News

Whistleblowers should be treated like heroes. Like not just protections where the reward is that they get to keep their job working for a company that is probably going to feel hostile towards them, but reward them so that they don't need to work with that company anymore.

Publically funded science (done in the interest of the public rather than profit for universities or publishers) should also be ramped up so that it has the resources to examine these questions, too.

Also, criminal charges for execs that suppress information that prefers profits over safety.

According to my brother, the real issue is that there is too much regulation and it is stifling the ability of ethical companies to break into industries 🙄

Pretty sure all those industries continue doing all that shit today

You missed cars. 😁

Please go on, not that I need convincing, but would like to hear more, idk when was led? 60s?

Impossible, the only appropriate package for our premium scissors is comparably premium clamshell plastic. That you need scissors to open.

You mean: how they will raise prices to account for that.

Recycled plastic is also terrible if you have any type of quality standards you have to meet. You generally end up creating even more scrap because the regrind always has some amount of contamination in it, and never performs the same as virgin.

Recycled plastic is also inferior quality with worse structural properties so it's not really suitable for many applications.

Yeah we have a government that represents corporations.

The plastic producers were the ones pushing the grift and controlling the narrative/studies, just like what was done with fossil fuels and climate change (certainly a trend here with the oil industry).

Additionally, they're the ones that directly benefitted the most so it makes sense to go after their fraudulent gains.

I'm all for being critical of municipalities and elected officials, but the solution is not to bankrupt cities or state/federal funds through litigation. The focus should be on the producers. Go to the top of the chain/follow the money.

Edit: To your point about news conglomerates, that seems more viable and they certainly need better incentives and regulation.

That has to do with fuckery around the term recycling. What normal people have been led to believe is only a very narrow definition of recycling and not what happens in most cases. Burning plastic is considered recycling as the waste is recycled into fuel.

Same with renewable energy.. sure the trees you chip down and burn can be regrown.. but that is not what people are led to believe is what they are being sold.

This is not on the local municipalities. They where saddled with waste and had to deal with it, they did as good as they could. And many people have been yelling about this since before 2000... It was just ignored untill microplastic where found in the balls and brain.

This along with big oil needs to be dragged infront of a tribunal and higher-ups from the last 40 years need to be held to account. We have room in the Hague.

Seattle doesn't even accept plastics for recycling, only certain things for cleaning and reuse. They could do a better job in informing the public about it, though, since all of the products still stamp on the recycling symbols, most of which have never been actually recycled.

Also, decades of telling people to separate plastics for recycling into separate plastic types, like lids separate from bottles, undermines reuse because the bottles then get crushed without the lid to keep air inside. And crushing usually damages them too much to be cleaned and reused.

Global solutions are nice to ask for, but not forthcoming. We can start by investing in alternatives at the local/national level, encouraging others to do the same, and advocating to grow an alternative way of living that is less extractive and more respectful. Ideas can spread quite quickly, if the conditions are right. A global switch isn't possible immediately. Infrastructure must be planned. International economic planning and international cooperation are low right now. Even intranational cooperation is low.

Cooperation grows from the bottom up, and we need to find something locally/nationally to agree on and cooperate over. Plastics and recycling being a unifying issue is hopeful to report, and is something that can be tackled at the local level. I have greatly reduced my own plastic consumption (it's not zero) and saved money doing it. Plastic products are usually expensive conveniences. Now I spend my days cleaning instead of just tossing and moving on. A part of the problem is that living well requires labor, and our society forces us to sell all of our labor energy to make a boss rich and pay us pennies. Further, we all live in atomized, nuclear units that must be self-reliant, which requires more labor to meet needs compared to the economies of scale involved with community-pooled labor to meet shared needs like food (a major source of plastics waste).

Previously, western society supported this structure via sexual segregation where one sex provided the labor to live well, and the other provided the labor donated to capitalism in exchange for the family unit being allowed to live. Then, the sex whose job it was to help us live well realized that they were being oppressed in this scenario, since they were being denied many basic rights of citizenship such as being seen as a person by society. They were tricked by the capitalists to demand that they may also donate their labor to the invisible hand in exchange for something closer to full citizenship. This creates a domestic labor vacuum that prevents pay parity. Domestic labor needs are being suppressed by convenience plastic use. The need for someone to do domestic labor causes women to fall back into this role due to the structural vacuum. Convenience plastics use is required to support the lack of time available now that Bosses demand double the labor from each family unit compared to the 1960s. Dropping plastics increases domestic labor requirements which exacerbates the sexual labor vacuum and pay gap. I see a local/national need to fix sexual issues as blocking a fix for our plastics addiction in the west. Abstracting the problematic societal structures around sex, calling them gender, and then breaking their rules is the current strategy to free ourselves.