this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
63 points (94.4% liked)
Asklemmy
44148 readers
1327 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That’s the thing, you usually don’t have that choice. Sure, you can often bring your own containers to buy food. You can also use reusable bags for groceries shopping. You also don’t need those stupid tiny plastic bags for vegetables and fruits. But the impact is very low.
No industry can operate without processing and using plastics and they’re not willing to change because it’s cheaper and easier right now and change would cost them money.
You're completely correct, until enough of us buy other products to impact their bottom line. Scaled up production makes things cheaper per unit, but if demand drops out because we're buying it less, then their cost per unit goes up. Then they raise prices to make up for it. Eventually alternatives become relatively competitive and then there's a domino effect of more people jumping off of plastic. At least for some things. We will never get away from plastics entirely, but we're way more wasteful than we need to be. There aren't enough systemic incentives for companies to change their production, and there aren't enough legislators willing to change that, but we can influence it a little bit by voting with our wallets. It's very low impact, but talking about it in places like this can make the low impact a little bigger and lead to a bigger conversation about the global responsibility of industrialized nations to bear more of the burden because we can afford to. Idk I just don't want to grow old and tell younger generations that we knew what we were doing was wrong and would hurt them but we just didn't feel like doing anything about it.
I also just hate glass. I broke a jar the other day and thought I'd cleaned it up properly, but no. I've been picking nearly invisible pieces of glass out of my foot with tweezers for days. My feet are scratched to shit. Plastic is bad but glass sucks too.
Did you vacuum?
Yes.
Maybe some of the glass launched way further than it seemed and your feet are picking it up from there.