Few things say f:)k the environment like a styrofoam cooler.
My biggest complaint about styrofoam coolers is that they’re absolute disasters anyway you look at them.
The styrofoam cooler is a quick party fix and that usually means you were lazy and didn’t plan ahead. Nobody ever really relies on the styrofoam cooler to be their permanent cooler because, well … a styrofoam cooler can’t be a permanent cooler. There are no old styrofoam coolers.
The styrofoam cooler is basically a one time shot deal and we know this going in. You run into 7 Eleven and grab the cooler, throw the beer and ice in it and head to wherever you’re going.
If the cooler stays together long enough to actually make it to the destination that’s a plus. If the cooler last through the event (and it probably won’t) you’ll never take it home anyway. Just throw it in the trash on the way out of the park or beach and be done with it. Why would you want to keep a styrofoam cooler when you’ve got perfectly good coolers at home?
The true quality of the cooler is another thing altogether. The chances of your cooler lasting long enough to carry your cargo to the destination is about 50%. At some point pieces of styrofoam will flake throughout your car for no apparent reason until you suddenly realize water is leaking all over your back seat from melting ice in the cooler that is escaping through that small crack in the cooler that happened when you ever so gently placed the cooler in the back seat two minutes ago.
The chances of your cooler lasting through the event are only about 10%. Styrofoam coolers usually last long enough to get one or two beers out of them and then somebody leans on it and it shatters into a million environmentally un-friendly pieces.
We usually take this pretty well. We only paid $5.00 for the cooler anyway and, afterall, we’ve had plenty of styrofoam coolers before and … wow, come to think of it, this one probably lasted longer than any of those.
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Ricky26, you are so right on! Twenty years ago, they were all over the place! How hilarious it is now for me to see one… ACTUALLY BEING USED!!!! I usually see the all over the highway. I guess it’s because at some point in the ride, the lazy-ass, non-planning loser looks in the back and sees leakage all over the place. Then guess what? He tosses the thing out the window… probably heads to Kmart (not Target, because they don’t sell beer), buys a real cooler, and dashes off to his eventual destination (three hours later).
Wow… we are still using styrofoam coolers from camping trips 12 years ago… seriously…
Anyway, can’t you recycle them?
Nabeel R on July 31st, 2007 at 10:44 pm | Link
How do you recycle a pile of crap like the one in the picture? It’s been blown to smithereens. Thousands of tiny styrofoam pellets are disbursed the moment some fat guy leans on the cooler or someone slightly overloads the cooler and it shatters.
I thought the issue with styrofoam is that it COULD NOT be recycled, EVER, and that long after humans perish, styrofoam lives on to carry the tale of our heritage and how we destroyed Earth and ourselves.
Not only will styrofoam tell the tale of our heritage, it will tell the story of how we couldn’t build a very good cooler.
Whoever comes after us will wonder how we could build such fantastic buildings and fly through the air with such little minds, but yet build something to keep our beer cold that lasts only 10 minutes until, as said earlier, “the fat guy leans on the cooler”. And yes, that’d be me, thank you very much.
Styrofoam coolers can be recycled if you live in an area that is cold and has feral cats. We live in Michigan and there is a pack of feral cats across the street from us and they always manage to make their way across the street to our neighborhood. I am a bunny hugger and cannot stand the thoughts of those poor babies having no protection from the cold winter months. You can take a styrofoam cooler, line it with a mylar blanket which only costs 2.00, glue the lid to the top, cut a hole in it for the cat to get into and place straw inside. This way the cats have a place to get into when the weather is cold and the mylar blanket will reflect their body heat so they can stay nice and warm. I just made one today for a feral cat that we have in our neighborhood.
connie on December 15th, 2007 at 5:44 pm | Link
And the environmental damage your doing by leaving these frail coolers out in the feral wild is untold. When these things break down and they will and these foam beads they are made of get out there how many fish are you killing, (no not by saving the cats and they eat the fish but by the foam beads getting into the water) . How many birds will eat this stuff and all the other animals. Hell you may even be creating an environment inside this cooler cat keeper when the cfc’s off gas from the foam beads it will create genetic mutations killing cats with great suffering as with most genetic maladies. Or you may create a strain of super cats which will come attack you and eat your eyes out and run a rampage of carnage throughout the world.
So I beg you don’t save the feral cats kill them before they kill us ALL!!!!
mark on December 15th, 2007 at 10:58 pm | Link