i just recently found out the "crying Indian" commercial where an Italian-American actor pretended to be native american cried when he saw someone litter was actually funded by big cola/packaging as an early form of the neoliberal "recycling is a personal responsibility" type of green washing bullshit in the early days. your comment reminded of that and i can't explain to you why that happened.
“recycling is a personal responsibility” type of green washing bullshit
Damn, i hate this so much. My country is fucking religious over seperating your trash into the right trash cans for plastic, paper, compostables etc. - i've had actual nazis check my trash cans to see if everything was properly seperated (that's when i started buying black trash bags, btw. You need these if you ever plan to live in an average German village). Yet most of the plastic waste just gets shipped to Malaysia, where it ends up in landfills or in the ocean. It's a massive scam that allows the industry to pin the blame on somebody else and eases everybody's conscience while we still pollute as much as we always did.
This type of shit is 100% intentional and malicious.
In 1991 the World Bank's chief economist, Lawrence Summers, observed (in an internal memo leaked to the press) that Africa was "vastly underpolluted," pointing out as well that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable." (Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth, 2002, ch 16)
. Yet most of the plastic waste just gets shipped to Malaysia,
yup. It's all over SEA they just dump this shit, literally just show up and dump it. The Philippines actually re-delivered the trash Canada just dropped off on an island there because they dumped it without paying anyone, I know there is other countries and small islands dealing with this same exact thing from the US and other places.
I take all bottles and cans to an actual recycling center and get paid for it. It's not a ton of money but at least there I know they are recycling most of it. But they don't accept random other pieces of plastic which is a big problem, not much I can do personally besides actually limit what I buy, but that of course has its own limits since it's unavoidable for certain things. That's about as "personal responsibility" as it gets, if there is an alternative and you can buy it, probably worth it, but realistically it's hardly even a dent so if you can't buy alternatives no one should fault you for that.
We're using plastic at such an absurd rate but they try to make you feel guilty about it when it's the people packaging that shit that are forcing us to have it. You cannot buy certain things without plastic and there is no real global plan for changing this on the scale that needs to happen. I've been hearing about that so called organism they are attempting to make that can eat plastic but it still a long way away from being a reality. The ocean is absolutely fucked, I've seen so many pictures of them opening up dead whale or other large sea creatures stomachs and it's filled with plastics.
100%. There's plastic in the bodies of the creatures living at the bottom of the Challenger Deep. Many of these tiny creatures are also the main source of food for a lot of ocean fish. The plastic then gets ingested by them and then on from there. It's everywhere
Yeah, the sheer scale and pervasiveness of the problem so clearly shows that you cannot do anything about this by just building bottom-up market pressure. That never fucking works. It didn't work with leaded gasoline, it didn't work with CFCs, of course it won't work with plastics either, or with CO2 emissions for that matter.
i just recently found out the "crying Indian" commercial where an Italian-American actor pretended to be native american cried when he saw someone litter was actually funded by big cola/packaging as an early form of the neoliberal "recycling is a personal responsibility" type of green washing bullshit in the early days. your comment reminded of that and i can't explain to you why that happened.
Damn, i hate this so much. My country is fucking religious over seperating your trash into the right trash cans for plastic, paper, compostables etc. - i've had actual nazis check my trash cans to see if everything was properly seperated (that's when i started buying black trash bags, btw. You need these if you ever plan to live in an average German village). Yet most of the plastic waste just gets shipped to Malaysia, where it ends up in landfills or in the ocean. It's a massive scam that allows the industry to pin the blame on somebody else and eases everybody's conscience while we still pollute as much as we always did.
This type of shit is 100% intentional and malicious.
jfc how can this ghoul coin a term like underpolluted and not go and hang himself?
yup. It's all over SEA they just dump this shit, literally just show up and dump it. The Philippines actually re-delivered the trash Canada just dropped off on an island there because they dumped it without paying anyone, I know there is other countries and small islands dealing with this same exact thing from the US and other places.
I take all bottles and cans to an actual recycling center and get paid for it. It's not a ton of money but at least there I know they are recycling most of it. But they don't accept random other pieces of plastic which is a big problem, not much I can do personally besides actually limit what I buy, but that of course has its own limits since it's unavoidable for certain things. That's about as "personal responsibility" as it gets, if there is an alternative and you can buy it, probably worth it, but realistically it's hardly even a dent so if you can't buy alternatives no one should fault you for that.
We're using plastic at such an absurd rate but they try to make you feel guilty about it when it's the people packaging that shit that are forcing us to have it. You cannot buy certain things without plastic and there is no real global plan for changing this on the scale that needs to happen. I've been hearing about that so called organism they are attempting to make that can eat plastic but it still a long way away from being a reality. The ocean is absolutely fucked, I've seen so many pictures of them opening up dead whale or other large sea creatures stomachs and it's filled with plastics.
100%. There's plastic in the bodies of the creatures living at the bottom of the Challenger Deep. Many of these tiny creatures are also the main source of food for a lot of ocean fish. The plastic then gets ingested by them and then on from there. It's everywhere
Yeah, the sheer scale and pervasiveness of the problem so clearly shows that you cannot do anything about this by just building bottom-up market pressure. That never fucking works. It didn't work with leaded gasoline, it didn't work with CFCs, of course it won't work with plastics either, or with CO2 emissions for that matter.
Oh yeah I remember that commercial lol, before my time but I have seen it on the internet.