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We need to talk about casual acceptance of litter and clutter. Clearly it doesn’t have to be that way.

by jl6 5y ago

kristopolous 5y ago
It's not like they lived in a world of takeaway bags with paper cups and disposable cutlery. There was a time when you'd return bottles to the manufacturer and they were seen as responsible for what they chose to manufacture. Somewhere down the line, all of this, 100% of it was placed on the end user - as if the billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees and control of an international supply chain has no agency whatsoever to make any decisions at all and they exist as mere errand boys of the supposedly all powerful consumer. None of these things will be fixable until we collectively stop fantasizing that someone paying $1 for a soda has more power in the fundamental decisions of how it's manufactured than the company's board of directors.
- omk 5y ago
  You pose a very valid point and I stand by it. Such an argument is often countered with the cost of rapid progress and providing businesses the autonomy without burdening them with bureaucracy. Cost is also a factor. These pictures seem to come from an era when there weren't many disposable (cheap) materials found in consumer products. Paper, cloth, glass, metal and wood all could be classified as expensive. One could exchange this scrap with a vendor in exchange for a reasonable amount. Plastics simply don't find a place once separated from the utility they packed. Very little incentive for consumers to take it back even if the manufacturer accepted.
- joe-collins 5y ago
  Not simply takeaway, but disposable packaging in general.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
We don't actually, because it's obvious; people should put trash in the relevant bins, and the local authorities should pay people to clean it up. Online discourse is not action. Look at e.g. Japan that doesn't have a littering problem, because people don't litter and they pay people to clean up the rest. But as others pointed out, this was before plastics, before the availability of the wide variety of products and services we have today, before chain fast food restaurants. They would have had (waxed) paper and the like, but not to the point where it was so cheap that it would be everywhere.

We need to talk about casual acceptance of litter and clutter. Clearly it doesn’t have to be that way.

by jl6 5y ago

We need to talk about casual acceptance of litter and clutter. Clearly it doesn’t have to be that way.

It's not like they lived in a world of takeaway bags with paper cups and disposable cutlery. There was a time when you'd return bottles to the manufacturer and they were seen as responsible for what they chose to manufacture. Somewhere down the line, all of this, 100% of it was placed on the end user - as if the billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees and control of an international supply chain has no agency whatsoever to make any decisions at all and they exist as mere errand boys of the supposedly all powerful consumer. None of these things will be fixable until we collectively stop fantasizing that someone paying $1 for a soda has more power in the fundamental decisions of how it's manufactured than the company's board of directors.

omk 5y ago
You pose a very valid point and I stand by it. Such an argument is often countered with the cost of rapid progress and providing businesses the autonomy without burdening them with bureaucracy. Cost is also a factor. These pictures seem to come from an era when there weren't many disposable (cheap) materials found in consumer products. Paper, cloth, glass, metal and wood all could be classified as expensive. One could exchange this scrap with a vendor in exchange for a reasonable amount. Plastics simply don't find a place once separated from the utility they packed. Very little incentive for consumers to take it back even if the manufacturer accepted.
joe-collins 5y ago
Not simply takeaway, but disposable packaging in general.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

We don't actually, because it's obvious; people should put trash in the relevant bins, and the local authorities should pay people to clean it up. Online discourse is not action. Look at e.g. Japan that doesn't have a littering problem, because people don't litter and they pay people to clean up the rest. But as others pointed out, this was before plastics, before the availability of the wide variety of products and services we have today, before chain fast food restaurants. They would have had (waxed) paper and the like, but not to the point where it was so cheap that it would be everywhere.