>*"Now companies can pollute to their heart's content and make it our failure and their externality."
Not that I disagree with your overall sentiment, but are you suggesting that it's not my responsibility to throw garbage into a trash can?
Not that I disagree with your overall sentiment, but are you suggesting that it's not my responsibility to throw garbage into a trash can?
If the trash can't be easily recycled or is excessive that's a manufacturer problem even if it all ends up in the correct bin. If reuse and deposit schemes would help that's a manufacturer or legislative problem. So it goes on. I'd even argue that takeaways and franchises have partial responsibility for trash around their outlets. Produce less, with less impactful materials. After all the customer wanted a burger or coffee not a selection of impossible to recycle junk.
One of those groups is going to some lengths to avoid their responsibilities. The other, on the whole, is trying or is required via kerbside collections from their homes. On windy days kerbside collections in these parts don't pick up all the blown away plastic. That should be their responsibility too. Presumably my local authority didn't specify that adequately in the outsourcing contract - though it shouldn't be necessary.
As is, it looks like we've landed most of the responsibility on those least able to do anything about it.
I'd argue they do, or at least should. As do we, the end customer.
No law, advertising campaign or regulation has yet achieved 100% compliance. It's the responsibility of producers and retailers to realise, or be forced to realise, that in selling to humans some portion of their trash will be disposed of lazily or inconsiderately and mistakes will be made. They made it, they cannot be absolved of all responsibility the moment it's handed to the customer. Particularly when the quantity created is ever increasing and producers seem ever more inclined to single use plastic - because for them it is consequence-free.
There's an army of psychologists employed trying to create need or desire where there was none, or encouraging further sales. How might they nudge a real improvement in trash disposal? Maybe a 25p or $1 deposit on a bottle or container would be a good start. Maybe we'd want to require benign and decomposing materials knowing full well we're over-evolved apes that would once harmlessly drop the banana peel or chicken bone wherever we finished with it.
Responding to a straw ban with a sippy-cup lid that uses more plastic (hello Starbucks) is taking the piss and ignoring all the now well known public concerns. If there were any natural justice that should result in a business-threatening boycott and draconian legislation in response. Whether the straw ban was well intentioned but misguided is a separate conversation.
They're suggesting the idea that it's solely the individual's responsibility was invented and promoted (for obvious reasons) by companies that manufacture disposable products, starting in the 1960s.[1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... (archive to fix formatting)
When in my (limited) experience, 99% of trash on the ground is from the public, while 99% of pollution of the water ways (edit: and landfills) is from corporations/industry/government. (1% being the exceptions, and these being made up numbers anyways...)