Despite concerns, 'throwaway' still sells

During the last federal election, CBC's Vote Compass found that Canadians ranked the environment second only to the economy when asked what issue was most important.

But if so many of us care about the environment, who's buying all the single-use, throwaway products sold in Canada each year?

According to market research company NPD, as many as 40 per cent of Canadians own single-serve coffee pod machines.

And that means a lot of products like Keurig's single-serve K-Cups are heading to the landfill.

And most disposable coffee-maker cups are difficult, if not impossible, to recycle.

Of course, we don't always buy single-use, throwaway products simply for convenience. Sometimes it's because we believe they're healthier.

In this Kleenex ad, we see everyone in the family, including the dog, sharing the same hand towel. And that, according to Kleenex, calls for a solution.

Other single-use, throwaway products promise superior house cleaning, like Swiffer's Sweeper.

Some throwaway products, like the Brita water filter system, justify their existence by saying they're less wasteful than other throwaway products. 

The ad doesn't mention that regularly-replaced Brita filters themselves could be done away with if we simply trusted the public water supply.

Then there are situations where eliminating one form of waste creates another. For example, some municipalities discourage us from using single-use plastic grocery bags, but recommend we continue to use bags for kitchen garbage, which increases demand for brand new single-use plastic bags.

Or they encourage dog owners to use single-use plastic bags for... well, you know.

While we may strongly believe in environmental responsibility at the societal level, at the personal level we're motivated by fear of germs and mess, and the desire for convenience.

Marketers understand this and are diabolically clever at getting us to decouple our personal behaviours from our societal beliefs, so we can keep buying more stuff that goes straight to the landfill.

However, there are some marketing people who don't embrace the throwaway society.

In this 2015 video, we see a city being attacked by disposable K-Cup coffee pods. They take the form of alien spacecraft and Godzilla-like monsters intent on killing everything in sight. The video ends with "Kill the K-Cup before it kills our planet."

It turns out the video was created by a Halifax commercial production company, appalled by the huge waste created by their Keurig machines. The video has since been viewed almost a million times.

But the tide may have started turning on K-Cups. After years of rapid growth, in August 2015 Keurig reported a one per cent drop in pod sales from the year before, while sales of brewing machines and accessories fell by 26 per cent.

Bruce Chambers is a syndicated advertising columnist for CBC Radio.