Imported junk.
It does my head in...really. Endless tons of low quaity nick nacks (ie crap you don't need) that people buy just because they can..., because it's cheap. And it's all destined for land fill in a very short period of time.
It's especially bad when it comes to things that compete with locally made/good-quality products as the ridiculously cheap imports force local/qualtity manurfacturers to lower the quality of their products to be able to compete with the chinese (et al) rubish price-wise. This seems to create a kind of feed-back loop with net result being that all products in a catorgory become low quality and it becomes impossible to buy a good quality product at all, where previously it was the best quality product that sold best.
When I think of all the recources that are burnt/consumed producing all this garbage it does my head in. There's the energy (and pollution) to mine the materials, the energy to ship materials to china, there's the materials themselves, theres the production (factory) energy, the materials for packaging (and ascociated costs/pollution), the transport costs to ship the finished junk back to australia (or your country), there's the distribution transport, there's the work you had to do to earn the money to buy that novilty egg timer you allways wanted that'll break after the third time you use it, then there's the energy to get broken junk to the tip and buried in land fill 'cause it's too hard to recycle, and of course, there's the whole lot repeated again 'cause you have to buy another one, 'cause you decided to buy something cheap 'n' nasty...........AAAAAAARRGHHH!
Sure, it only cost ya two bucks, but what's the real cost of all this junk?
