Christensen: A disposable culture

Consider the disposable coffee cup. Functional and convenient, it makes its presence known for… Consider the disposable coffee cup. Functional and convenient, it makes its presence known for just as long as is necessary to finish your drink, and then it’s gone without a trace — well, maybe there’s a trace in a New Jersey landfill somewhere, but out of sight and mind, right?

Whether we realize it or not, our consumerism increasingly defines itself by what we can and cannot throw away. In addition to coffee cups, we now have disposable cell phones, and even disposable pants. Where did it start, you might ask? Well, it began with a man who wanted to make some money, a businessman named King Camp Gillette — yes, Gillette like the razor.

Gillette worked as a salesman for the Crown Cork and Seal Company in the 1890s, selling cork seals. The company’s bottle caps were discarded after the bottle was opened, leading him to recognize the value of a product that could be used a few times and then thrown away.

Ever since men first started trimming their facial hair, the standard format for a razor blade was the same: a long blade, kept throughout life and taken to a specialist periodically to be sharpened with a strap. Katie Capri, who studies advertising at Pitt and worked on a project on Gillette for her Special Topics in Communications course, said that for centuries a “close shave” was considered to be up to three weeks of growth.

After talking to Capri, I became intrigued and checked other sources as well. It turns out that safety razors were developed around the 1850s but still used a forged blade, which dulled quickly and required continuous sharpening. Gillette improved the safety razor designs, engineering the blades from thin, cheap steel — metal which could be thrown away when it dulled. On Sept. 28, 1901, Gillette founded the American Safety Razor Company — later changing the name to the Gillette Safety Razor Company — and in a few short years, he made his fortune. After all, at least half of the world’s population would be the targeted consumer.

For some time, Gillette was something of an international celebrity, with his face featured on every wrapper of the billions and billions of Gillette razor blades sold around the world. But today, like a discarded coffee cup, Gillette’s story is out of mind. Even though the philosophy of convenience and accessibility might have created a trajectory leading to later inventions such as disposable syringes and paper-saving e-mail, the consumerist empire Gillette began to found directly contradicted his innate philosophy.

Gillette was actually a utopian socialist, believing in a society based on idealism rather than materialism. He wrote books promoting a socialist utopia. In one of his polemical tracts, “The Human Drift,” he cited competition as the root of all evil. He presented plans for pollution-free cities contained in glass-domed communal complexes — cities which he hoped would replace the monstrosities created by the industrial revolution. Intentionally or not, it seems he sacrificed his vision; today our streets are littered with disposable bags, boxes and plastic products. Gillette invented a throwaway razor and sparked a throwaway culture.

It’s probably unnecessary for me to talk about what we’ve done to our environment for convenience’s sake. I’ve seen the pictures of turtles strangled by plastic soda-can rings and the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, too.

I love nature, but it doesn’t stop me from being a litter bug at times. It’s not close enough to me to be aware of at all times. It’s also trite for me to stipulate that, from Gillette’s story, we should be more aware of what happens when we compromise our morality in favor of money. Money is the way our world works, and I think that everyone — no matter how virtuous — has a price.

So even though I’m not the world’s greatest environmentalist, I think that Gillette’s story should make us more aware of how much we do throw away. Maybe in all things we should start looking for more permanence and less disposability instead of always pitching out what we could later use. Disposability makes money, but it also makes for cheap production. There’s no harm in taking reusable cloth bags to the grocery store — they’re sturdier anyway — or buying one of those reusable coffee cups. They’re spill-proof, and a refill costs less than a cup. I’m not enough of an idealist to say that we can undo what’s been done or build a city out of glass. But learning to value something, to hold onto it for a little longer, is bound to build our character.

Write Caitlyn at cac141@pitt.edu.