You’re in your lecture class. It’s finals week, and the hall is silent. As you try to remember the week one slides, your thought process is as scattered as an infant releases a wet squelch behind you. But it’s not an infant; it’s a 32 oz Wide Mouth Hydro Flask™ which retails for $44.95 being twisted open.
The owner of the Wide Mouth chugs room temperature water, having to angle the cylinder so it doesn’t slosh the entire liter upon their face. Once the student is finished consuming, they attempt to return the flask to the floor. It bangs twice on the way down, once against their leg and again on the ground. Both times it creates the hollow clang of rebar hitting an empty trashcan that leaves no corner of the hall unperforated.
The worst part? No one even looked over. This is normal behavior.
I don’t feel I need to explain to college students what a Hydro Flask is. Hell you’re probably putting another Dutch Bros. sticker on yours right now. These horrible water bottles are a cyclopean merger of bullshit technocratic innovation to “solve” a problem with a culturally sensationalized item that seeks to offload climate agency onto the individual.
However, I must start with the user experience because it’s like the creators of the Hydro Flask were in a pissing match with the developers of Duo to create the most annoying product. But while Duo has a captive audience of students needing to log onto Canvas, the owners of these flasks must be a cult because they seem to like the obtrusiveness of the bottle.
While being handled, a Hydro Flask often impacts objects making a sound that is anything from a shrill clang to a refrigerator taking its own life. Opening the infernal tube produces a squeal that grows in unpleasantness exponentially with the amount of moisture on the rim, a sound so biologically off-putting it makes me want to commit a Van Gogh on my ears.
But the sounds aren’t the reason consumers drop four times the national hourly wage on a water bottle, rather they do so for faux sustainability.
Hydro Flask’s environmentalism message is the epitome of the “vote with your wallet” philosophy, wherein the consumer makes purchasing decisions based on their perception of a company’s social values. Thereby the free market pressure companies are pressured to promote popular ideals.
However, voting with your wallet is not the choice of finding a product that holds your values, but settling for a corporation that does its best marketing to mimic those ideals. Corporations and their products will never solve the climate crisis because their profit motive creates the pollution and waste that fuel environmental degradation.
Yes, your individual footprint matters, and you should try to be as sustainable as possible. Yet corporations would like you to believe your actions are equally as crucial as theirs. After all, it was the oil company BP that invented the “carbon footprint,” to obfuscate the fact that just 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of all global emissions.
Promoting change through individual decisions in consumerism is a purely cultural venture, and it will never bring about meaningful reforms.
For instance, just look at Hydro Flask’s environmental campaign “Parks For All,” which at the time of writing this article has donated $1.9 million and 56,000 bottles to 122 non-profits supporting “building, maintaining, restoring, and providing better access to parks.” For all of the company’s apparent commitment to the cause, how much has it actually supported “the parks?”
If we assume Hydro Flasks are as valuable as their retail price and just as charitable as dollars, those 56,000 bottles add another $1.7 million to donations –– given the average bottle would be $30. This equates to a total donation amount of $3.6 million. However, considering Hydro Flask has an estimated annual profit of $38.9 million since beginning operations in 2009, its total profit is conservatively well over $300 million.
Meaning that as a percentage of profits, Hydro Flask has donated roughly 0.01% to values it claims to support.
If Hydro Flask really cared about sustainability and cutting down on waste, it wouldn’t make a product. Because the most sustainable product is not the $30 double-walled, vacuum-insulated water bottle, but the ugly secondhand bottle from your local Goodwill.
This is a cultural issue that needs to be dealt with if society wants to actually respect messages of environmentalism, and the assault on our ears. Yes, it’s just a stupid water bottle, but as a product it displays the incompiability of the for-profit model with addressing climate change.