Having just moved into an eco village to see if my inner princess can live this way, I learned a very good lesson.
I had bought a really cheap plastic crate despite all my misgivings and as I moved it, full of very light items, it split and cut three of my fingers. The amount of blood spilled was ridiculous for a small cut, and sore fingers on a day when you are shifting boxes, is not fun.
The crate, now useless and letting in water- I am in Wales and that day it decided to pour with rain- was impossible to lift and proved a nightmare for the day. I have always bought quality and still have many things that I bought in my twenties....as my parents taught me.
Cheap products that break quickly end up in landfill. Plastic sometimes take centuries to degrade, if it does at all. Quality products tend to last longer, and are much more pleasant to use.
I will not be making this mistake again. I went out and bought 3 crates that are well made, and will last me for decades.
Cheap food, a whole other subject, came about because we had cheap oil and it was not expensive to ship food here to be processed, here to be packed and then some where else, sometimes to a different continent, to be sold.
According to Paul Hawken, this is very expensive to the economy, the environment and our health. The price is cheap but the methods of producing this cheap food are expensive.
As oil prices are uncertain, and there are questions about how much oil there is left, we need to start buying food, and everything else, locally. This way we can meet the farmers, find out their ethics and how they produce the food, and see if it is how we want what we eat to be produced.
As I said I have moved into an eco village. The more I understand how wonderful life can be, the less I understand how we have come to a place where we are so removed from nature, and her abundance.
Cheap is not sustainable. The average person in the first world is living as if there are 3 planets, not one. Something needs to give.