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Comment by quakeguy | Hacker News Reader

You are absolutly right. To others seeing this comment, i‘d recommend you watch the Documentary named „Plastic China“. It is on YT, but you support the makers here:

https://www.plasticchina.org

We need to stop plastic polluttion now, or im afraid the earths ecosystem will collapse sooner or later.

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I feel like the debate on human induced climate change is a red haring. It's so abstract, it basically invites conflict and CO2 is absolutely nothing compared to issues of mass consumption. There are huge floating patches of plastic waste our oceans, being swallowed by sea life, killing fish and making its way into our food supply. There are massive lakes of sludge in Chinese and South Pacific factory cities used to make our electronics and PC components. There are disasters in the US like the Kingston Fossil spill where a coal plant containment damn breached and left a toxic slurry of coal ash and sludge flood the valley and enter the watershed.

Overall consumption needs to stop. Buying a new electric car requires all the waste that comes with making a car, plus the lithium and other metals needed for batteries that have to be replaced every ten years.

We cannot spend our way out of this. Humanity needs to consume less, to not replace cellphones and laptops every 2~4 years. Anything that fights real, tangible and easily measurable environmental disaster will also reduce CO2 emissions as a byproduct, but emissions themselves should not be and end goal.

The end goal is much much more difficult: convincing the people who run Intel and Apple and Samsung that it is in the planet's best interest to not have higher sales each year and that a better goal are products that last four times as long, where the sale of replacement parts are much higher than that of actual products. It requires fundamental shifts in the way our global economy works.

Essentially, we need a better system than capitalism.

That's too broad. We can have almost any system, as long as the incentives are aligned correctly.

We don't make companies pay for externalities, and we should. Maybe we could tax companies that sell plastic packaged things to pay for recovery costs, or make them recover it themselves.

There's lots of options and many of them could exist in a world where private interests make profit. We just can't let profit be the goal, it has to be the reward for acting responsibly.

seems difficult as long as capital is raised in a top down manner, since its those who hold the leash are the ones who demand compound annual growth (which is the real root of the problem imo)

I agree. The main objective of capitalism is making people consuming more and more and never only as much as one needs. To change that mindset we need to get rid of capitalism in the first place.

This is also thesis of Naomi Klein book

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2018/08/capitalism-killed...

A low hanging fruit in the attempt to reduce consumption (which is the only real solution) is to stop single-use items. e.g. paper napkins, straws, carry bags from the local grocery shops etc. Just assuming that it's biodegradable or being recycled doesn't take into account the amount of energy and materials that went into production which are just wasted since the items are not reused.

While being low-hanging fruit, these things are also fully irrelevant. If the entire world stopped using them tomorrow, it would barely be a blip on any climate model or ocean pollution model.

Wearing the dressings of smart people, we do nothing, while telling others to do nothing, because the something they would do would be a "blip."

It's all about didcussionshifting away from government who could enforce change for all to the individual which is sure to fall

> Wearing the dressings of smart people, we do nothing, while telling others to do nothing, because the something they would do would be a "blip."

Talk is cheap. If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself. The only way to effect change is to work towards it yourself and gently encourage others to do so. Be prepared to make sacrifices and/or compromises (this is what stops most people, humans are selfish and lazy).

Don't like plastic waste? Make an effort to reduce it. Take reusable cloth bags with you when shopping. A big trend among young people today is takeout food. It seems that fewer and fewer people cook for themselves. This is a massive source of plastic waste. Don't buy new gizmos just because they are new or for status. Use things until they break. Then fix them until they cant be fixed.

Just imagine if everyone stopped talking a good game and started taking small steps to making the world a better place.

Again you're just blaming the end user for companies making the bulk of pollution of all sorts.

I don't want the box in a box in a box with countless plastic air pillows in an Amazon shipment. Nor do I want razorsharp clamshell packaging. Nor do I need plastic bags- I use cloth bags.

Yet I'm the one somehow "responsible" for a variety of pollution and climate change. Its not my fault things are built with planned obsolescence. I can repair a variety of things, but with glues and ultrasonic welding makes things notoriously difficult.

Tl;Dr. Companies are really responsible, but 3 Rs are targeting citizens.

My irrelevant "blip" for 2017 was picking up 300 bags of trash off beaches with my own bare hands. I didn't lead with that, but you brought it up.

If we want to avoid the worse effe ts of climate change, we need to do something at the level of industry, not consumers. As individuals, that means we must focus on political efforts, much more than personal efforts: vote for a 'green' candidate even if you stand to lose from their financial policies; convince your friends to do the same. Call your representatives when green laws are voted on.

I'm not saying it's bad to do the small things. But it is bad to assume that if only everyone did the small things, the world would be better without having to do the big things as well - it wouldn't. As long as industry continues to be as wasteful as it is, as long as we continue to transport goods over the huge distances that we do, as long as we still grow the huge amounts of animals that go to waste, we are heading for catastrophe regardless of our everyone's individual actions.

Getting people to do something means we start to solve these problems. Plastic in the ocean and food chain is not nothing.

Same for climate change, start fixing small things build awareness and move onto bigger things.

Alternately tell people to stop doing anything.

That could work, but it is painfully slow,and it might as well backfire - making people live worse lives so that they might be politically motivated to make industry take some of the brunt is not an obvious next step.

Also, any reasonable changes to your personal buying behavior, and absolutely everyone on the planet's as well, assuming 0 changes in, say, industrial fishing dumping practices, will produce about a 0% change in ocean plastic pollution.

Getting rid of a lot of single-use items would OTOH conflict with hygiene rules though. That's probably why straws come in little plastic wrappers nowadays in some places.

Rules are made by people and can adapt.

Shallow ecology measures like that are more PR stunts than meaningful action.

Putting it here, for fun with a serious topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lh3aPbKDn8

> The end goal is much much more difficult: convincing the people who run Intel and Apple and Samsung that it is in the planet's best interest to not have higher sales each year

The people that run those companies are just functionaries. It's the owners that call the shots, and they are at this point apparently too far down the road of competitive wealth-hoarding to change.

How is investing in one's pension or retirement fund "competitive wealth-hoarding"?

I may be misinterpreting your question, but it seems as though you're equating the average worker's retirement fund investments to what the GP was most likely referring to: large investors who compose what we commonly refer to as the "ownership class" and who are most certainly engaged in a perverse form of wealth hording at the cost of any apparent negative externalities. The two classes of investor are not remotely similar and cannot be judged by the same standards. It would be best if all investors (present company included) insisted on environmentally and socially ethical standards as a precondition for investment, but what does that have to do with the observation that such focus seems particularly critical for the largest players to adopt ASAP?

I couldn't put it better.

Isn't the end goal convincing the population at large to reduce their consumption habits, even in the face of a competitive culture where success == greater and better consumption? I mean even if we dismantled Apple, Samsung, Intel today another company would gladly step in to sell to people who are addicted to convenience, novelty and find meaning in purchasing things.

You had me at "Overal consumption needs to stop" but lost me at "convincing the people who run...".

The people required to make the changes are the "consumers" not the people running the companies. Companies will respond to DEMAND and nothing else.

But it's also obvious that companies shouldn't be able to supply anything and everything demanded. For instance, there is a demand for hitmen and child porn - this does not mean that the demand should be satisfied. It is also clear that companies influence both policy and desires (through advertising and taking advantage of mass-consumption) to change what is demanded. If we are looking for a practical solution, I see no reason why it lies on the billions of consumers to suddenly become environmentally conscious - and for what reason? To satisfy an ideal of "pure capitalism"?

That documentary saddened and disgusted me. I realized that recycling is nothing more then moving my garbage to another country where some of it is recycled at the cost of their health and environment. I realized it is actually better to just toss my stuff in the trash and at least it stays in my country. But this still bothers me. In the past every jar you would buy at the store would fit the same lids as the canning jars and you could literally buy a jam, use it, then put your own jam in that jar. Why did they stop doing that? The packaging industry has promoted waste for years and people want change. I too recommend that documentary if you haven't seen it.

Yeah, I always wondered why I couldn't just get my MacBook at the Apple store unboxed and then let them keep the packaging and re-use it for transport. It's not like their box has any utility to me after; I just put my laptop and its pieces in a bag and never look back at that box.

The worst part is -- I keep a lot of boxes around for years thinking the little plastic doodads and little accessories might become useful for me someday. What actually happens is that they never get used and then get tossed after the product is no longer useful to me.

> We need to stop plastic polluttion now, or im afraid the earths ecosystem will collapse sooner or later.

I'm afraid that if we hurry into it, there will be all sorts of unintended consequences. I also suspect that it's harder than we realize to keep track of what building houses the nuclear reactor and which one is the bike shed.

Going from plastic soda bottles back to glass ones, for example, would probably be an environmental disaster. It takes so very much energy to manufacture glass, and it takes so very much fuel to truck it around. I think, rather than micro-focusing on one specific bogeyman, what I'd really like to see is an attack on packaging-related waste and pollution in general.

> Going from plastic soda bottles back to glass ones, for example, would probably be an environmental disaster.

This is only true if said glass bottles were not reusable (and their reuse wasn't compelled in some fashion).

Yup. That's the catch right there - practically speaking, and on a commercial scale, glass bottles aren't reusable. At least, not anymore. Over the past couple decades, a lot of barriers have been put up to prevent the re-use of glass containers: Local bottling facilities have consolidated into regional ones, the number of different brands of beverage available on store shelves has increased enormously, many areas have passed laws that outright ban the reuse of glass containers, glass containers are no longer manufactured to be durable enough for repeated use, they now come in far too wide a variety of shapes to work well with sanitization equipment, etc etc.

A simple ban on plastic bottles would address none of this. You'd have to look at the big picture to be sure you can achieve good results.

I'd wager that we'd get much better results by instead introducing a tax on, say, every beverage container that enters the waste stream. Or, maybe easier to enforce, that cannot be proven not to have entered the waste stream. That would be a single legislative string to pull that would give the industry a strong economic incentive to address all (or at least most) of the real causes of the problem.

Interesting link. Another link!

This to a book that enlightened me to the chaotic world of globalised recycling: Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1608197913

"A Plastic Ocean" [1] is also a good documentary that deals with how most of the plastic that's used and thrown gets into the oceans and affects people. It touches upon some communities that try to recycle these, much to the detriment of their own health.

[1]: https://plasticoceans.org/about-a-plastic-ocean/

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