plastic on the label. Are you serious? The entire bottle is made up of plastic, reducing the half-inch cap by one fifth is negligible relative to the current system still in place.
These initiatives have been made purely to convince naive and non-thinking individuals that companies actually care about the environment and are doing “all that they can, one step at a time” to becoming green. So you might ask yourself, a 20% reduction on the cap might not be much, but at least it’s something, and that’s better than nothing. Right? Well, perhaps.
Although when you reduce the size of a water bottle cap 20%, it’s just small enough to lose or fall on the filthy ground of the city you reside in, rendering the portability of the bottle useless, which is why you bought that “overpriced, more costly than gasoline per unit” item in the first place.
It’s like when the cigarette companies switched from advertising light alternatives on the label to Camel Blue. No, they still don’t care about you, and they are not looking to keep the end user informed– these cash cows were legally forbidden from calling their cigarettes light any longer due to the fact they contain almost identical quantities of highly processed tobacco and additives.
So when you see something that strikes you as odd when it comes to browsing the aisles of your local grocery store and processing information based on marketing tactics to push a product’s sales, even those that are advertised in your benefit in the case of the water bottle caps, chances are that your gut impulses, even without fully substantiated evidence, are a reality.
Evan Seaman is a senior majoring in marketing. He may be contacted at eseaman@themiamihurricane.com.