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Top-level
 Large scale polluters love Earth Day. It's a big advertising day for them. Coca Cola will spend a lot of money today telling you to recycle one bottle, because they don't want anything to happen, any law or tax or regulation, that keeps them from making another billion bottles next year. A version of the Spider-Man maxim holds here. Responsibility scales with power, and on both sides of the equation, yours is limited. I know that's not the sexiest idea, but it has the advantage of being true. 9 comments
 Agree on the larger issue of taking the battle to the proper fight. And w/r/t individual choices… Maybe we need to have deposits in containers or all types, packaging, and disposable parts of commodities such that the price to recycle or inter indefinitely (landfill) is fully borne by the consumer. Then and only then will we look at two products and say…I will take the one that is refillable, reusable, refurbishable.  @Anthro @ianrosewrites or we could charge corporations for using non-sustainable materials. the reason so many corporations use virgin plastic above any other material is that, because oil is so subsidized, it's the cheapest option. if they had literally any financial motivation to use reusable containers etc they would. @ianrosewrites we could make the creation of virgin plastic for all non-essential plastics (for medical purposes for instance) illegal tomorrow and all those companies would be forced to either stop using plastic or to re-use the world's existing plastic, but it's cheaper to make new plastic from oil than it is to recover and recycle. Our governments are complicit in that. We could stop this tomorrow but the people in power have no interest in doing that. It's infuriating. Same with renewables  @tiny_m it's not cheaper to produce new plastic from fossiles if you calculate the implications & consequences for our environment. This is was we don't do. And we must. Our planet' natural systems won't be able to buffer our mistakes for much longer @ianrosewrites @Rural_Canadian @ianrosewrites My idea is that there shouldn't be packaging and bottles that are not recyclable or reusable after cleaning. We must create a sustainable economy, that simply doesn't allow that kind of thrash production we got today. And we need it globally.  @ianrosewrites This so much. It is frustrating that we are _willing_ to make bigger sacrifices, but we aren't given that option. We need to recognize that many of the options - the big, world-changing ones - we would have picked were taken from us. It is not that the small choices are entirely meaningless, but we can't lose sight of the bigger, more meaningful choices. The sense of scale is important.  @ianrosewrites It's tiring how they've succeeded in making every thread calling for action on climate by multinationals with greater internal economies than most countries, about how individuals must do this or that "too". How come it must always be brought up when the major culprits are mentioned? People got infected by a bad brainworm on that one. |
Gregory's Server
Some people in The Comments seem to be misunderstanding my point to be that individual actions don't matter. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that actions which influence and restrain institutions are the only ones that matter on the scale of institutions, which is the actual scale of the problem.
Your neighbor throwing out a bottle is unfortunate, but every ounce of effort you expend on being mad at them, rather than the company that made a billion bottles last year, is wasted.