Among the treasures found in Tutankhamun’s tomb were drinking vessels rendered in finely carved and inlaid alabaster. Ancient Egyptians’ use of this material as “fit for a Pharaoh” attests to its high value and their high esteem for it. The objects themselves pertain to their most deeply held beliefs about the afterlife and the needs of the body therein. One can imagine perhaps every object in such a society being not only imbued with meaning, but also recognized and valued as such. By using alabaster to render disposable bottles that are so ubiquitous in our everyday environment as to be practically invisible, I mean to draw attention to the idea of “value”. Thousands of years after the fact, we find an artifact here or there and it speaks volumes about the values of the society that made it. In future societies, people may look back on our consumer culture’s near infinitude of disposable objects of every imaginable description, and these artifacts too will speak volumes about our society and what we value (convenience in this case). I believe that were we to assign more realistic values to our disposable consumer products, accounting for the true costs (unsubsidized by either current or future inhabitants of Earth) of processes like resource extraction, transport, refinement, transport, manufacture, distribution, consumption, disposal and pollution mitigation at each and every one of these stages, we would find that our “cheap” disposable plastic bottles in fact bear very high costs both now and far into the future. So high in fact, that a plastic bottle might turn out to have a higher true cost than one of alabaster. Perhaps such a realization/recognition might contribute to a shift in our consumer habits that may even improve our chances of having future critics.