I agree with Kellogg that individual change is both near-impossible and pointless. For most Americans it's not possible to live a day to day life without involving single use plastics and plastic packaging. For example I can't even go to my local supermarket and buy raw vegetables without involving single-use plastics: a sack of potatoes comes in a plastic bag, cucumbers are shrink wrapped (!) and often corn-on-the-cob is precut and packed in foam and plastic meat packs (!!).
Plus, at this point single-use plastic is part of our culture. How can you have Halloween without billions of tiny individually-plastic-wrapped candies? If you're an individual trying to be zero waste, are you supposed to tell your kid they can't do Halloween?
Change must necessarily come from legislation - that's the only single use plastic reduction has a chance. And I do think that people almost don't notice when it's gone - for example plastic shopping bags have been legislated away in many places in America and nobody seems to talk about that any more.
> individual change is both near-impossible and pointless.
I disagree, strongly, for two reasons.
1. Individual change is the only thing most of us can do
2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it
For legislation to ever have a hope, the voting public needs to care enough to put candidates in office who will institute this legislation. I just don’t see how this happens if everyone concludes “there’s nothing I can do”.
I agree that the global impact of my actions aren’t enough on their own to make a difference in terms of actual waste output. But each of our individual actions are collectively a prerequisite to actual legislation.
The actions we each take also influence those around us, which is again a prerequisite to broader awareness and the outcomes this awareness can lead to.
Expecting legislation to solve this while carrying on as usual is washing our hands of responsibility. We need both things to happen.
> 2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it
I can demand legislation to encourage/require behavior that I myself won’t practice in absence of said legislation.
It sounds counterintuitive but it makes sense… by analogy, if I’m a hockey goalie I may have the opinion that goalie pads have gotten too big and the game would be more exciting if they were required to be smaller. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to personally wear smaller goalie pads and put myself at a disadvantage, unless the league requires it.
I’m in favor of laws that reduce single use plastic even if I myself don’t go out of my way to avoid single use plastic. Too many products around me use it, and if I had to pay attention to every product I buy to avoid it, it would be very difficult. But if legislation existed to force companies to avoid making it in the first place, my individual purchasing decisions would remain simple and we’d all benefit.
> I can demand legislation to encourage/require behavior that I myself won’t practice in absence of said legislation.
By this logic, the primary basis on which we make decisions is whatever provides a personal advantage. It’s an unsustainable mindset that would regularly encourage unethical/immoral but otherwise legal actions.
Our individual lives aren’t businesses operating in a regulated environment or a goalie forced to operate under the rules all other goalies operate under. We live in the wide open space of every day life where we get to choose what everyday life looks like, for the most part.
There are some things that are important to do because they are important, regardless of the legal landscape. If you find yourself waiting for someone to force you to change, stop and consider the implications if everyone does the same thing.
> But if legislation existed to force companies to avoid making it in the first place, my individual purchasing decisions would remain simple and we’d all benefit.
At least in the US, this misses the critical fact that the government’s function is to represent the will of the people; not impose their will upon the people. Clearly the US system is not doing well in this regard, but there’s a strong case to be made that apathy and lack of individual involvement are primary factors in this dysfunction. In light of this - knowing that the system itself is struggling to meet its charter - it seems especially important not to just expect some magical legislative solution. People are going to have to get involved and do the hard work.
> By this logic, the primary basis on which we make decisions is whatever provides a personal advantage.
I think you’re approaching my comment in a very uncharitable way. I said I can support legislation that contradicts my personal behavior, not that I always do. I’m not saying I always act selfishly. I’m saying it’s possible (as in, not strictly speaking a fallacy) to act individually selfishly while also voting for legislation that is unselfish.
> At least in the US, this misses the critical fact that the government’s function is to represent the will of the people; not impose their will upon the people
That’s not what I’m saying at all? Are you sure you’re not just reading what you want to read in my statement? I’m saying I would support legislation (as in, I would vote for candidates that campaigned on this) that would limit the use of single use plastic. I’m not saying “the government should force this even if people don’t want it”. I’m saying “we should all collectively decide we want to ban single use plastic.” I don’t know how you interpreted the comment otherwise.
Sorry, I think I must have really misinterpreted/misunderstood the comment. I’ll see if I can explain why I interpreted it that way because I’d like to understand what you mean.
> > 2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it
> I can demand legislation to encourage/require behavior that I myself won’t practice in absence of said legislation.
Can you clarify the point you’re making here or state it in a different way? I interpreted this to mean that you were endorsing the position that “I’ll support the legislation, but I’m not gonna change until everyone has to because I’d be at a disadvantage”. The goalie analogy reinforced this especially re: disadvantage.
I agree that my interpretation sounds uncharitable, but I’m struggling to find the charitable interpretation. If you’re raising a pure hypothetical, i.e. “this is something that humans can technically do”, I don’t disagree, but I’m struggling to understand the relevance in that case, and would genuinely like to understand.
> I’m saying “we should all collectively decide we want to ban single use plastic.” I don’t know how you interpreted the comment otherwise.
For some reason, this is definitely not what I took away from the parent comment, and wouldn’t have responded the way I did if that’s what I thought you were trying to say.
My point is that I support legislation that would ban single use plastic, but I don’t necessarily avoid single use plastic in my daily life. This “pattern” shouldn’t be assumed to extend to every facet of my life: I don’t make all my decisions this way.
> It’s an unsustainable mindset that would regularly encourage unethical/immoral but otherwise legal actions.
This was the unnecessary bit for me. You don’t need to invoke a slippery slope here, I’m not saying I make all my decisions this way.
To get more specific about this issue, I don’t bother avoiding single use plastic because doing so is damned near impossible, and I’ve given up trying. See sibling comments about Halloween/etc which articulate the difficulty better than I can. What I do understand is that if we enacted laws [0] which ban single use plastic at the supply side, this problem would largely disappear on the demand side… suddenly I’d go to the store and Halloween candy would be sold by the bag and I could give trick or treaters scoops of it, etc. Thus, my point is that I do a selfish thing (buy Halloween candy that uses single use plastic) but would support legislation that would ban this, specifically because it would make it easier for me to do the right thing.
The goalie analogy is imperfect because it invokes “disadvantage” in the argument, but that’s not really relevant to the point, so I admit the analogy isn’t great. But the larger point it speaks to is this:
Just because I act a certain way individually doesn’t mean I wouldn’t support broader action (ie. legislation) that would make me act a different way. Because my decisions aren’t made in a vacuum, they’re made in context of my broader environment, like for instance what kind of candy packaging actually exists at the store.
[0] by voting, indirectly through representatives, so please don’t invoke the “but government is supposed to by the people, not control the people” argument either, because it’s not relevant here. “Supporting legislation” means “I, a citizen, would consent to this and I hope others do too.”
> 1. Individual change is the only thing each of us can do
> 2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it
I don't think the first item is quite right, and the second item even suggests it isn't. I would amend it to say that we can't guarantee anything but individual action (and even that is not certain), but it's far from the only thing we can do.
You caught that before my quick edit - I replaced “each” with “most”, but I agree with your amendment. It’s the one thing we can each absolutely start doing today. And the choice to do so is a meaningful one that changes each of us and the people around us.
I don't think anything can cause people to collect potato sacks from houses except poverty. The rag and bone man is a very low paid hard life and all of these medieval-scale recycling proposals overlook the details of the lives of the people who used to implement them.
Agreed. It's arguably legislation that added all the traffic signs around SF and it's individuals that decide to ignore all of them. Every time I go out I see cars turning left on Mission between 14th and 28th (no lefts on Mission allowed in that entire section). I see them driving north on Mission through 20th and 16th, both of which have signs and road markings "right turn only". I see them turn right at "no right on red" stop signs, many of which have 3 different signs. A painted sign, a red right arrow, an LED red right arrow with the no circle mark ⊘ over it. They still turn right. There's also 50% of the cyclists on Valencia that go through read lights.
The difficulty with the path of trying to elect candidates that promise action on a particular issue is that there are always thousands of issues and no given candidate is likely to support all of your preferences so you have to decide which is more important. If a candidate agrees with you on single use plastics but is in opposition to your views on prison reform, which one do you give more importance? It's just one of the quirks of representative democracy that keeps issues with lower noise from being addressed.
I’m disagreeing with the premise that making conscious choices about what I purchase can be reduced to “voting with my wallet”, or that we can conclude it “doesn’t help much” based only on a limited outlook on what helps i.e. there are many more reasons to do it that may never have a meaningful monetary impact on the system.
If legislation is the only real end goal, that raises the question: how do we reach that goal?
Gay marriage isn’t legal by some accident. Attitudes about cannabis aren’t shifting for no reason. These are issues that people cared deeply enough about to keep pressuring the system for decades. An apathetic voter base doesn’t accomplish those changes.
> I’m disagreeing with the premise that making conscious choices about what I purchase can be reduced to “voting with my wallet”, or that we can conclude it “doesn’t help much” based only on a limited outlook on what helps i.e. there are many more reasons to do it that may never have a meaningful monetary impact on the system.
The problem is that capitalism, like the internet, is a system designed to route around problems. From the position of the system, any node acting “incorrectly” and not maximizing its profit is doing it wrong.
If you refuse to eat beef, you are only making it cheaper for the people who will still eat beef. And they will eat more of it. The system routes around the error.
The only way to reliably effect large-scale changes in these economic patterns is to change the rules of the game. Which is why that is so fiercely contested, and why there’s so much effort to push the blame back down on individual behavior.
The cucumber plastic is really helpfull to not loose too much cucumber, it prevent dehydratation, this way it can last almost a month. And losing cucumber mean you are wasting fuel on all the "processing" and transport.
That said, a change in the process is possible, which prove your point of "individual change is near-impossible and pointless".
I’ve only ever seen the long, skinny “Persian” cucumbers in plastic and don’t buy them for that reason (maybe I should). Regular “fat” and pickle cucumbers are rarely in plastic, if ever.
Yes, not all cucumber are in plastic for various reasons. If plastic could be avoided, producers would avoid it as it don't bring any advantage from a marketing pov (aka it's not sexy like a cereal box is).
I get mine weekly from my local farmer and I live in the inner city of Paris. There's zero waste because we only get what he harvests. Each basket covers a week.
The vast majority of food demands in urban population centers cannot be met by small farm operators, for scalability and price reasons. There are also a number of foodstuffs that can either never be provided by local farmers, or can only occasionally produced due to climate reasons. This is as true of "nice to have" goods as it is staple crops like wheat or rice. Resorting to sources that are further away and require extra measures to preserve freshness and ensure the items survive transport is something we will never escape from given global population size, the bias towards city settlement, and diet preferences.
You can actually just buy the fruits and vegetables without putting them in a plastic bag. It gets some weird looks, but it's perfectly fine most places.
And as far as things like Halloween, it's not hard to get kids onboard with various projects and let them come up with solutions to things. "Less processed candy" wouldn't be a bad thing in our society. Though quite a bit of candy is a waxed paper wrap.
I'm not referring to the plastic bags that you put your own vegetables in, I mean that at many groceries, including the one near me, these vegetables come prepackaged by the store/distributor and you don't have a choice to buy 10 loose raw potatoes or a whole corn-on-the-cob in a raw husk.
Of course it depends on the store - but then do I drive an extra 15 mins (and emit all that carbon...) just to go to a different store with some loose veggies?
Oh... weird. I've never run into that, but I'm out in something closer to farm country than I expect a lot of people are (it's a short walk from my place to active farm fields).
I think the right answer, if you're in that sort of plastic hellscape, is to find your local community agriculture box sort of projects, and get fresh things in a recyclable cardboard box. Though I would also consider "not shopping at the place you mention and explaining to a manager why."
Zero-waste is a guilting and fetishization of packaging waste at the expensive of other problems. I've seen people fret over recycling yogurt lids, but have zero concern when a cosmetic kitchen remodel generates an entire dumpster full of waste. Throwing things away is only a tragedy in that it is a representation of the shame of how many resources we needlessly wrest from the Earth in the first place.
What frustrates me the most is how often it manifests as buying new, fashionable bamboo (for example) products and such rather than just reusing an existing item you or your relatives had sitting about, or buying one second hand. It's just more conspicuous consumption clothed in moral fashion
The art of fixing things is rather out of style these days, but it's been a major part of every human society until rather recently. If something breaks, you fix it, you don't just use it as an excuse to buy new.
Developing the skills to do "deep repair" sort of stuff on electronics is useful. It can be a profitable little side gig in a range of ways. Re-capping some old electronics to bring them back to life is quite satisfying, too.
For most it is just an excuse to buy new things. Most ecologically conscious person I know had an old toyota pickup despite being able to afford whatever Tesla or such. He knew the car was a sunk cost
>Most ecologically conscious person I know had an old toyota pickup despite being able to afford whatever Tesla or such. He knew the car was a sunk cost
My guess is that it was a small, rather high efficiency little subcompact Toyota pickup, and that it was driven relatively few miles annually and kept in good running order.
Depending on the country and engine, there's also a possibility it was a waste vegetable oil burner (that was quite popular in certain circles, and I believe the old Toyota diesels were just fine with it).
Also, there's more than just carbon emissions to consider, and this is an odd, deliberate-seeming blindness of the "environmental movements" of the past decade or so - blowing up a mountain for the minerals is fine, as long as it's carbon neutral. If you'd like to "never want another mobile computing device again," I suggest the book Cobalt Red, on the lies and deceit active in the DRC related to cobalt mining out there (basically, the nutshell is that regardless of what anyone claims to have done to improve the conditions, they've "worked around the problem" locally in ways that are almost impossible to detect on the ground, and it's still a ton of hand-dug cobalt in horrid working conditions, with the short lifespans and horrible deaths to go along).
It was a smaller (from 90s) v6 or even v8 gas car. The point is to manufacture a car, a tremendous amount of energy is used in everything, from breaking up rock, extracting the iron ore, smelting to make steel, to machining, to etc...
The CO2 emitted by the car during it use,( and you are correct, only ocassional few weekends use) is a rounding error.
Look up how much CO2 is emitted in producing 1kg of steel. And to further drive the point. This is just CO2. Consider pollution, by-products and water use for a more complete picture. Reuse is better in every sense
I don't disagree your last sentence, but an inconsistent approach of some people in your acquaintance to their resource use and recycling isn't a proof of zero-waste being festishization at the expense of other problems. As if a heaving post-renovation dumpster means we shouldn't be strict about recycling.
True. My concern is that there's a constant flood of environmental news, with almost no attention given to the relative impact of different efforts. There's no conspiracy, but if I was trying to prevent people from making meaningful change, this is what I would do.
> Figgener fears the public also became too focused on villainizing straws, rather than looking at plastic production itself as the problem.
The information to draw this extremely obvious conclusion was publicly available at the time, and plenty of people were pointing it out. The problem is that saying "stop using plastic straws and shopping bags and you will be a good person" is such an easy thing to tell people who are motivated by guilt that the fact that it's completely ineffective is just not relevant to the conversation.
I always thought it was planted as a distraction from the questions that really would make a difference. We think about the turtles that don’t have to get plastic straws in their noses while we drive our SUVs from the drive in with the rest of the meals wrapped in different types of plastics.
I think bioplastic is a much, much better way to solve this than zero waste. We tried to do zero waste and the personal lifestyle overhead expense was near impossible. Have switched most things in the house to bioplastic, way better.
Yes, but it's not made of petrol. Petrol is the main bad thing, not the plastic. Yes, plastic itself also creates problems, but AFAIUI bioplastics are (can be?) more biodegradable than your standard petrol-derived polyethylene (of course that won't be the case if your bioplastic is PE made from ethanol, but that should be self-evident).
> All materials are inherently biodegradable, whether it takes a few weeks or a million years to break down into organic matter and mineralize.[48] Therefore, products that are classified as “biodegradable” but whose time and environmental constraints are not explicitly stated are misinforming consumers and lack transparency.[44] Normally, credible companies convey the specific biodegradable conditions of their products, highlighting that their products are in fact biodegradable under national or international standards. Additionally, companies that label plastics with oxo-biodegradable additives as entirely biodegradable contribute to misinformation. Similarly, some brands may claim that their plastics are biodegradable when, in fact, they are non-biodegradable bioplastics.
> Biodegradable plastics that have not fully degraded are disposed of in the oceans by waste management facilities with the assumption that the plastics will eventually break down in a short amount of time. However, the ocean is not optimal for biodegradation, as the process favors warm environments with an abundance of microorganisms and oxygen. Remaining microfibers that have not undergone biodegradation can cause harm to marine life.[62]
Will I need to pull up a dictionary in my next comment because you'll still pretend not to understand?
Of course it is. And while it is of course is good that we don’t pump more fossil fuels from the ground to us as raw materials, the rest is very much the same as normal plastics. Most isn’t compostable, and some are even harder to recycle (at least in current facilities).
Isn't the problem that companies are not involved in the waste management?
E.g. I remember reading that coca cola used to collect and reuse their glass bottles, but when the plastic bottles were introduced customers could just throw it away and coca cola didn't have to collect and clean them again.
Introduce a deposit system and if you wrap stuff in plastic put some tax on it for waste management
Also single use plastic have two upsides. Glass bottles are heavy. And washing them to food standard is expensive and consumes lot of energy. Water used with lye is at 80C...
I have a minimalist for more than a decade. The hardest part is convincing others to become more environment friendly. I couldn't change even one person.
I mind my own business and don't give a shit what happens to the world
you are first and foremost responsible with how you live your own life, not how others live theirs. However, how you live does change the life of others around you (however miniscule it may be). Thus, you did the most important thing and that's respectable. A single person might not change the world but anyhow can make the world a better place.
> all this individual effort did little to stop the flood of new single-use plastics entering the waste stream every day.
That's the i-Frame "The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray" <https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4046264>
> Rather than calling attention to working with what we already have, and simply buying less, it was still grounded in producing and shipping more “things.”
Let's invest in foreign landfills to stop getting plastics into the rivers and oceans, where this stuff gets dumped in countries that lack landfill infrastructure.
Plus, at this point single-use plastic is part of our culture. How can you have Halloween without billions of tiny individually-plastic-wrapped candies? If you're an individual trying to be zero waste, are you supposed to tell your kid they can't do Halloween?
Change must necessarily come from legislation - that's the only single use plastic reduction has a chance. And I do think that people almost don't notice when it's gone - for example plastic shopping bags have been legislated away in many places in America and nobody seems to talk about that any more.