You know this isn't going to stop until bad things happen to polluters, who are perfectly content to wreck the biosphere for everyone else as long as they get theirs. Existing economic incentives are perverse and many people will fight tooth and nail to maintain their ability to extract economic rents rather than sacrifice for the public good.
We can all help stop this. Everyone can reduce their contribution. I cut out nearly all packaged food, which reduced my garbage to where I empty it less than once a year (I'm in month 13 of my current load). I was pleasantly surprised that doing so cost less, reduced food preparation time, increased diversity of food, and led to more social interaction with friends and farmers. For the record, it took a couple years of practice to go from weekly garbage to monthly to yearly.
That's just one example. Everyone can reduce some. The more you start, instead of just accepting and throwing your hands up, the easier each next step.
The producers will see the trend and stop buying plastic.
Of course there are other ways to act: legislation, creating healthier alternatives.
The point is: everyone can act starting here and now and they will find joy in it. It may take time, but acting on one's values is rewarding.
I worked in a grocery store for 5 years in the produce department and we sold a loooot of unpackaged food to customers that came to us in a lot of packaging. From stabilizers to keep produce from jostling and bruising - all the way to the shrinkwrap the pallets came in with...
I dumped a lot of plastic into the trash compactor. I dumped a ton of styrofoam into the trash compactor.
Sure, it might show a desire to the producers of food if we shop better - but I doubt your food is as plastic-free as you imagine. And I tossed more plastic daily than the average household did in months.
The supply chain needs to be plastic free before we stop having a problem.
It makes me think of a smaller scale example I witnessed as a cashier. I saw cashiers throwing away plastic bags by the hundred regularly, because they failed to load them onto the holding racks (you've seen them, but probably paid little attention to them) properly and it was simply easier to toss dozens of bags in the trash and load a full package of bags.
Meanwhile, at home my mom rebuked me for throwing one used and damaged bag in the trash instead of recycling.
I feel like we all can help with rising sea levels by filling a jar with sea water and keeping it in our house. That's a little less water in the seas. I'm helping.
Instead of hoping 7 billion people change their habits, we should change the habits of a few hundred companies. Everyone will pay the price somehow, but companies are vehicles of large scale change, and our markets can efficiently make the changes if we shape them correctly.
agree, I'm pretty frustrated with the notion that end-consumers are entirely responsible for somehow reversing the trend of pollution by voluntarily opting out of the packaging system. Firstly, it is mostly impossible to do completely without enormous effort and sacrifice, secondly, only a tiny fraction of the population is actually going to attempt to do such a thing, and thirdly, as you said, manufacturers and industry will continue to produce and discard the majority of waste in any case. From a political point of view, putting the blame all on consumers is the perfect story for polluting industries to hide behind - "it's all your fault!". It's a scam, and only legislation and interruption at the supply chain will have any impact. The only genuinely good thing about consumers engaging in voluntary source reduction is that they raise their own political awareness, since the main thing they need to do is vote.
"Even as their ad was inducing guilt in viewers for spreading trash, Keep America Beautiful’s members were fighting legislation that could have done much to address the problem."
Speak to a supermarket owner/manager. You would not believe how much packaging exists for a simple apple or similar. You would see an unpackaged apple at the end of the process and be none the less aware about the plastics involved.
Make sellers take back waste as a condition to sell. Boom. Problem solved.
You've changed the incentive, but doubled the potential number of material transports needed to move packaging back to the source.
In the interim period, while businesses figure out how to deal with less packaging, you end up with all the current stuff going back and forth all over the country, or you end up with attempts to set up a shadow infrastructure designed to ensure the right amount of packaging is in the right place at the right time to optimize on minimization of cost of the end product which is now priced with material handling in the equation.
Instead of actually changing things the way you hoped, you may just reorganize the supply chain to a slightly more distributed model where packaging doesn't happen until the latest stage in the process.
You've also invoked change in regulatory framework. Do we end up having to get FDA approval on alternate forms of food packaging or plasticless food transportation systems?
Do the details of the implementation threaten some national security metric with regards to food availability?
I'm mot saying I disagree with the intent at all, mind, but broad strokes without focusing on the nagging details have a way of coming back to haunt one in the long run. There are a lot of metrics and analysis that would need to be done before just declaring one day "Thou shalt!"
Which is probably no less than what will be needed sadly.
Well, presumably the truck needs to go back to the source, so they can bring back the old packaging on the return trip from bringing new goods to the store?
I really wish Amazon would pay their delivery drivers to do this with used Amazon boxes, too.
Not necessarily. Truckers will often pick up entire new loads and chain deliveries depending on whether they're last mile/long haul/commodity/or specialized equipment haulers.
So your packaging job would likely just be another blip on another trucker's route. But it would increase the need for more truckers since you're essentially (worst-case) doubling the number of deliveries to be done per transaction.
The producer externalized this extra truck cost to taxpayers (garbage trucks, landfills and environment aka dumping/littering/pollution). If the consumers see a lot of increased costs for plastic wrapped bananas with the seller having to deal with the waste; that is actually the point and the incentive for the producer to minimize waste.
1. Pretending that's a practical way to get the kind and scale of change we need is extremely wishful thinking, to the point that I wouldn't be shocked to see polluting industries promoting it to distract from regulatory solutions.
2. That attitude reflects your economic privilege. Not only is it harder for poor people to make these kinds of choices, living with a scarcity mindset makes you less likely to care and less able to act strategically.
Give me a break. I have been leading a low pollution lifestyle for decades and many consumers do too. Nobody likes waste except the people that make money from producing it.
I am not throwing my hands up, I am saying it's time to attack the root of the problem instead of clipping the topiary into slightly better shape. Waiting for the market to just catch up is failing and discounts the influence of marketers and lobbyists, as well as discounting the possibility of collective action. Don't be a judas goat.
I stopped to believe the individuals can vote with their wallets to stop the pollution. We are not enough people who care and there are too many things to consider. We need to fight the system using the mechanisms of the system. If pollution costs money, capitalism will optimize to minimize pollution. It depends on the price. We need politics to change the rules. I would advocate to use your time to make destroying the earth costly.
Agreed, having the mental energy to worry about the packaging the food your kids eat is not the norm unfortunately.
People have too many terrible things in their life to worry about without taking responsibily for this too. Its great for people to recycle but to me its more like being and early tech adopter, it doesnt really work for the masses yet but the lessons learned are invaluable.
A common source for microplastic is the abration of synthetic textiles and rubber. So unless you only wear unmixed nature fibre and walk in straw sandals you have to assume that you might also produce microplastic even if you never drive a car, take a bus or anything with wheels not made of steel or wood.
This is why we need to deal with the issue as a society, instead of blaming it onto individuals. We did precisely that for decades now and it doesn’t seem to work.
You're both being pretty vague, but I think it is useful to remember rhat ultimately "they" are indeed part of "us". The people who influence individual companies decisions to continue to produce waste have to go home to a neighbourhood, move within the community, and can be influenced by that community.
The people enabling it are the consumers, but also the thousands of smaller companies buying and producing plastic packaging, who have a much bigger say than the small amount of consumers you can convince to give up their luxuries.
This argument always comes up with "we can all do our part" and that's absolutely nonsense. Many times you have no idea what is put into the things you buy or there may not even be alternatives or at least not easily discoverable because the market. Many people have tried to do their part for years and the problem has only gotten worse because companies run rampant and aren't regulated or held accountable.
Exactly. It's an externalizing cost tactic where responsibility for something far up the production chain is shoved into the individually powerless consumer's shoes
Who exactly is asking for more plastic waste? Name the consumer lobbyists and marketing firms that actively demanding this, and whose demands command the forces of industrial production.
Your consumer + education focus is an approach that takes generations, time we don't have. Coincidentally or not, it also lets the manufacturers completely off the hook.
It's us driving or flying too much, it's us buying artificial fibre fleeces, or products in plastic packs that formerly came in card or paper, etc. We need to change those.
It's not us choosing to end use of a sustainable packaging to replace with plastic, or having mainly artificial fibres in the clothes stores, or setting policy on inappropriate methods of disposing of plastic. It's not us subsidising oil at the expense of renewables, or approving planning permission on a factory making single use plastic packaging, or a fracking site or refinery. They need to change with far more urgency, as these acts are orders of magnitude larger, and cancel out all acts and change of millions of individuals.
> You know this isn't going to stop until bad things happen to polluters
Well, this is happening yet. Annelida are figthing back and silently contaminating OUR farmed seafood with microplastics. Is ironic if we think about it (and very interesting). Who would expect that revenge from the humble Marphysa?
> You know this isn't going to stop until bad things happen to polluters
Well, this is happening yet and Annelida are figthing back and contaminating (returning the microplastics to) OUR food. Is ironic if we think about it, and very interesting. Who would expect that from the humble Marphysa?
I used to be angry at ‘polluters’ now I’m frustrated at a market/society that encourages bad behavior.
Few set out to destroy the planet. If you buy fish from fishermen that drop their lines sea it doesn’t matter how many plastic straws, bottles and cutlery you didn’t use. But as a consumer we are so abstracted from the source we are powerless to affect behavior.
