SunChips: The sound and the fury

Snack-food addicts like to keep their guilty pleasures quiet, said Stephanie Hayes in the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times. So it’s no wonder there was a consumer backlash against Frito-Lay’s biodegradable—but maddeningly noisy—SunChips bags. The bags were made from a stiff plant material that quickly disintegrates in landfills, but when chip eaters tore open a bag and reached into it, the rigid paper made a terrible racket that users likened to power lawn mowers and jet engines. One blogger measured the sound at an astonishing 95 decibels. The cacophony was not only hard on the ears—it alerted “roomies and spouses of your raging chip habit.” Sales dropped 11 percent, so the company last week said it would bring back the original packaging while developing a quieter eco-friendly bag.

You couch potatoes are a bunch of babies, said Lauren Marmaduke in the Houston Press. Yes, the compostable bag was loud, but that’s “a minor annoyance.” You snackers could have had your SunChips without drowning out the TV

if you’d just emptied the bag into a bowl. Unfortunately, said Kate Sheppard in MotherJones.com, most Americans aren’t willing to suffer even the slightest inconvenience for the good of the planet. Spoiled consumers refuse to buy those new, energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs because “they simply don’t care for the way they look.” They try to flout laws requiring low-flow toilets and shower heads. Even the smallest sacrifice won’t fly. “If the sound of a crinkly eco-chip bag is too much to handle, then the human species really is screwed.”

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Don’t blame consumers for rejecting inferior products, said Eric Felten in The Wall Street Journal. You can’t force-feed “environmentally conscious alternatives” that are “poor substitutes.” But when people are offered green products that are better than what they’re meant to replace, they embrace them. We stopped killing whales for oil only when kerosene, gas, and finally electric bulbs provided better and cheaper lighting. Newspapers and magazines will stop cutting down forests and printing on dead trees only when iPads, Kindles, and other e-readers provide a truly superior experience. The environmental craze for “locally produced foods” is actually catching on—not in order to save the fuel used in transporting foods, but because fruit, vegetables, and meat produced in small, nearby farms “tastes great.” People will someday eat chips out of a biodegradable bag—but only when reaching for that last chip doesn’t sound like a 747 on takeoff.