Whatever happened to the zero waste movement?
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
Plus, at this point single-use plastic is part of our culture. How can you have Halloween without billions of tiny individually-plastic-wrapped candies? If you're an individual trying to be zero waste, are you supposed to tell your kid they can't do Halloween?
Change must necessarily come from legislation - that's the only single use plastic reduction has a chance. And I do think that people almost don't notice when it's gone - for example plastic shopping bags have been legislated away in many places in America and nobody seems to talk about that any more.
And as far as things like Halloween, it's not hard to get kids onboard with various projects and let them come up with solutions to things. "Less processed candy" wouldn't be a bad thing in our society. Though quite a bit of candy is a waxed paper wrap.
Of course it depends on the store - but then do I drive an extra 15 mins (and emit all that carbon...) just to go to a different store with some loose veggies?
I think the right answer, if you're in that sort of plastic hellscape, is to find your local community agriculture box sort of projects, and get fresh things in a recyclable cardboard box. Though I would also consider "not shopping at the place you mention and explaining to a manager why."
That said, a change in the process is possible, which prove your point of "individual change is near-impossible and pointless".
I get mine weekly from my local farmer and I live in the inner city of Paris. There's zero waste because we only get what he harvests. Each basket covers a week.
I disagree, strongly, for two reasons.
1. Individual change is the only thing most of us can do
2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it
For legislation to ever have a hope, the voting public needs to care enough to put candidates in office who will institute this legislation. I just don’t see how this happens if everyone concludes “there’s nothing I can do”.
I agree that the global impact of my actions aren’t enough on their own to make a difference in terms of actual waste output. But each of our individual actions are collectively a prerequisite to actual legislation.
The actions we each take also influence those around us, which is again a prerequisite to broader awareness and the outcomes this awareness can lead to.
Expecting legislation to solve this while carrying on as usual is washing our hands of responsibility. We need both things to happen.
> 2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it
I don't think the first item is quite right, and the second item even suggests it isn't. I would amend it to say that we can't guarantee anything but individual action (and even that is not certain), but it's far from the only thing we can do.
If legislation is the only real end goal, that raises the question: how do we reach that goal?
Gay marriage isn’t legal by some accident. Attitudes about cannabis aren’t shifting for no reason. These are issues that people cared deeply enough about to keep pressuring the system for decades. An apathetic voter base doesn’t accomplish those changes.
The problem is that capitalism, like the internet, is a system designed to route around problems. From the position of the system, any node acting “incorrectly” and not maximizing its profit is doing it wrong.
If you refuse to eat beef, you are only making it cheaper for the people who will still eat beef. And they will eat more of it. The system routes around the error.
The only way to reliably effect large-scale changes in these economic patterns is to change the rules of the game. Which is why that is so fiercely contested, and why there’s so much effort to push the blame back down on individual behavior.
I can demand legislation to encourage/require behavior that I myself won’t practice in absence of said legislation.
It sounds counterintuitive but it makes sense… by analogy, if I’m a hockey goalie I may have the opinion that goalie pads have gotten too big and the game would be more exciting if they were required to be smaller. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to personally wear smaller goalie pads and put myself at a disadvantage, unless the league requires it.
I’m in favor of laws that reduce single use plastic even if I myself don’t go out of my way to avoid single use plastic. Too many products around me use it, and if I had to pay attention to every product I buy to avoid it, it would be very difficult. But if legislation existed to force companies to avoid making it in the first place, my individual purchasing decisions would remain simple and we’d all benefit.
By this logic, the primary basis on which we make decisions is whatever provides a personal advantage. It’s an unsustainable mindset that would regularly encourage unethical/immoral but otherwise legal actions.
Our individual lives aren’t businesses operating in a regulated environment or a goalie forced to operate under the rules all other goalies operate under. We live in the wide open space of every day life where we get to choose what everyday life looks like, for the most part.
There are some things that are important to do because they are important, regardless of the legal landscape. If you find yourself waiting for someone to force you to change, stop and consider the implications if everyone does the same thing.
> But if legislation existed to force companies to avoid making it in the first place, my individual purchasing decisions would remain simple and we’d all benefit.
At least in the US, this misses the critical fact that the government’s function is to represent the will of the people; not impose their will upon the people. Clearly the US system is not doing well in this regard, but there’s a strong case to be made that apathy and lack of individual involvement are primary factors in this dysfunction. In light of this - knowing that the system itself is struggling to meet its charter - it seems especially important not to just expect some magical legislative solution. People are going to have to get involved and do the hard work.
I think you’re approaching my comment in a very uncharitable way. I said I can support legislation that contradicts my personal behavior, not that I always do. I’m not saying I always act selfishly. I’m saying it’s possible (as in, not strictly speaking a fallacy) to act individually selfishly while also voting for legislation that is unselfish.
> At least in the US, this misses the critical fact that the government’s function is to represent the will of the people; not impose their will upon the people
That’s not what I’m saying at all? Are you sure you’re not just reading what you want to read in my statement? I’m saying I would support legislation (as in, I would vote for candidates that campaigned on this) that would limit the use of single use plastic. I’m not saying “the government should force this even if people don’t want it”. I’m saying “we should all collectively decide we want to ban single use plastic.” I don’t know how you interpreted the comment otherwise.
> > 2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it
> I can demand legislation to encourage/require behavior that I myself won’t practice in absence of said legislation.
Can you clarify the point you’re making here or state it in a different way? I interpreted this to mean that you were endorsing the position that “I’ll support the legislation, but I’m not gonna change until everyone has to because I’d be at a disadvantage”. The goalie analogy reinforced this especially re: disadvantage.
I agree that my interpretation sounds uncharitable, but I’m struggling to find the charitable interpretation. If you’re raising a pure hypothetical, i.e. “this is something that humans can technically do”, I don’t disagree, but I’m struggling to understand the relevance in that case, and would genuinely like to understand.
> I’m saying “we should all collectively decide we want to ban single use plastic.” I don’t know how you interpreted the comment otherwise.
For some reason, this is definitely not what I took away from the parent comment, and wouldn’t have responded the way I did if that’s what I thought you were trying to say.
> It’s an unsustainable mindset that would regularly encourage unethical/immoral but otherwise legal actions.
This was the unnecessary bit for me. You don’t need to invoke a slippery slope here, I’m not saying I make all my decisions this way.
To get more specific about this issue, I don’t bother avoiding single use plastic because doing so is damned near impossible, and I’ve given up trying. See sibling comments about Halloween/etc which articulate the difficulty better than I can. What I do understand is that if we enacted laws [0] which ban single use plastic at the supply side, this problem would largely disappear on the demand side… suddenly I’d go to the store and Halloween candy would be sold by the bag and I could give trick or treaters scoops of it, etc. Thus, my point is that I do a selfish thing (buy Halloween candy that uses single use plastic) but would support legislation that would ban this, specifically because it would make it easier for me to do the right thing.
The goalie analogy is imperfect because it invokes “disadvantage” in the argument, but that’s not really relevant to the point, so I admit the analogy isn’t great. But the larger point it speaks to is this:
Just because I act a certain way individually doesn’t mean I wouldn’t support broader action (ie. legislation) that would make me act a different way. Because my decisions aren’t made in a vacuum, they’re made in context of my broader environment, like for instance what kind of candy packaging actually exists at the store.
[0] by voting, indirectly through representatives, so please don’t invoke the “but government is supposed to by the people, not control the people” argument either, because it’s not relevant here. “Supporting legislation” means “I, a citizen, would consent to this and I hope others do too.”
>Most ecologically conscious person I know had an old toyota pickup despite being able to afford whatever Tesla or such. He knew the car was a sunk cost
Depending on where you live, a Tesla can become more CO2 friendly in just 2 years. Especially compared to an old pickup. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
Depending on the country and engine, there's also a possibility it was a waste vegetable oil burner (that was quite popular in certain circles, and I believe the old Toyota diesels were just fine with it).
Also, there's more than just carbon emissions to consider, and this is an odd, deliberate-seeming blindness of the "environmental movements" of the past decade or so - blowing up a mountain for the minerals is fine, as long as it's carbon neutral. If you'd like to "never want another mobile computing device again," I suggest the book Cobalt Red, on the lies and deceit active in the DRC related to cobalt mining out there (basically, the nutshell is that regardless of what anyone claims to have done to improve the conditions, they've "worked around the problem" locally in ways that are almost impossible to detect on the ground, and it's still a ton of hand-dug cobalt in horrid working conditions, with the short lifespans and horrible deaths to go along).
The CO2 emitted by the car during it use,( and you are correct, only ocassional few weekends use) is a rounding error.
Source?
Intuitively, I guess the weight of the consummmed gas quickly exceeds the weight of the car.
CO2 adds 2 O to one C once emitted…
The art of fixing things is rather out of style these days, but it's been a major part of every human society until rather recently. If something breaks, you fix it, you don't just use it as an excuse to buy new.
Developing the skills to do "deep repair" sort of stuff on electronics is useful. It can be a profitable little side gig in a range of ways. Re-capping some old electronics to bring them back to life is quite satisfying, too.
The information to draw this extremely obvious conclusion was publicly available at the time, and plenty of people were pointing it out. The problem is that saying "stop using plastic straws and shopping bags and you will be a good person" is such an easy thing to tell people who are motivated by guilt that the fact that it's completely ineffective is just not relevant to the conversation.
Both of the following can be true simultaneously:
1. Eliminating plastic straws alone won't move the needle when it comes to waste.
2. Plastic straws are entirely unnecessary for the vast majority of people.
> Biodegradable plastics that have not fully degraded are disposed of in the oceans by waste management facilities with the assumption that the plastics will eventually break down in a short amount of time. However, the ocean is not optimal for biodegradation, as the process favors warm environments with an abundance of microorganisms and oxygen. Remaining microfibers that have not undergone biodegradation can cause harm to marine life.[62]
Will I need to pull up a dictionary in my next comment because you'll still pretend not to understand?
> Biodegradable simply means it breaks down into small pieces that you cannot see anymore. They're still there.
The first paragraph you quote just says that some companies claim that materials that aren’t biodegradable in any meaningful way are biodegradable.
The second paragraph you quote just says that some companies release the material into the ocean before it has finished degrading.
Everyone remember COVID response doing away with bulk bins right?
How can we have a zero waste movement without bulk bins? Hm?
Supply infrastructure is imperative in supporting our way out of the consumertopia waste cycle.
E.g. I remember reading that coca cola used to collect and reuse their glass bottles, but when the plastic bottles were introduced customers could just throw it away and coca cola didn't have to collect and clean them again.
Introduce a deposit system and if you wrap stuff in plastic put some tax on it for waste management
I mind my own business and don't give a shit what happens to the world
That's the i-Frame "The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray" <https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4046264>
> Rather than calling attention to working with what we already have, and simply buying less, it was still grounded in producing and shipping more “things.”
The story called it "consumerism", which again is the i-Frame. The correct word is "capitalism", and the incentives driving it. See "The Gift of Death" https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/