161–170 of 324 posts
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It was in my circles, I remember some passionate eco types arguing I should use plastic bags because they were recyclable, and paper bags "killed trees".
I know paper right now doesn't have a great environmental footprint, but paper does seem like a pretty good way to trick capitalism into planting lots of trees.
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It was in my circles, I remember some passionate eco types arguing I should use plastic bags because they were recyclable, and paper bags "killed trees".
I know paper right now doesn't have a great environmental footprint, but paper does seem like a pretty good way to trick capitalism into planting lots of trees.
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> It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I'm not asking maliciously, but I wonder how Germans reconcile their seemingly environmental awareness with their high CO2 emissions and big cars culture.
Compared to other developed countries they are not the worst. Australia: 16.8 tons/capita/year Canada/US: 16.1 Germany: 9.1 China: 8.0 France: 5.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The whole recycling scam makes me upset. For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. It actually would've been better if it went to landfills, at least then it's safely contained. Another lie was that we're running out of landfill space, there's so much land out there. Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on prod…
Thinking about this more, wasn't there a time, maybe late 90s early 2000s when the message was that plastic is more environmental than paper? Something like at the supermarket checkout you should pick plastic over paper bags to save rain forest trees? Is my memory wrong or was this a widespread message at the time?
I remember in school we switched from single-portion paper milk cartons to square bags of milk that you punctured with a plastic straw. This was sold to us along with a muppet skit explaining how to use the milk bags (the muppets rated it "one thumb up and one thumb down, to cover the straw hole when you puncture the bag"). There was a poster in the cafeteria comparing the giant pile of milk cartons relative to the small pile of plastic pouches. We paid much more attention to what adults said than they ever gave us credit for, and they had been telling us about renewable and non-renewable resources, about recycling, about landfill space, and about externality. We knew, even if the rational outcome was the same, that it was more than big pile vs small pile.
I remember when bag fees started showing up, and at the checkout grocery stores began selling... reusable plastic bags. People seem to collect these now, maybe 30-40 per household, which is fine by me I'd rather have 40 bags in someone's pantry than 4,000 floating around outside. But it seems excessive. I've accumulated about that many: I on occasion "win a prize", family members bring items over and leave the carrying bags behind, donate money to anyone and you're sure to get a tote. I actually don't have any rope bags though I wish I did, my mother still has hers and she's not parting with them. I think the rope bags are more convenient than anything else, but then what happens to the 40 odd plastic bags I've accumulated?
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I suppose the truly religious environmentalists can buy indulgences in the form of carbon credits. Airlines offer them so the people guilty about travel can pay the owner of a forest to do nothing. Not perfect because you still make carbon, but at least you don’t have to pilgrimage in a sailboat like Greta Thunberg.
If carbon credits are implemented without massive fraud, I don't think it's fair to call them indulgences. If enough people bought carbon credits under a working system it would be a flood of money toward restricting carbon release and recapturing carbon.
I think carbon credits are a scam in the same stage recycling was 20 or 30 years ago.
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Compared to other developed countries they are not the worst. Australia: 16.8 tons/capita/year Canada/US: 16.1 Germany: 9.1 China: 8.0 France: 5.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Why does France do so much better?
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This isn't actually all that new, 25 years ago when I worked at a large Motorola facility, I was always amused when I worked late, which was often, of having the janitorial staff empty my wastebasket into the large bin they pushed around, and then dump the contents of the paper recycling basket into the same bin. It hasn't been economical to recycle paper waste streams in the US maybe ever.
Did you actually do the legwork to connect the actions of the janitor to company policy and the economics of recycling in the area? Like, I would guess the janitor was just being lazy, and their actions provide little to no information about either the actual policy at the company or economics of recycling where it was located. The substantial amount of recycled fiber in many products suggests that it isn't particula…
"It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today." Don’t trust this guy, he is supposed to sell oil, recycling is in direct conflict with selling more oil. There’s no reason we should fall for this twice.
Though I'm curious if the "reusable" trend is more of the same. Are single-use bags and straws really that bad for the environment, and do reusables get reused enough times to make a difference, or is a reusable straw just another thing to make money on? (Not that I imagine reusable straws is a lucrative enough industry to be worthy of dedicated political lobbying teams, but who knows).
A 316 grade stainless steel or aluminum straw that is appropriately marked for automated material identification (a very big gap in our current industrial culture) is easy to send back through a foundry to re-melt and reuse when broken beyond repair (likely by accident, as such a straw could conceivably last centuries when well taken care of).
Same straw except made out of silicone, and unmarked, will still slowly (slower than say PET, but still minutely) leach polymers as microplastics into the environment. Better than a single-use straw, but we can choose better.
I'm very partial to materials that can be fed as the sole feedstock into industrial processes without adding virgin feedstock. It is amazingly difficult as a consumer to find out these materials in the end products. Right To Repair is a part of this picture as well: you want to be able to repair the smallest piece possible to keep the overall artifact in use for as long as possible, and send back the smallest possible piece into the feedstock stream.
There could be a Second Industrial Revolution built around standing up an infrastructure that emphasizes the agile manufacturing of reusable, cradle-to-cradle-recyclable, repairable artifacts, deliberately serving an S-curve sales chart because the artifacts last so long, and rapidly switching the majority of the manufacturing line into different, adjacent artifacts, and leaving behind only a smaller line that addresses marginal demand from population growth and parts supply. It could be the first step towards a proto-post-scarcity infrastructure.
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Thinking about this more, wasn't there a time, maybe late 90s early 2000s when the message was that plastic is more environmental than paper? Something like at the supermarket checkout you should pick plastic over paper bags to save rain forest trees? Is my memory wrong or was this a widespread message at the time?
This is what I remember as well. I remember my mother using her own rope net grocery bags as an alternative to the paper ones. I remember in school we switched from single-portion paper milk cartons to square bags of milk that you punctured with a plastic straw. This was sold to us along with a muppet skit explaining how to use the milk bags (the muppets rated it "one thumb up and one thumb down, to cover the straw h…
We always used them as garbage can liners. Now that stores no longer have plastic bags we have to buy plastic bags. So instead of reusing the plastic bags we brought our groceries home in, we are buying brand new plastic bags instead. The same number of plastic bags are entering the landfill. The only difference is that now we have to pay for them.