You walk through the gate and the sun hits the metal of the scanners. A volunteer reaches for your hand and she slides a band onto your wrist. It is made of wood and the wood is light. The surface of the tag is smooth and the logo of the festival is burnt into the grain. You feel the weight of it and it feels like a promise. You think about the plastic bands of the past and you feel better about the weekend. The wood is natural and the strap is organic cotton. You walk into the crowd and the music starts and the promise stays on your arm.

The festival is in a field near Ghent and the field is green. It is Monday morning now and the music has stopped. Ines wears a hi-vis vest and she carries a metal grabber. She is a volunteer and she has worked since the sun came up. The grass is flattened and the mud is drying in the heat. She sees a flash of light in the dirt and she reaches down. It is a wooden wristband and the clasp is broken. She drops it into a thick plastic bag. She moves two steps and she finds another. The logo is still crisp but the wood is stained by beer. She fills her fourth bag and the bag is heavy.

Ines sits on a crate of rubbish and she takes out her phone. She sees the post from the festival communications team. The graphic is bright and it says the festival was a success. It says they used 42,000 plastic-free wristbands. It says the festival is green and the fans are part of the change. Ines looks at the bag at her feet. She sees the broken wood and the torn cotton. The report counts the material but it does not count the bag. The report says the bands are keepsakes but the mud says they are trash.

I spent my morning in July untangling Christmas lights. The heat was in the attic and the air was still. The lights were a knot of green wire and glass. I sat on the floor and I pulled at the loops. I found the end and then I lost it. It was a system that had failed because no one cared how it was stored. We buy the lights and we use them and then we throw them into a box. We think about the light but we do not think about the knot. Sustainability is often like that knot. We look at the ingredient and we ignore the lifespan.

The pipe organ is a machine of wood and air. I spend my days inside the chests and the air is dry. Wood is a living material even when it is cut. It moves with the moisture and it breathes with the season. When I tune a pipe I must respect the wood. If the wood is cheap it will crack. If the wood is thin it will not hold the wind. We use wood in the organ because it lasts for a hundred years. We do not use it because it sounds green in a press release. We use it because the outcome is sound and the outcome must endure.

In the world of access control the material is an engineering decision. A factory like

WXR

produces bands in silicone and wood and paper. They do this because the environment dictates the choice. A water park needs silicone because the water is constant and the chlorine is harsh. A hospital needs paper because the patient stays for a day and the band must be cut away. A festival chooses wood because the festival wants to tell a story. The story is about the earth. The story is about the absence of plastic. But the story ends at the exit gate on Monday morning.

The RFID chip inside the wood is a small piece of silicon and copper. The copper antenna is etched onto a substrate and the chip is bonded with a conductive epoxy. The chip does not care if the housing is wood or plastic. It only cares about the frequency. An NTAG213 chip works at 13.56 MHz and it talks to the reader at the bar. The wood protects the chip for the weekend. The wood is a housing and it is a good housing. But if the wood is thrown away after three days it is still a waste of energy. The carbon used to harvest the wood and shape the tag and ship the band is gone.

We have created a metric that rewards the ingredient. If a company uses wood they get a point for being plastic-free. If a company uses silicone they are marked down because silicone looks like plastic. But a silicone band can be used for five years at a gym. It can be washed and it can be worn in the shower and it can be handed back. The wooden band is used once and it is snapped off. The clasp is usually a one-way plastic slide or a metal crimp. When the band is cut the wood is no longer a tool. It is a splinter in a landfill.

We count the percentage of non-plastic credentials and we applaud. The number is 100% and the number is beautiful. But the metric is a trap. It stops us from asking what happens next. If we buy a wooden band and we throw it away we have still produced waste. We have used the earth to make a disposable toy. The silicone band is made of silica and it is durable. It represents a higher initial cost of carbon but it spreads that cost over a thousand uses. The wooden band has a lower cost but it is paid every single weekend.

I once saw a man trying to tune a pipe with a piece of tape. He wanted a quick fix and he wanted it to look right. The tape held for an hour and then the air pushed it off. The problem was not the tape. The problem was the refusal to look at the pressure of the wind. A festival has a high pressure. There are thousands of people and there is mud and there is sweat. The wristband must survive the pressure. If we choose a material only for the label we are the man with the tape. We are fixing the image but we are ignoring the machine.

The communications team at the festival does not talk to Ines. They stay in the office and they look at the invoices. They see the line item for 42,000 wooden bands and they see the certificate of sustainability. They do not see the bag in the field. They do not see that the “keepsake” is a marketing fiction. Most people do not want a dirty piece of wood on their shelf. They want to go home and they want to sleep. They pull the band off and they leave it on the grass. The material is green but the behavior is exactly the same as it was in 1995.

We should measure the keeping-rate of the objects we create. We should ask how many people still have the band a month after the show. If the keeping-rate is low the material does not matter. Waste is waste. We have moved from a plastic problem to a volume problem. We are filling the earth with “good” materials instead of “bad” ones but the holes in the ground are still growing. We are untangling the lights but we are not checking the bulbs.

The factory floor is a place of logic. A worker at WXR understands that an NTAG215 chip in a wooden housing is a specific tool. It is designed for an event that wants a specific aesthetic. It is a choice. But the choice belongs to the event organizer. The organizer must decide if they want a disposable item or a reusable one. If they choose wood they should own the waste. They should not hide behind the word “plastic-free” while the bins overflow. They should look at the silicone and the elastic and they should consider the long game.

I think about the organ pipes in the cathedral. They are made of lead and tin and wood. They are heavy and they are expensive. No one ever calls them sustainable in a brochure. They are sustainable because they are still there. They are sustainable because I am there to tune them. We have lost the sense of the long game in our rush to be green. we want the sticker and we want it now. We want to be able to say we did no harm while we continue to produce thousands of discarded things.

Ines finishes her shift and her back aches. She hauls the bags to the central collection point. There are hundreds of bags and they are piled high. She sees a wooden band sticking out of a tear in the plastic. It looks like a small bone. It is a piece of a tree that was cut down to be worn for sixty hours. It was a “green” choice. Ines walks to her car and she sees the dust on her boots. She does not feel like she saved the world. She feels like she moved a pile of wood from a field to a dump.

We must change the way we audit our lives. We must stop looking at the list of ingredients and start looking at the floor. If the floor is covered in wood we have failed. If the floor is empty because the bands are still on the wrists of the users we have won. Sustainability is not a material. It is a relationship between a human and an object. It is the decision to keep something because it still has value. When we make things disposable we strip them of value regardless of what they are made of. We need to value the object more than the press release.

The sun is high now and the field is nearly empty. The trucks arrive to take the bags away. The bags will go to a facility and the wood will be buried or burned. The 100% plastic-free claim will stay on the website for a year. It will be used to sell tickets for the next summer. People will read it and they will feel good. They will walk through the gate and they will accept the wooden band and the cycle will start again. We are untangling the wires and we are missing the point. We are tuning the organ while the roof is leaking. We must look at the bin and we must tell the truth about what we see.