RUMFORD, MAINE- Local environmental scientists who won a government contest are rolling out their eco-friendly, sustainable, locally sourced, union-certified, carbon-neutral, water-saving, “waste-reflection-free” bathroom mirrors at participating Home Depots and other non-evil retailers on Earth Day Sunday.

The cutting-edge bathroom mirror design comes at a price, it’s true — $6500, before a government rebate of four dollars — but with the world spinning out of ecological control, the EcoMirror might be our only hope to avoid forty billion people sitting on a desolate, lifeless planet, with an average daytime temperature of 1400 degrees Kelvin. The government is phasing in a requirement that all bathroom mirrors be waste-reflection-free by 2014.

Despite intensive attempts to educate the public about the danger posed to the environment by waste reflections, people are woefully ignorant of their effects. Faculty scientists at the Rumford University College Academy Institute of Higher Learning, located upstairs from the Aubuchon Hardware sphagnum shed, were among the first to “science up” a bunch of evidence that waste reflections from your bathroom mirror are killing the planet.

“We used R Prize grant money to study the links between waste reflections from American bathroom mirrors and the obesity rates of Piping Plovers, and let me tell you, the results were chilling,” opined lead researcher Thad Delano Farquar Devonshire-Smythe IV, “and there was a direct and incontrovertible relationship shown between unused reflections and the plover population. “You could almost hear the crunching of the eggs as the working mother plovers plopped down, exhausted after a day of doing all the work (for only seventy percent of the seeds a male would get) in their family units, and unwittingly killing their broods. And let me tell you, you could win the Stanley Cup with the chart we came up with.”

The studies show that no matter how eco-conscious a family might be, the reflections from the bathroom mirror are being continually pumped into the atmosphere, even when the house’s occupants are out riding their recumbent bicycles to their fair trade jobs. “Unless you have a teenager at home, the mirror can have no one in front of it to absorb the planet-killing reflections as much as forty percent of the time,” Devonshire-Smythe continued, ” and if you leave the light on in the bathroom by mistake… dear Gaia, you might as well start clubbing seals.”

The EcoMirror avoids these deadly waste reflections in an ingenious way. First, the EcoMirror trims back the size of the mirror itself to about the size of the porthole on an economy cruise ship. Then, it cuts out almost 100 percent of the waste reflections by avoiding directly showing the user a representation of him or herself at all. It’s simply equipped with a button that summons a government-approved pastel artist, who arrives as soon as public transportation allows, and draws a likeness of you on the erasable EcoMirror’s surface.

Local resident Butch Herblock said he was skeptical at first, but said if you give the process a little time, you might like it. “The first artist they sent was a little hinky. I didn’t want to say anything, but she arrived kind of late, and smelled a bit of medical marijuana, and she drew a picture of the Soweto riots on my new EcoMirror instead of a reflection of my face. But when I explained to the Homeland Reflection Authority that I needed a different artist, they sent a nice fellow as a replacement after I filled out some forms online. He wore wool socks and Birkenstocks, which my wife said was a bad sign for artistic flair, but he did pretty good after he got the hang of drawing everything backwards. And the HRA offered to pay my co-pay for the transfusions I needed when I shaved in the new mirror. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Everyone should have one of these babies if we’re going to save the planet.”

The EcoMirror’s price tag has set tongues to wagging. But Ed Dyson Light of the National Cray-Pas Consortium is a believer. “It’s just Big Mirror that’s against these kinds of things. Anyone complaining about these mirrors are funded by the Koch brothers, I bet. And think of the jobs this thing will create. I know I am.”

Local wag Spike Daboll was having none of it. “Hell, I got two art-school dropouts sleeping on my couches right now. I told that woman not to send my step-kids to Rumford University College Academy Institute of Higher Learning unless’n they got a scholarship, but did she listen? On top of everything, they’re oil painters and no one’s gonna wait around for that stuff to dry when they’re brushing their teeth. Couldn’t paint a fence if you ask me. Anyway, we don’t need another gummint program to get people sketching around here. And I’ll tell you what. For every EcoMirror you make me buy, I’m going to keep two old ones, and point them at each other.”