11 ms·

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 h

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 https://www.plasticchina.org We need to stop plastic polluttion now, or im afraid the earths ecosystem will collapse sooner or later.

14 8y ago
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.
- immernerstheime 8y ago
  there maybe something very easy to recycle some kind of plastic maybe PET maybe PP or whateve that maybe could be easy to produce and cheap to produce in a small plant like bricks for say Dog HOuses for example or to pile at the borders of gardens or something like this oreven to rplace bricks at some parts of a barn wall or even fences whateve anything kind of that size maybe roof tiles yeah... The goal is to keep them at a sight at the same time not small parts and particles around and easy to take to some other recicling step if demand demands or whatever righ and to keep it contained at same places not fucking around like garbage yeah with small plants for rough simple cheap shape of tile or roof or whatever Jars for water right BIg and THick Jars of water to have rain water or so for gardens yeah thanks
- shortoncash 8y ago
  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.
djsumdog 8y ago
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.
- arvinsim 8y ago
  Essentially, we need a better system than capitalism.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - CptFribble 8y ago
    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.
zhte415 8y ago
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 https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1608197913
wtmt 8y ago
"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/ https://plasticoceans.org/about-a-plastic-ocean/
bunderbunder 8y ago
> 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.
- vict00ms 8y ago
  > 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).
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    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.

14 8y ago

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.

immernerstheime 8y ago
there maybe something very easy to recycle some kind of plastic maybe PET maybe PP or whateve that maybe could be easy to produce and cheap to produce in a small plant like bricks for say Dog HOuses for example or to pile at the borders of gardens or something like this oreven to rplace bricks at some parts of a barn wall or even fences whateve anything kind of that size maybe roof tiles yeah... The goal is to keep them at a sight at the same time not small parts and particles around and easy to take to some other recicling step if demand demands or whatever righ and to keep it contained at same places not fucking around like garbage yeah with small plants for rough simple cheap shape of tile or roof or whatever Jars for water right BIg and THick Jars of water to have rain water or so for gardens yeah thanks
shortoncash 8y ago
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.

djsumdog 8y ago

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.

arvinsim 8y ago
Essentially, we need a better system than capitalism.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CptFribble 8y ago
  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.

zhte415 8y ago

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 https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1608197913

wtmt 8y ago

"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/ https://plasticoceans.org/about-a-plastic-ocean/

bunderbunder 8y ago

> 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.

vict00ms 8y ago
> 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).
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  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.