It's hard to be clean.

When I took the plastic wrapping off our new wooden dish rack this afternoon, I could actually smell the deforestation.

I couldn’t make eye contact with it for a while. It riled me. I riled myself.

Another day, another piece of crap. 

To be fair, I did buy it at the local megamall, the one that the Malaysian logging company built. It’s not a place that’s ever going to care too much about ‘ethically sourced’, or ‘fair trade’. Fair enough. I suppose the dish rack is actually brilliant product placement: the fruits of company labour and investment.

It’s the only place in town to buy stuff. And I, like most people with the means to be, seem to be caught in this endless cycle of consumption, discarding, consumption and discarding. I don’t know how to make it stop!

When that place first opened, I did quite enjoy walking through the home wares section, and amusing myself with the appalling light fittings, black leather look seat covers and faux wrought iron dining settings. I would have a chuckle at the bad English on the rows and rows of plastic lunch boxes and food containers; every day is sun ….you and me look together always. Occasionally, I would even buy one. Who can resist a panda face for a lunchbox? Then of course the book “Slow Death by Rubber Duck” came into our lives, and I have been ignoring the growing pile of coloured useless plastic we have amassed in our kitchen cupboards ever since. 

Anyway that was then, I was allowed a brief moment of nostalgia for the Chinese retail sector and all the amusement it provided me. But now when I look at those isles and isles of odd brands and not-quite-right products, all I can see is a graveyard. It’s where the rotten fruits of large-scale cheap manufacturing have come to die. No one really wants this stuff. At best it is a novelty or amusing gimmick, but the joke wears off pretty quickly.

At least for me.

For the real residents of this town however, this mall is the jewel of the city. There has never been anywhere else like it. A huge air-conditioned public space where people can come freely, and shop, or just hang out. There is always a crowd outside the electronics shop watching the flat screen TV. There’s a food court, undercover parking, and a play area for kids. The modern middle class reality has reached Port Moresby.

As for the dish rack: it made it into our home because it wasn’t plastic. Yet, it is the crappest, cheapest, and no doubt, most unsustainable woodchip imaginable. And now, in the interests of reducing the turnover of ‘stuff’ that passes in and out of our home – it must stay. In order to make this work however, I will now have to go out and buy any number of anti-deforestation deoderisers to neutralise that pesky “I’m burning alive!” smell trees sometimes make.

You see what I mean? I simply cannot get off this ride.