Submitted 3 days ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
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Same thing with “carbon footprint”, which was invented by B.P to shift the blame for climate change onto the consumer.
I’m not saying don’t try to reduce your emissions by using electric vehicles, going plant based or at least reducing animal product intake, and limiting flying, just that it’s pretty meaningless in the whole scale of things, so instead of focusing on the individual, focus on organizing protests, disrupting, and other collective action.
I’m not saying don’t try to reduce your emissions by…
I’ll say it. Don’t do these things because you think they reduce your carbon emissions. Do it when it’s the most frugal option.
Reduce and reuse are still something we should 100% being doing but trying to measure then inject carbon foot print is futile.
Every dollar spend it a better measurement of your contribution to emissions. Trying to calculate it yourself with incomplete data is pointless.
Don’t be fooled by some study you read that made you feel like a righteous person. No one knows. The methods we have for measuring and assessing our footprint are hilariously incompete.
The truth is buried in endless noise. We don’t know what we need to know because it is in the best interests of others that we not know it. Blindspots.
Buy less products because buy “better” is a personal fantasy. Where better is because some popsci idea made you feel guilty for not being better. What the fuck do these things know, they’re bullshitting. Yes people do that; not just on the internet but definitely there.
There is “buy better”, it is not but a fantasy.
Buy more local / regional produced food and products, less km travelled and support local people. Buy products made from longer lasting materials if there are different versions. Buy fairtrade when it’s available for coffee, cacao, bananas, pineapple, etc. Buy bio if available. None of it is perfect, but you are still voting with your wallet and not perfect is often still better than the cheapest there is.
If you can afford it.
Buying better definitely does exist and, for non-consumable goods, definitely can result in buying less. My washing machine is from the early nineties. I expect my steamdeck to last for 2 decades at least, because it seems repairable and software won’t ever be the bottleneck. I have sweaters I wear that are over 25 years old. Endless noise just makes it hard to identify which product is the better one, you’ll often only be sure long after the purchase… And the at first sight most frugal option will often not be the better buy.
Individuals are essentially useless on a global scale but companies like BP aren’t drilling for oil to accomplish their sinister goal of warming the earth they are producing a product that all of us as individuals are purchasing.
It’s like you are in a dog park that’s covered in dog shit, just because there’s shit everywhere doesn’t mean you shouldn’t clean up after your dog. Telling other people they don’t need to worry about cleaning up their shit because the guy with the dog training school doesn’t clean up any of the shit that those dogs makes you bad.
You cleaning up after your dog isn’t going to clean the whole park but doing nothing until a petition is done that enforces cleaning up your dog isn’t the way. I’m not asking you to spend all day trying to clean the park but you should at least do your best to not make it worse
I’m not asking you to spend all day trying to clean the park but you should at least do your best to not make it worse
that is a useful mindset for those who fear a systemic solution.
the people who would have to organise instead spend their effort on other things, like cleaning up dog shit; Or arguing how much shit you need to clean up, before you are morally allowed to advokate for a systemic solution.
the more the anti-dogshitters are splintered, the easier it is for the pro-dogshitters to keep the status quo
imagination, life is your creation
come on barbie let’s go party
I’m old enough to have both lead and plastic in my brain, lungs, and testicles. I envy you youngins with only plastic in you.
Forever Chemicals
Everyone, I mean everyone on the planet has PFOAs in them.
On the bright side, my nuts don’t stick to the side of my leg anymore cause I sweat PTFEs.
Important to note that recycling some things makes sense, like metal. And recycling glass makes sense but sanitizing and reusing bottles makes alot more sense. There’s also been a push to compost as much paper product as possible since that makes way more sense than recycling paper. Our green bins now take any brown cardboard with no tape and pizza boxes.
PET for example is also feasable to recycle. Problem with plastic recycling is mostly that plastic waste is not just one type of plastic.
Biggest misconception by far. You can’t just “melt it down” like you can with glass or aluminum or steel
How dies composting paper make more sense than recycling? From what I can tell we have pretty well established paper recycling mechanisms, at least here in Germany.
In most countries, recycling paper only made financial sense if they shipped it to poor countries or used prison labor so it could be inexpensively sorted thru. Traditionally it was China, but they stopped accepting it. And letting microorganisms do what they do consumes less resources like electricity and less industrial chemicals.
I would guess that it’s because recycling requires energy input, while compost doesn’t require hardly any energy.
I do wonder, maybe there is similar scheme when it comes to housing affordability. There is too much of a coincidence that much of the Western countries are having the same housing crisis. Most ordinary Westerners are perplexed to find out other countries also have the same issue, or are surprised they can’t find a place to live when they move abroad. There is a deliberate manipulation of the housing market and misinformation. Here in Ireland, after all, foreign vulture funds outbid locals and then either rent or sell properties at extortionate price. And yet, the wrong kind of foreigners are getting blamed.
It’s because we allow property and the homes that sit on it to be a speculative market. We encourage it. The only way for property values to be high, well, it’s a supply and demand thing. If you glut the market with anything, you drive prices down. And people whose entire retirement is built on that won’t be having it, let alone the conglomerate owners…
China is trying to steer into the opposite with laws against it. Not sure how well that’s working, but they can acknowledge the issue at least.
In the US the whole idea of owning a house as your “nest egg” that keeps growing forever in a way that you can retire with is so toxic. And then there’s also the retirement funds demanding huge returns on real estate.
Yeah exactly, housing is used as a value storage for large players when they need to use a generic asset in between investments. It’s relatively safe but its value is passive, it is driven by the rest of the market. Plus it’s great for money laundering and bribing politicians or officials. So all this manipulation raises the prices for everyone, and most people don’t benefit from it. It’s just so greedy and abusive.
Furthermore, we then tie it all into the stock market and link our future pensions to that. So we can never really change the system otherwise everything will collapse.
It’s like a house of cards.
I recycle when convenient. I have two can the same company empties, one for trash one for recycling. I’ll fill the recycling, and overflow goes in the trash.
My wife hates it, but the amount of plastic trash that factories produce just blows consumer household recycling out of the water. There are people whose jobs include fillling a whole dumpster each shift. No comparison. Im not bending over backward to be little Dutch boy with my finger in the dam while it’s got a backhoe digging out the foundation.
Typical dutch… Why even try to better the world? Why would I try to better myself if others dont? As long as my garden is green the world can burn
But I LOVE plastic!!
Just don’t eat them!
…and don’t think about how many tons the Lego company produces in a year unless you want to cry.
A lot of right-wing people use this fact as an excuse to not care about the environment at all…
A lot of right-wing people use … as an excuse to not care about … at all…
I thought your comment would be one of those rare instances where you can make a sentence more accurate by generalizing it.
They REALLY like doing it with people, and ruining the environment and/or climate is just shitting on other people (especially the poor ones) with an added level of abstraction.
MY bunker is going to be a lot nicer than YOUR bunker 🥵😤🫢
What are we supposed to believe will save the world now?
Being responsible off the chop would be nice. I just recently stopped buying a very popular brand of cookies because, for some fucking reason, they switched from cardboard to plastic packaging.
We’re constantly reacting to problems that we create(corporations, in this case) and it’s just getting so tiresome. We can just not do these things in the first place and we wouldn’t have nearly the same numeous, shitty problems we have right now.
I avoid so many things lately because of packaging!
My biggest pet peeve at the moment is milk. There are so many dairy farmers nearby, all single use plastic containers :( while the same companies would have yogurt in glass jars that they ask back from the consumer and reuse. Why the difference?!
I barely shop at normal supermarkets anymore, and I’m glad I’m able to eat the cost increase (~10% overall).
People uniting themselves against corporations, oligarchs and consumerism culture
Rifles.
Manufacturers have no responsibility or regulation in packaging. Buy some items made of metal, and you still generate immediate plastic packaging waste. Some of that plastic has recycling symbols on them, but they can be fake, and again, no regulation.
So all we really recycle is clear PETG. 90% of recycling plastics are landfill. We put stuff in blue bins to remove consumer guilt.
Should just follow japans lead and incinerate the plastic for energy
And just blow those toxins into the air.
idk man, in Rome, Italy you get fined if you don’t separate yo things.
Just because they fine you doesn’t make separating them any more or less recyclable
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOtrvBdRx8I
someone still need to recycle stuff that’s being used. Not that I disagree that they’re trying to shfit to blame to consumers, just practically speaking
This is a PSA that as a whole, the plastics recycling industry isn’t well regulated, and all those plastic drink and soda bottles at the grocery store that now say “Made with recycled plastics”? You have NO idea what type of plastics are in there now or the level of decay, and neither do the manufacturers.
Do not drink out of, eat out of, or wear anything that is made from recycled plastics.
Recycled plastics encountered in the world should be assumed to be toxic unless you know for certain they aren’t, and should not be considered fit or safe for food use, medical use, or prolonged human contact.
<citation needed>
Not saying you’re wrong but if you give it as a PSA, at least base it on something credible
I make the shit full time so I think I’m 50/50 ken doll/human by now.
You and me both, brother!
We have these groups of volunteers gathering trash along the roadside. The more they collect the more they can earn for their good cause or their organisation.
They’re being cheap cleanup for the companies that sell trash and by collecting trash they keep the stats down.
If you’d recycled more, there wouldn’t have been any plastic to end up in your blood, organs, etc… Who’s really the one shirking responsibility?
Plastic recycling is one of the primary sources of microplastics. They use jets of air to remove labels, which creates an enormous cloud of microplastic. People who live near plastic “recycling” plants have more plastic in their bodies than people who don’t.
There are articles about this out there.
Source?
does it do more harm than dumping plastic in a landfill though?
Fine, I agree with all of you, let’s stop recycling.
This would almost make sense if there weren’t thousands of corporations, and 8 billion other humans, doing whatever the fuck they want…
Excuses, excuses. Enlist a friend to help, if you need it!
Yeah that’s not true.
Vote for trash burning power plants. Still worse than oil power plants, but better than plastic trash in the wild.
Wait until OP hears about the evils of cardboard recycling, I drive by daily and see the towering eternal flame of methane. Sadly methane is sneaky and not all of it gets burned.
wait what!?!!
fuck.
Cardboard is recyclable so long as you don’t print on it and it’s the brown corrugated stuff. Which is a big ask.
Most of it doesn’t get recycled into more boxes though. Think like those cup holders you get at a take out place.
The other thing is trees area renewable resource in theory but we use a lot of fossil fuels to harvest and process then.
I admit biology isn’t my field of expertise, but if there’s plastic in my danglies, does that mean my kids will be action figures, or will that take several more generations?
Matt Damon!
Throw your plastic in the garbage! Many first world nations ship their unrecyclabe refuse to third world countries, don’t let your governments ship the problem away, make them accountable.
save yourself first before thinking of others
we can’t save ourselves without others
Me watching op how he’ll eat beef this week
This meme is missing a third panel with a cancer patient in their death bed.
microplastics might explain that epic rant about lobster.
But they sell those soda branded shirts made out of soda bottles!! /s
starlinguk@lemmy.world 3 days ago
They didn’t invent plastic recycling. They are, however, using it as an excuse to make more plastic. The EU had regulations against over packaging (like putting cucumbers in plastic) for a while until plastic recycling became a thing and they went ‘meh’.
nullroot@lemmy.world 3 days ago
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#Co…
It’s less that they invented plastic recycling and more that this is one of the first examples of corporate greenwashing and shifting the burden onto the public vs the corporations who made the problem.