from HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 19 Feb 11:44
https://sh.itjust.works/post/55576683
Like many of us who are mindful of our plastic consumption, Beth Gardiner would take her own bags to the supermarket and be annoyed whenever she forgot to do so. Out without her refillable bottle, she would avoid buying bottled water. “Here I am, in my own little life, worrying about that and trying to use less plastic,” she says. Then she read an article in this newspaper, just over eight years ago, and discovered that fossil fuel companies had ploughed more than $180bn (£130bn) into plastic plants in the US since 2010. “It was a kick in the teeth,” says Gardiner. “You’re telling me that while I am beating myself up because I forgot to bring my water bottle, all these huge oil companies are pouring billions …” She looks appalled. “It was just such a shock.”
Two months before that piece was published, a photograph of a seahorse clinging to a plastic cotton bud had gone viral; two years before that England followed Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and introduced a charge for carrier bags. “I was one of so many people who were trying to use less plastic – and it just felt like such a moment of revelation: these companies are, on the contrary, increasing production and wanting to push [plastic use] up and up.” Then, says Gardiner, as she started researching her book Plastic Inc: Big Oil, Big Money and the Plan to Trash our Future, “it only becomes more shocking.”
Her research took her to Reserve, Louisiana, in the Lower Mississippi River, where she met Robert Taylor, an activist in his 80s who has spent much of his life living by an enormous plastics plant. “He is surrounded by illness, by all kinds of cancers. He only found out in 2016, as a result of federal action, that the levels of toxic gases had gone through the roof in his area, an overwhelmingly Black neighbourhood. He told me about all the illness in his family – affecting his wife and his daughter, his neighbours and his cousins. It was haunting. When we talk about plastic, we tend to think about the ways we experience it in our own lives, and we’re not as aware of the production and the impact it has on the people who live beside it.”
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And they want to make it our responsibility to control plastic waste. Politicians and CEOs are one evil entity.
I’ve worked/been adjacent to manufacturing and seeing every single plastic panel of a budget electronic product coming in its own plastic sleeve with plastic film pre-applied to the outer surface, assembling these things and seeing the mountain of single use plastic films being used is monsterous.
And then you see what happens with returned products at places like amazon and see the whole ass product being crushed by a baler completely unused.
We’re a stupid fucking species. We have enough. Its a distribution problem and we’re being held captive by 8-10 specific rich assholes.
I wish godzilla was here.
Yeah instead of evolving as a species we’re doing the opposite. We’re a virus now.
I think its actually brainworms in a subset of the population who don’t see the rest of us as human.
Also why we need government regulation of social media, because individuals will never self-regulate properly en masse.
The way the israelis want to regulate it?
Is that a serious question?
Just making sure you’re not a zio.
The same ploy has been used for everything environmental and climate change based. Apparently you have a CO2 emission cost, you have a personal plastic and waste cost its all your consuming fault. No one seems to challenge the idea that if we don’t “consume” this plastic we die from lack of food since everything comes wrapped. Almost all production of waste products generally is done by companies for products they sell us, they are secondary emissions.
The most common ones where people actually produce the waste themselves are petrol/diesel cars, gas boilers/heating and stoves. But the bulk of production is all the choice of really very profitable businesses and asking them to change over the last 55 years has not worked.
Plastic production has doubled since 2000 and less than 10% gets recycled. The oil industry is actively poisoning the planet for quarterly profits. There is no solution besides ending mass plastic production, but that seems like a nonstarter. Just another neverending global disaster to be conveniently ignored.
They’ll tell us they have bigger problems (distractions) to worry about like immigrants, war for oil, Epstein… Meanwhile climate change is going to kill us all. If life were a movie, now would be the part when humanity unites against evil and we fight back hard. If it’s not too late.
I remember reading an article in the early 2000s about how plastic recycling was essentially China buying plastic en bulk to only bury it. Once they saw it was poisoning their water they stopped, which effectively stopped plastic recycling in a lot of areas.
Today, I still try to recycle plastic if I can. I try to limit my use if I can help it but it’s so fucking hard. I’ve recently learned that glass isn’t even recycled in my area. (It’s crushed and then sold as aggregate filler.)
Aluminum cans aren’t recycled like they used to because they have a plastic lining now.
We really need to force companies to take back their products or at minimum pay a tax so that localities can actually recycle their trash.