Hank Green did a video inspired by a similar meme after the Blue Origin rocket explosion. He acknowledged that plastic recycling isn’t great, but encouraged focusing on other materials like aluminium. The explosion released 825 tons of carbon dioxide, which is ~1% of the hourly emissions of the aluminum industry. The current amount of recycled cans in the US saves the equivalent to 15 rocket explosions of carbon every day.
So yeah, get a reusable container, and try using aluminum instead of plastic.
Heads up: your YouTube link tells shows your channel to everyone who clicks it. This is due to YouTube’s new messaging feature, and how they set the default privacy settings to share your channel with everyone whenever you post a link. You need to remove everything from the ?is= onwards and also turn off the sharing feature if you don’t want everyone on Lemmy getting your profile and the ability to YouTube chat with you
yeah, and there was a recent expose about how, on top of the fact that most plastic recycling doesn’t actually reduce overall pollution all that much, a huge amount of state and municipal recycling programs had been subsumed by some massive scam that just offloaded recycling waste to some 3rd-party program that eventually buried it all in landfills or dumped it somewhere anyway.
the real answer is to stop producing/consuming so much waste (especially petrochemical-based waste) in the first place and to live in more sustainable and less waste-producing systems.
Oh good allegory would be: stop taking all of those cholesterol and blood pressure medication’s, and just eat healthier and exercise more.
I 100% agree with your plastic statements. However, wanted to make a note that it is standard practice to put type 1 diabetics on a low dose blood pressure medication because it reduces wear on their kidneys, thereby reducing the risk of renal failure and other complications. Cholesterol meds are also prescribed proactively to people with a variety of chronic illnesses, particularly those related to heart health, who are often eating better than anyone here, but have higher risks of complications. Medications are tools amongst a variety of ways to help people live better lives.
All that to say, what choices you make about medications and their place in your health are completely valid for you. That doesn’t mean your choices are applicable across the board. Please don’t give medical advice on the internet.
(A conversation about the importance of communities designed to encourage exercise, and easy access to affordable unprocessed/low processed food is a different thing from “don’t take medications: everything can be cured by kale and a walk in the woods”)
Absolutely. I also want to point out how in some places reducing plastic consumption is so much easier than in others.
Anecdotal: I now live walking distance from a “no plastic” shop that mostly refills your own containers -veggies, dried and liquid stuff… my plastic consumption is most weeks only the milk bottles. I used to live in many other places in which a life like this was hard or outright impossible.
Support local movements to allow you to not use plastic, reuse and refills containers, or get rid of them.
Thankfully my country has a deposit system for cans and bottles (except for strong alcoholic drinks for some reason. Beer has deposit, wine, vodka etc do not)
Most cans get recycled. There’s even hobos looking in communal garbage bins for recyclable containers because although there’s not a lot of money in it, it gets them what food banks don’t.
I think most of Europe does this but in the rest of the world I’m not sure how much gets recycled or not
but in the rest of the world I’m not sure how much gets recycled or not
Unfortunately some developing countries have problems with waste segregation and disposal, especially those with cultures where their packaging was then organic (paper bags, banana leaf wrappers, etc. for food) before being replaced by plastic-based packaging, so with little to no convenient places to dispose their trash properly, it ends up almost everywhere. That some balk at segregation, believing they don’t want to be inconvenienced.
This is sometimes done on a state by state basis in the US. Execution varies between states too, some states have it so if you sell stuff in bottles and cans you must also be able to accept returns, whereas other states you have to take them to a special facility which no one does except the hobos you were mentioning.
Hank Green did a video inspired by a similar meme after the Blue Origin rocket explosion. He acknowledged that plastic recycling isn’t great, but encouraged focusing on other materials like aluminium. The explosion released 825 tons of carbon dioxide, which is ~1% of the hourly emissions of the aluminum industry. The current amount of recycled cans in the US saves the equivalent to 15 rocket explosions of carbon every day.
So yeah, get a reusable container, and try using aluminum instead of plastic.
https://youtu.be/pXVmkurTOgM
Heads up: your YouTube link tells shows your channel to everyone who clicks it. This is due to YouTube’s new messaging feature, and how they set the default privacy settings to share your channel with everyone whenever you post a link. You need to remove everything from the ?is= onwards and also turn off the sharing feature if you don’t want everyone on Lemmy getting your profile and the ability to YouTube chat with you
yeah, and there was a recent expose about how, on top of the fact that most plastic recycling doesn’t actually reduce overall pollution all that much, a huge amount of state and municipal recycling programs had been subsumed by some massive scam that just offloaded recycling waste to some 3rd-party program that eventually buried it all in landfills or dumped it somewhere anyway.
the real answer is to stop producing/consuming so much waste (especially petrochemical-based waste) in the first place and to live in more sustainable and less waste-producing systems.
Oh good allegory would be: stop taking all of those cholesterol and blood pressure medication’s, and just eat healthier and exercise more.
I 100% agree with your plastic statements. However, wanted to make a note that it is standard practice to put type 1 diabetics on a low dose blood pressure medication because it reduces wear on their kidneys, thereby reducing the risk of renal failure and other complications. Cholesterol meds are also prescribed proactively to people with a variety of chronic illnesses, particularly those related to heart health, who are often eating better than anyone here, but have higher risks of complications. Medications are tools amongst a variety of ways to help people live better lives.
All that to say, what choices you make about medications and their place in your health are completely valid for you. That doesn’t mean your choices are applicable across the board. Please don’t give medical advice on the internet. (A conversation about the importance of communities designed to encourage exercise, and easy access to affordable unprocessed/low processed food is a different thing from “don’t take medications: everything can be cured by kale and a walk in the woods”)
Absolutely. I also want to point out how in some places reducing plastic consumption is so much easier than in others.
Anecdotal: I now live walking distance from a “no plastic” shop that mostly refills your own containers -veggies, dried and liquid stuff… my plastic consumption is most weeks only the milk bottles. I used to live in many other places in which a life like this was hard or outright impossible.
Support local movements to allow you to not use plastic, reuse and refills containers, or get rid of them.
Thankfully my country has a deposit system for cans and bottles (except for strong alcoholic drinks for some reason. Beer has deposit, wine, vodka etc do not)
Most cans get recycled. There’s even hobos looking in communal garbage bins for recyclable containers because although there’s not a lot of money in it, it gets them what food banks don’t.
I think most of Europe does this but in the rest of the world I’m not sure how much gets recycled or not
Unfortunately some developing countries have problems with waste segregation and disposal, especially those with cultures where their packaging was then organic (paper bags, banana leaf wrappers, etc. for food) before being replaced by plastic-based packaging, so with little to no convenient places to dispose their trash properly, it ends up almost everywhere. That some balk at segregation, believing they don’t want to be inconvenienced.
This is sometimes done on a state by state basis in the US. Execution varies between states too, some states have it so if you sell stuff in bottles and cans you must also be able to accept returns, whereas other states you have to take them to a special facility which no one does except the hobos you were mentioning.