Everyone thinks that the US consumes too much. Even Americans think so; in conversation they frequently bring the subject up themselves, just to get it over and done with. I am currently working in a giant US art gallery, MASS MoCA in Massachusetts, and I have found evidence, small but significant, that all is not as it seems.
Here it is: In American theatres they don’t tend to use cable-ties! When they want to bundle up cables neatly or attach them to scaffolding poles they use thin black cotton cord. Backstage there’s a great reel of the stuff. It’s biodegradable, reusable, easy to undo and a great deal more attractive than cable ties. In the UK we use cable-ties in theatre, in broadcasting, for gardening, for mending our cars. Most of them can’t be re-used, they never rot away and they are ugly as heck.
OK, it’s not a massive thing, but I have been using cable-ties for all sorts of things for ages and it never even occurred to me that it would be better to use string. I thought I was going to be leaving the US with a load of cheap shopping, I didn’t realise I’d be coming home with ideas for saving the planet.
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But if you have reusable ones you can use them for all sorts of fantastic things – keeping together chicken pens that you sometimes need to take apart every so often to clean out for example. Or as the catch for a chicken pen, on the grounds that foxes don’t have opposable thumbs and can’t work the little catch thingy that unclips them. Or keeping tomatoes up. It’s the reusable-ness of them that’s the point I think, rather than just the one-offness.
Reusable ones are better, but I am fast coming round to the idea that string is nearly always best. I think it’s because of how disgusting it looks when you see people being handcuffed with cable ties – they’re getting bad connotations for me. Surely that lovely frayed gardening twine is brilliant for tomatoes and ideal for tying back other things in the garden because it rots away after about a season so it doesn’t dig in when things grow.
I agree with Jon – cable ties are ugly. Twine is good; when we got our allotment I got a bit obsessive about getting as much plastic as I could out of our rubbish-strewn ground (pretty successfully). Not that I found many cable ties. Lots of bin-liners, plastic chicken wire and a lorra lorra carpets. Glass, pottery and metal I tended to leave, unless I thought it posed a danger to the children.