Luminous squishy spheres of rubber. Little globes of future-perfect plastic worlds. Coming soon to a street vendor near you – Eco Soil. What plant would not feast resplendent on their luscious watery bounty? What home could resist their glowing, nay radioactive, eye candy? What species will survive their mass-marketed usurping of real grit and mud?

Like a jellied electronic book reader, attempting to pollute the planet in the name of replacing an incumbent product (e.g. a regular book) seemingly just for the sake of it, eco-soil looms large as a possible Armageddon vehicle. While burning your books to make way for a handy palm sized device that stores all of them on a memory chip (good luck if you drop that one) at the same time rather than giving your plants soil try these new lumps of plastic: You take them out of the vase, you wash them (with detergent) and then you dry them out and put them back in again. If they just called it fake soil, fine. But eco? Just what is so eco about these things? Surely the true eco-soil is just regular soil, no?

What could ever, in any sense, be ecological about choosing plastic over organic? I can hear the strange mongrel lady who attempted to sell them to me last weekend in my head now, “but with this beads you re-use! Over and over like!” Nope, sorry. You can re-use regular soil too. You don’t even need to wash it because, guess what bozo, it’s dirt; it’s meant to be filthy mucky and slimy.

The real deal with Eco-soil is that it lets you display your flowers in a clear vase without having to be, I guess, offended with the turdish colour of regular muck. Big whoop. Eco-soil is clearly designed for morons who can be seduced by the double fronted attack of pretty aesthetics and saving the planet. These people would presumably visit more brothels if they promised to donate 10% of the rake to charity, too.

If this sells we are all going to the grave. You don’t have to try too hard to think of other equally bizarre schemes that will soon overrun us. Well, that is unless your brain has been screwed by breathing in too many noxious fumes from the eco-soil manufacturing plant in deforested China. Why not eco-flowers as well? Just as good as real flowers but made out of plastic. They last forever! Yes, literally a million years from now the burning Venutian wasteland that is our planet will be resplendent by fake roses and daffodils, slightly worn but still offering a glimmering funeral corsage to the world of today when marketing hijacked the Green Agenda. Oh and look there; what’s that blowing along over the bedrock in the two hundred mph wing where there was once gardens and parks? Why can it be? Yes, that’s right, a bead of that unmissable, lovable, diabological, eco-soil.