The Habit of Using One-off Products

    It is supposed that human society has become a throwaway society. Using one-off products has been highly popular among people. Thus, those kinds of products are becoming more and more numerous even flood our world. However, the habit of using one-off products should be suppressed.

People are accustomed to use one-time use products mainly for their cheap and convenient. They can be just thrown away instead of taking time to be maintained or cleaned, which is greatly accord with the trend of modern society—efficiency. Therefore, people largely use them with little hesitation. But to reach this efficiency may come with big cost.

To begin with, using disposable products widely can waste a large number of and many kinds of resources. For example, wood is used in great amount to product throwaway chopsticks, lots of things related to paper like paper napkins and containers. According to the data counted by UN, thousands of acre of the forest disappear every year. The current world forest coverage has been less than 26%. And then, wood can also be turned into furniture, houses and roads for long-term use. Therefore, wood is not only important for development but also very precious. Especially today water, petrol and many other resources like wood are also seriously inadequate. It is hardly believed that people use products made by those kinds of precious materials only for once and then throw them immediately.

 Except for the waste of resource, the habit of using disposable products is not good for human beings themselves. First, it is not beneficial in shaping people’s proper saving concept. People who form a habit of using disposable products may overlook the importance of those products. As they are used to throwing things and take it for granted, when the economic crisis comes just like now, it is difficult for them to change their life style into an economical way. Second, this using disposable products habit does harm to people’s health. For example, in plastic food box, some polymers like polystyrene that can lead to cancer may dissolve out and be absorbed by food and then by people. Also in disposable chopsticks, there is a substance called sulfite, which can lead to asthma.

The most obvious hazard brought by the habit of using disposable products is that the environment around us has been being harmed. Evidently, countless plastic products for one-shot use have formed a huge garbage land people may barely manage. Take China for example, two-thirds of Chinese cities has been surrounded by garbage and one-fourth of cities has had no more landfill can be used. What’s more, the amount of trees is reducing in an alarming way for disposable products, which can further contribute to many environment problems as the deterioration of air pollution, desertification of land and soil erosion.