TikTok has taken on a new realm of trending items. There are items like Labubus and Sonny Angels that have been trending for a few months now. People have giant collections of these little toys, but no one realizes how truly detrimental they are to the environment.
There are a few reasons why these trends are so bad. AP Environmental Science teacher Maureen Huhman provided one of these reasons, which is the plastic waste they generate. “They create more plastic waste. People buy these micro-trends, and they eventually go out of style and get thrown away,” Huhman said. With trendy items, like Sonny Angels, especially, being made mostly of plastic, when they stop trending, which is inevitable, people usually either throw the toys out or donate them.
Commonly, when these items are thrown out, they are disposed of in a landfill or incinerated. Most times, they can’t be recycled. “Plastic will take at least 20-500 years to break down in a landfill, and when it does break down, it just becomes microplastics,” Huhman said. For starters, that is a really long time for something to break down, so when there are so many of these items in a landfill, it clogs up the landfill. “Since these items are typically made of plastic, they will not decompose, and they just sit and rot,” Lucas Dvorak (12) said. “This takes up a significant amount of space in landfills, which creates a need for more landfills, which requires the destruction of more ecosystems to make space for our trash.” And, incineration isn’t any better. “When they are incinerated, they release carbon and toxic gases into the air (plastics are made from fossil fuels, which are carbon-based),” Huhman said.
Another thing that people do is donate the toys. While donation seems like a better option, it realistically isn’t much better. Dvorak said, “Typically, micro-trends aren’t even bought, so they sit for a while within a thrift store and then go to a landfill.” So, donating could be a little better while the item is in the thrift store it was donated to, but ultimately, the ones that aren’t bought will also just end up in landfills.
Social media is a big part of these micro-trends as well. People use social media apps like TikTok to promote these items, and when the video goes viral, more people will start to buy/promote these products, and soon enough, it will start trending. “Social media has changed the trend cycle’s length by increasing the rate of information and media consumed. The rapid presentation of information on social media reduces the retention of concepts, which is why these trends die out so early,” Dvorak said, “The trend cycle is heavily correlated to how much information is being processed. The more we consume and the quicker we consume it, the faster we create and send trends back into obsolescence. Overall, it is the speed and sheer amount of information given to people on social media that is leading to a quicker trend cycle, creating the phenomenon of ‘micro-trends.’”
Since people move on from one trend to another in the span of a few months to a few years, the trending items bought get thrown out fairly quickly. Micro-trends have too harmful an impact on the environment to continue to be created. It’s just not worth harming the environment for a little figurine that will sit on someone’s shelf until they decide to throw it out within months after buying it.
