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Comment by redshirt | Hacker News Reader

Seems like Germany had this one figured out. One non-recyclable thing found in your building’s garbage and you’re all in trouble. The US is way too lax on enforcing good practices. We waste too much, and when we do feel good recycling drives we do it lazily.

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Agreed but like maybe companies shouldn't produce waste packaging, etc.

This sounds an awful lot like "blame the litter bugs".

Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk

How about not buying stuff with poor packaging. Sure, sometimes we don’t have a choice, but many times we do. Often it’s as simple as preparing food at home versus getting take out. I’d prefer laws to mandate recycleable packaging. Problem solved. Petrochemical industry will be ticked.

People working 12 hours per day don't really have time to cook. Also if stuff wrapped in plastic is cheaper, people will buy it as money is a limited resource they need for so many other things.

Unless there is government action to mandate some sort of rules around this - mainly to force companies to use reusable containers - blaming little consumers is a fool's endeavor.

Luckily most people don't work 12 hours per day.

Lots of poor and blue collar working class people do 12 hour work days (for example truckers or workers in construction). And these are the people that are usually described here as "primitive" consumers who only eat fast food and buy cheap prepared food in plastic containers.

I'd be all for it.

Especially when it comes to things I'd like to switch on in the store before taking it home to discover that it's not working as intended.

Annie Leonard, who's written on trash and waste, has an excellent article on this from the 2013 Worldwatch Institute State of the World report:

Framing environmental deterioration as the result of poor individual choices—littering, leaving the lights on when we leave a room, failing to car-pool—not only distracts us from identifying and demanding change from the real drivers of environmental decline. It also removes these issues from the political realm to the personal, implying that the solution is in our personal choices rather than in better policies, business practices, and structural context.

"Moving from Individual Change to Societal Change"

http://blogs.worldwatch.org/sustainabilitypossible/wp-conten...

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