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Comment by playingalong | Hacker News Reader

Help the planet - OK, but how much? The public discourse would benefit from having some scale of savings/damage for all news like that. Think the lovely and simple color squares showing radiation (banana, natural, flight, atomic bomb, etc.).

I don't think we as humanity have adopted a reasonable approach towards "helping the planet". I know it could be hard, but how about listing top N polluters and addressing these? Or top N factors where the biggest possible gain is and addressing these?

Instead I am preached on plastic straws and laundry detergent.

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Every day we see some new article about how much of a complete piece of shit westerners are and if they just sacrifice this one luxury we will save the sea turtles.

I don't want to hear a thing until the largest polluters are reprimanded by world government first (india, SEA, africa). I have never thrown a piece of trash onto the ground let alone into a body of water to end up in a turtles stomach.

> I don't want to hear a thing until the largest polluters are reprimanded by world government first (india, SEA, africa). I have never thrown a piece of trash onto the ground let alone into a body of water to end up in a turtles stomach.

You do realize that a lot of western "recyclable" trash ends up in landfils on those countries because "it is cheaper" ? /s

We have ample land for landfills in the US, it is not cost effective to ship it to the third world.

The ganges is filled with bodies and trash unrelated to anything we are doing here in the US.

yeah you're on to something. What I would want as first and reasonable step is to talk about absolute numbers of CO2 per person(/state/company/whatever). Only then talking about reducing (e.g. in percentages) does make sense. Instead we have all the campaigns about this or that that don't really adress the general issue that it's all about _absolute_ counts of e.g. CO2 (or in this case microplastic).

But I want to give the article some slack: They basically said that in the UK the number of wash loads increased by nearly 10% without any positive effect (my interpretation); thus we may reduce our amount of wash loads by at least as much again. Also helps with the bills.

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