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I do wonder, maybe there is similar scheme when it comes to housing affordability. There is too much of a coincidence that much of the Western countries are having the same housing crisis. Most ordinary Westerners are perplexed to find out other countries also have the same issue, or are surprised they can’t find a place to live when they move abroad. There is a deliberate manipulation of the housing market and misinformation. Here in Ireland, after all, foreign vulture funds outbid locals and then either rent or sell properties at extortionate price. And yet, the wrong kind of foreigners are getting blamed.
It’s because we allow property and the homes that sit on it to be a speculative market. We encourage it. The only way for property values to be high, well, it’s a supply and demand thing. If you glut the market with anything, you drive prices down. And people whose entire retirement is built on that won’t be having it, let alone the conglomerate owners…
China is trying to steer into the opposite with laws against it. Not sure how well that’s working, but they can acknowledge the issue at least.
Furthermore, we then tie it all into the stock market and link our future pensions to that. So we can never really change the system otherwise everything will collapse.
It’s like a house of cards.
Important to note that recycling some things makes sense, like metal. And recycling glass makes sense but sanitizing and reusing bottles makes alot more sense. There’s also been a push to compost as much paper product as possible since that makes way more sense than recycling paper. Our green bins now take any brown cardboard with no tape and pizza boxes.
PET for example is also feasable to recycle. Problem with plastic recycling is mostly that plastic waste is not just one type of plastic.
Biggest misconception by far. You can’t just “melt it down” like you can with glass or aluminum or steel
You can recycle it though and it’s economically viable.
I was agreeing with your “not just one type of plastic” comment
How does composting paper make more sense than recycling? From what I can tell we have pretty well established paper recycling mechanisms, at least here in Germany.
Edit: typo.
In most countries, recycling paper only made financial sense if they shipped it to poor countries or used prison labor so it could be inexpensively sorted thru. Traditionally it was China, but they stopped accepting it. And letting microorganisms do what they do consumes less resources like electricity and less industrial chemicals.
I would guess that it’s because recycling requires energy input, while compost doesn’t require hardly any energy.
I am pretty sure recycling does not require more energy than using fresh trees. You can even use the waste pulp to produce biogas.
recycled paper is lower quality, so you still have to add fresh paper pulp to it
Sure. It’s not a closed cycle. But if you need to cut down less trees, that is a win for me.
I’m old enough to have both lead and plastic in my brain, lungs, and testicles. I envy you youngins with only plastic in you.
Forever Chemicals in my non stick stuff
On the bright side, my nuts don’t stick to the side of my leg anymore cause I sweat PTFEs.
Everyone, I mean everyone on the planet has PFOAs in them.
They didn’t invent plastic recycling. They are, however, using it as an excuse to make more plastic. The EU had regulations against over packaging (like putting cucumbers in plastic) for a while until plastic recycling became a thing and they went ‘meh’.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#Controversies
It’s less that they invented plastic recycling and more that this is one of the first examples of corporate greenwashing and shifting the burden onto the public vs the corporations who made the problem.
But I LOVE plastic!!
Just don’t eat them!
…and don’t think about how many tons the Lego company produces in a year unless you want to cry.
A lot of right-wing people use this fact as an excuse to not care about the environment at all…
A lot of right-wing people use … as an excuse to not care about … at all…
I thought your comment would be one of those rare instances where you can make a sentence more accurate by generalizing it.
They REALLY like doing it with people, and ruining the environment and/or climate is just shitting on other people (especially the poor ones) with an added level of abstraction.
microplastics might explain that epic rant about lobster.
Same thing with “carbon footprint”, which was invented by B.P to shift the blame for climate change onto the consumer.
I’m not saying don’t try to reduce your emissions by using electric vehicles, going plant based or at least reducing animal product intake, and limiting flying, just that it’s pretty meaningless in the whole scale of things, so instead of focusing on the individual, focus on organizing protests, disrupting, and other collective action.
Individuals are essentially useless on a global scale but companies like BP aren’t drilling for oil to accomplish their sinister goal of warming the earth they are producing a product that all of us as individuals are purchasing.
It’s like you are in a dog park that’s covered in dog shit, just because there’s shit everywhere doesn’t mean you shouldn’t clean up after your dog. Telling other people they don’t need to worry about cleaning up their shit because the guy with the dog training school doesn’t clean up any of the shit from the dogs still makes you bad.
You cleaning up after your dog isn’t going to clean the whole park but doing nothing until a petition is done that enforces cleaning up your dog isn’t the way. I’m not asking you to spend all day trying to clean the park but you should at least do your best to not make it worse
I’m not saying don’t try to reduce your emissions by…
I’ll say it. Don’t do these things because you think they reduce your carbon emissions. Do it when it’s the most frugal option.
Reduce and reuse are still something we should 100% being doing but trying to measure then inject carbon foot print is futile.
Every dollar spend it a better measurement of your contribution to emissions. Trying to calculate it yourself with incomplete data is pointless.
Don’t be fooled by some study you read that made you feel like a righteous person. No one knows. The methods we have for measuring and assessing our footprint are hilariously incompete.
The truth is buried in endless noise. We don’t know what we need to know because it is in the best interests of others that we not know it. Blindspots.
Buy less products because buy “better” is a personal fantasy. Where better is because some popsci idea made you feel guilty for not being better. What the fuck do these things know, they’re bullshitting. Yes people do that; not just on the internet but definitely there.
There is “buy better”, it is not but a fantasy.
Buy more local / regional produced food and products, less km travelled and support local people. Buy products made from longer lasting materials if there are different versions. Buy fairtrade when it’s available for coffee, cacao, bananas, pineapple, etc. Buy bio if available. None of it is perfect, but you are still voting with your wallet and not perfect is often still better than the cheapest there is.
If you can afford it.
Buying better definitely does exist and, for non-consumable goods, definitely can result in buying less. My washing machine is from the early nineties. I expect my steamdeck to last for 2 decades at least, because it seems repairable and software won’t ever be the bottleneck. I have sweaters I wear that are over 25 years old. Endless noise just makes it hard to identify which product is the better one, you’ll often only be sure long after the purchase… And the at first sight most frugal option will often not be the better buy.
imagination, life is your creation
come on barbie let’s go party
Manufacturers have no responsibility or regulation in packaging. Buy some items made of metal, and you still generate immediate plastic packaging waste. Some of that plastic has recycling symbols on them, but they can be fake, and again, no regulation.
So all we really recycle is clear PETG. 90% of recycling plastics are landfill. We put stuff in blue bins to remove consumer guilt.
idk man, in Rome, Italy you get fined if you don’t separate yo things.
Just because they fine you doesn’t make separating them any more or less recyclable
Should just follow japans lead and incinerate the plastic for energy
And just blow those toxins into the air.
Filters and stripping columns. It’s not that hard to do and if you have a clean source of plastics (not mixed with garbage) then it’s basically all just hydrocarbons with a little bit of nitrogen. Carbon + oxygen + hydrogen = CO2 and H2O which while we don’t need more CO2 it’s significantly better then generating that same energy from oil as it is cleaning up our waste vs extracting more from the ground.
Its a lot harder when you do trash incineration as that has a lot more nasty stuff in it but plastics are easy
But they sell those soda branded shirts made out of soda bottles!! /s
Wait until OP hears about the evils of cardboard recycling, I drive by daily and see the towering eternal flame of methane. Sadly methane is sneaky and not all of it gets burned.
wait what!?!!
fuck.
Cardboard is recyclable so long as you don’t print on it and it’s the brown corrugated stuff. Which is a big ask.
Most of it doesn’t get recycled into more boxes though. Think like those cup holders you get at a take out place.
The other thing is trees area renewable resource in theory but we use a lot of fossil fuels to harvest and process then.
sometimes I wonder what would happen if we were to send all carbon based waste (plastic, food, cardboard, paper…) to the Artic/Antarctic.
make a giant landfill where it is too cold for it to decompose into methane, and it will actively sequester carbon, as replaced carbon and other organic items sequester carbon.
We’re already shipping all our garbage halfway across the world,
You would put twice the carbon into the atmosphere by burning the fuel to get it there.
Ok, probably not twice … but you get the idea.
we send it halfway across the world, to burn/recycle to low quality, send back, use, discard, send back across the world to burn/repeat.
honestly with that system, it’s hard to think of a worse system.
Vote for trash burning power plants. Worse than oil power plants, but still better than plastic trash in the wild.
I make the shit full time so I think I’m 50/50 ken doll/human by now.
You and me both, brother!
I recycle when convenient. I have two cans the same company empties, one for trash one for recycling. I’ll fill the recycling, and overflow goes in the trash.
My wife hates it, but the amount of plastic trash that factories produce just blows consumer household recycling out of the water. There are people whose jobs include fillling a whole dumpster each shift. No comparison. Im not bending over backward to be little Dutch boy with my finger in the dam while it’s got a backhoe digging out the foundation.
do companies/factories in your country not also recycle what they can? are they not paying money to garbage collectors who are incentivised by the state to sort their garbage?
Ha! Hahaha haha!
I have never once seen a garbage inspector at any of the places I’ve worked. I have been instructed by my employer to dump or otherwise dispose of things questionably, many, many times.
Boss once had me fill a dumpster with old
halogenflourescent bulbs. Probably 90% of them shattered in the process. Then it turns out that was the wrong dumpster so we had to shovel all the broken bits into another. Didn’t learn they had mercury in them for a decade. I was 15. So that’s cool, wonder what that did.Halogen bulbs to do contain mercury.
Sorry I meant “flourescent” apparently. It was this kind. My uncle’s business was moving into an office that was some 1970s government office and somehow I got roped into the re-fit.
One small semi-relevant data point (not commercial though):
In San Jose, California (1hr south of San Francisco), they might occasionally audit residential recycling containers to make sure folks aren’t dumping trash. Drive around early before pickup.
Typical dutch… Why even try to better the world? Why would I try to better myself if others dont? As long as my garden is green the world can burn
