100% convinced our decedents will look back in this age and laugh 2 things : domestic recycling as an attempt to save the the planet , and the fact that we did nothing unless there was a profit in it.
Also I don't know about you, but my countries recycling relied on sending it all to China to burn.
dustsv hands yep my work here is done
Recycling is a lie to keep making plastic, nothing more
It's for profit
Ancestors?
It will probably be an alien species who will find a dead planet and wonder how and why so much toxic material was spread around the planet .... and also wonder why there is an orbiting space station filled with gold, paper money and the greyed out decaying bodies of a humanoid species.
yeah anytime i see anyone talking about some little change they made in their lives to be more eco friendly it makes me incredibly, deeply sad. especially if it's at more expense or more effort for them -- they're trying their best but it's literally completely pointless
Many of us do it for sport tbh. A healthier way to gamify life sorta. I've been vegan since 2015/16 and it does increase the difficulty setting somewhat, but also it's unlocked a million fun mini games for me along the way and provided much needed community.
I wish I could cope as good as you. Is going vegan the answer?
Reducing your meat consumption is likely the most effective way of lowering your personal climate 'footprint'.
You don't even have to go fully vegan. Use 20%, 30% or 50% less meat and you're already doing a lot.
Also look up climate impact of different types of food (and where it comes from), and use that to prioritize. Chicken, fish and pork are up to 10 times less impactful than beef.
Give it a shot, can't hurt. You won't become Buddha overnight, but it can certainly put you on a path toward much different ways of seeing yourself and everything around you.
It's absolutely not helpless to change your habits. All our consumption is based on collective habits, and changing them will have an effect.
Exactly. It's only pointless as long as other people think it's pointless. If everyone made changes we could see a noticable impact happen.
Billionaires need to change too, they do more than their fair share of polluting, but it doesn't mean we are all off the hook. We should hold them accountable and also each of us strive to be better.
What if that small change In made was assasinating billionaires (sorry, PragerU, people with means) in my spare time instead of just playing Hitman?
Does one person saying that they voted for change in the government make you incredibly, deeply sad? Just one vote in millions after all. Little things can collectively add up to something big.
It drives me crazy, this performative enviornmentalist bullshit. I have to pay 10c (on top of 300% food cost increase don't forget) for a plastic bag at the grocery when i forget my canvas ones. In these bags i must pay for i can place fruit individually wrapped in plastic.
Every time something gets worse, we must be the ones to pay. This whole environment-saving-by-paper-straw phenomenon is so insipid that I would rather believe that it's actually a deliberate corporate strategy. At least that would make sense. If they keep us thinking that something is being done, they don't have to change a thing, and if it's "all of our jobs" (read: not theirs), to save the world, we'll never take them to task for their (greater) part of the waste.
It is actually a deliberate corp strategy. Plastic straws were never a real concern, save for that ONE turtle. Plastic straw make such a negligible amount of plastic waste that stop using it will have virtually zero measurable impact in amount of plastic waste we create. All it ever was intended for was to make us feel like something was being done while doing absolutely nothing.
That's not to say all plastic reduction initiatives are pointless. But the straws definitely belong in the least environmentally impactful category.
All it ever was intended for was to make us feel like something was being done while doing absolutely nothing.
It certainly does help a little bit. But it's of course still not a coincidence that companies are pushing for it instead of more effective measures... It's not just cheap but it also pushes people to believe that measures to save the environment are all useless and annoying, and makes them less likely to want more to happen.
It's the "thoughts and prayers" of environmentalism. I'm convinced the net effect is negative after you factor in the way it distracts people from anything that might actually help.
What's worse is we haven't replaced plastic straws with a good alternative. Paper straws fucking blow and I'm not going to carry around and wash a silicon straw with me at all times.
I mean, one alternative that you are carrying around at all times is your mouth. It's very rare that a straw is needed at all.
Nothing beats collection of beer/cola can's pull tabs for recycling competition at schools. That forces children to ask parents to buy more of the six packs so that they could have the tabs.
You're treating it like a hypothetical but that is in fact exactly what's going on.
Corporations and the politicians they own are hyperfocused on (relativee to centralised) inefficient end user recycling and regular people taking responsibility for the environment and climate change to distract from the fact that maybe 95%+ of it are the fault of corporations, not their customers.
Even consumer waste is many times worse than it would be if companies didn't for example use all that plastic and design electronics to become obsolete if functional at all in as little as a single year just to squeeze as much money out while spending as little as possible.
Apple: We're changing everyone's charging schedules to make electricity 0.00001% greener.
Also Apple: Titanium, so pretty. Even though it's dirtier to mine.
Not only the billionaires, even the millionaires, and all the people taking the plane more than once a year. It is an ecological crime the pollution of air transport.
fun fact. modern planes consume ~3-4l per 100 passengers per km or 3-4l per passenger per 100km.
efficient ICE cars consume ~6l per passenger per 100km.
add to that, that there's basically no good alternative to fast very long distance or cross-continent transport
Edit #2: ICE is a type of train in germany. I mistook "ICE cars" as meaning trains and was wondering how flying is supposed to be more efficient than trains. Hence my confusion.
OG comment (invalid, see Edit #2): Where are these numbers coming from?
I cannot find any source for the 3-4l/passenger/km claim. I cannot find any source for the claim that planes are more efficient. Nothing comes even near this claim.
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/rail-and-waterborne-transport
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566
Can you please provide a source?
Edit #1: I just want to add that my old combustion car (VW Up! / Seat Mii / Skoda Citigo) burned around 4.2l/100km. So I according to you, if I had another person with me, I'd beat both planes and trains with what stands uncontested as the most inefficient form of transport?
Since I just had this whole back and forth with someone else a few days ago, I have these handy. I’m not the parent, but he’s right. An individual car can be more fuel efficient with 3+ passengers but the average car trip is only 1.3 passengers. The most popular use of a car is commuting and that stands at 1.2 passengers per trip.
“A new report from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute shows that flying has become 74% more efficient per passenger since 1970 while driving gained only 17% efficiency per passenger. In fact, the average plane trip has been more fuel efficient than the average car trip since as far back as 2000, according to their calculations.”
http://websites.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/UMTRI-2014-2_Abstract_English.pdf
“The main findings are that to make driving less energy intensive than flying, the fuel economy of the entire fleet of light-duty vehicles would have to improve from the current 21.5 mpg to at least 33.8 mpg, or vehicle load would have to increase from the current 1.38 persons to at least 2.3 persons.”
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/
The alternative is stop traveling such huge distances all the time.
Other than public transportation and filling up the cars with people, instead of having one vehicle per person.
One plane flight a year? What if I want to return home the same year?
You don't, wait the next year or don't leave home.
The trick is to go a week before new year's
Stainless steel straws for the win.
I feel like this is a whoosh. The environmental impact of our collective straw use is so insignificant compared to the effects of so many other things. The fact that people focus on straws is just evidence that the average person has no idea what to do, in order to decrease their environmental impact and will also complain about the mildest of inconveniences.
I don't use straws at all, but this isn't really the point. There are much more impactful ways to reduce your carbon footprint like biking, walking, public transport, but all this pales in comparison in the massive environmental pollutions that billionaires and corporations do to our waterways and air.
I like using straws, and stainless is a really pleasant straw experience ; you can slurp up really thick smoothies, for example.
I'm hyping stainless for the experience.
This resonates hard. Also incredibly fun to watch companies get to abuse loop holes and continue operations as always, then get told we need to sell our cars and turn off our heating to survive this environmental disaster.
ANY effective, long-term collective change REQUIRES that the large majority of people CHANGE THEIR CONSUMPTION HABBITS. While not great, the private plane stuff is exactly as pointless as the paper straws. Both are ways for everyone to point the finger at everyone else, and not have to change.
If the government implemented the "correct" laws tomorrow, but the populace doesn't want to change their habits, they will vote in people that give them back their old, bad things.
If a company implemented to "correct" processes, but the consumers don't want to pay the necessary price, they go bankrupt, and the company with the "incorrect, but cheap" processes wins.
ALL COLLECTIVE ACTION IS A COLLECTION OF INDIVIDUAL CHANGE. There is no alternative!
You don't solve this by just recycling harder - you solve this with legislative intervention to minimise packaging, ban private jets, retire fossil fuels, and stop massive food waste.
Pointing your finger at the masses and demanding they muster the will to change enough that entire supply chains are forced to retool entirely is naiive to the point of stupidity - people will go for cost and convenience just as predictably as companies will burn down the world for an extra dollar. The systemic change makes that shift quickly and (for the consumer) easy.
Bollocks! If every private jet is grounded there's no amount of paper straws that can match that impact.
There's still individual changes that impact more than the collective ones!
Let's just start literally cannibalizing them to send a message. The population is hungry 🍴
You’re talking about two different ways to screw the environment. One is the rampant plastics pandemic, the other is carbon emissions. Paper straws are meant to combat the first, not the second.
While that's true, I think the complaint here is that the the law deliberately harms poor people only. Instead of banning individual plastic applications, we should be taxing literally all plastics and letting consumers decide what's worth it. And if we are to take a case-by-case class warfare approach, we should be going after the excesses of the wealthy - like private jets.
It's not that they're the same thing, it's that they both hurt the environment and are treated very differently.
Downvote this man and his factual statement!!!
The popular comments are all about how recycling is a scam to allow plastic companies to continue creating plastics.
But mushy straws isn’t even about recycling. You’re literally removing a plastic that people use all the time. Sounds like a win no matter what.
