Whatever happened to the zero waste movement?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/zero-waste-movement-plastic-straw-bans-evolution

by Brajeshwar • 3 years ago

33 70 3 years ago

nationalgeographic.com

amacalac• 3 years ago

They wasted away?

lebean• 3 years ago

Was a waste of time

acabal2• 3 years ago

I agree with Kellogg that individual change is both near-impossible and pointless. For most Americans it's not possible to live a day to day life without involving single use plastics and plastic packaging. For example I can't even go to my local supermarket and buy raw vegetables without involving single-use plastics: a sack of potatoes comes in a plastic bag, cucumbers are shrink wrapped (!) and often corn-on-the-cob is precut and packed in foam and plastic meat packs (!!).

Plus, at this point single-use plastic is part of our culture. How can you have Halloween without billions of tiny individually-plastic-wrapped candies? If you're an individual trying to be zero waste, are you supposed to tell your kid they can't do Halloween?

Change must necessarily come from legislation - that's the only single use plastic reduction has a chance. And I do think that people almost don't notice when it's gone - for example plastic shopping bags have been legislated away in many places in America and nobody seems to talk about that any more.

Syonyk4• 3 years ago

You can actually just buy the fruits and vegetables without putting them in a plastic bag. It gets some weird looks, but it's perfectly fine most places.

And as far as things like Halloween, it's not hard to get kids onboard with various projects and let them come up with solutions to things. "Less processed candy" wouldn't be a bad thing in our society. Though quite a bit of candy is a waxed paper wrap.

pests• 3 years ago

He means they come pre-wrapped in plastic. Like a shrink wrapped box would in the electronics department. Not raw veggies you put into a bag yourself.

acabal2• 3 years ago

I'm not referring to the plastic bags that you put your own vegetables in, I mean that at many groceries, including the one near me, these vegetables come prepackaged by the store/distributor and you don't have a choice to buy 10 loose raw potatoes or a whole corn-on-the-cob in a raw husk.

Of course it depends on the store - but then do I drive an extra 15 mins (and emit all that carbon...) just to go to a different store with some loose veggies?

logtempo4• 3 years ago

The cucumber plastic is really helpfull to not loose too much cucumber, it prevent dehydratation, this way it can last almost a month. And losing cucumber mean you are wasting fuel on all the "processing" and transport.

That said, a change in the process is possible, which prove your point of "individual change is near-impossible and pointless".

Ma8ee7• 3 years ago

How does your cucumber last a month?! In particular cucumbers tend to get bad within a few days for us, which is very frustrating.

jwagenet• 3 years ago

I’ve only ever seen the long, skinny “Persian” cucumbers in plastic and don’t buy them for that reason (maybe I should). Regular “fat” and pickle cucumbers are rarely in plastic, if ever.

rcMgD2BwE72F3• 3 years ago

Gotta learn to eat vegetables in time, maybe?

I get mine weekly from my local farmer and I live in the inner city of Paris. There's zero waste because we only get what he harvests. Each basket covers a week.

tayo42• 3 years ago

you do all your shopping at trader Joe's?

kibwen2• 3 years ago

My Trader Joe's has all sorts of loose (non-wrapped) fruits and veggies.

haswell5• 3 years ago

individual change is both near-impossible and pointless.

I disagree, strongly, for two reasons.

1. Individual change is the only thing most of us can do

2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it

For legislation to ever have a hope, the voting public needs to care enough to put candidates in office who will institute this legislation. I just don’t see how this happens if everyone concludes “there’s nothing I can do”.

I agree that the global impact of my actions aren’t enough on their own to make a difference in terms of actual waste output. But each of our individual actions are collectively a prerequisite to actual legislation.

The actions we each take also influence those around us, which is again a prerequisite to broader awareness and the outcomes this awareness can lead to.

Expecting legislation to solve this while carrying on as usual is washing our hands of responsibility. We need both things to happen.

kwk1• 3 years ago

1. Individual change is the only thing each of us can do
2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it

I don't think the first item is quite right, and the second item even suggests it isn't. I would amend it to say that we can't guarantee anything but individual action (and even that is not certain), but it's far from the only thing we can do.

whatshisface• 3 years ago

I don't think anything can cause people to collect potato sacks from houses except poverty. The rag and bone man is a very low paid hard life and all of these medieval-scale recycling proposals overlook the details of the lives of the people who used to implement them.

klipt• 3 years ago

It seems you're both agreeing that voting with your wallet doesn't help much, but voting with your vote does.

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

The difficulty with the path of trying to elect candidates that promise action on a particular issue is that there are always thousands of issues and no given candidate is likely to support all of your preferences so you have to decide which is more important. If a candidate agrees with you on single use plastics but is in opposition to your views on prison reform, which one do you give more importance? It's just one of the quirks of representative democracy that keeps issues with lower noise from being addressed.

ninkendo3• 3 years ago

2. Legislation won’t happen until enough people care enough to demand it

I can demand legislation to encourage/require behavior that I myself won’t practice in absence of said legislation.

It sounds counterintuitive but it makes sense… by analogy, if I’m a hockey goalie I may have the opinion that goalie pads have gotten too big and the game would be more exciting if they were required to be smaller. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to personally wear smaller goalie pads and put myself at a disadvantage, unless the league requires it.

I’m in favor of laws that reduce single use plastic even if I myself don’t go out of my way to avoid single use plastic. Too many products around me use it, and if I had to pay attention to every product I buy to avoid it, it would be very difficult. But if legislation existed to force companies to avoid making it in the first place, my individual purchasing decisions would remain simple and we’d all benefit.

nox100• 3 years ago

Agreed. It's arguably legislation that added all the traffic signs around SF and it's individuals that decide to ignore all of them. Every time I go out I see cars turning left on Mission between 14th and 28th (no lefts on Mission allowed in that entire section). I see them driving north on Mission through 20th and 16th, both of which have signs and road markings "right turn only". I see them turn right at "no right on red" stop signs, many of which have 3 different signs. A painted sign, a red right arrow, an LED red right arrow with the no circle mark ⊘ over it. They still turn right. There's also 50% of the cyclists on Valencia that go through read lights.

heckraiser2• 3 years ago

A Nobel fringe.

Everyone remember COVID response doing away with bulk bins right?

How can we have a zero waste movement without bulk bins? Hm?

Supply infrastructure is imperative in supporting our way out of the consumertopia waste cycle.

bthallplz• 3 years ago

What's sully infrastructure?

heckraiser2• 3 years ago

*supply :p

rogerkirkness• 3 years ago

I think bioplastic is a much, much better way to solve this than zero waste. We tried to do zero waste and the personal lifestyle overhead expense was near impossible. Have switched most things in the house to bioplastic, way better.

uxp8u61q4• 3 years ago

Bioplastic is still plastic...

tmtvl• 3 years ago

Yes, but it's not made of petrol. Petrol is the main bad thing, not the plastic. Yes, plastic itself also creates problems, but AFAIUI bioplastics are (can be?) more biodegradable than your standard petrol-derived polyethylene (of course that won't be the case if your bioplastic is PE made from ethanol, but that should be self-evident).

Ma8ee7• 3 years ago

Of course it is. And while it is of course is good that we don’t pump more fossil fuels from the ground to us as raw materials, the rest is very much the same as normal plastics. Most isn’t compostable, and some are even harder to recycle (at least in current facilities).

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Figgener fears the public also became too focused on villainizing straws, rather than looking at plastic production itself as the problem.

The information to draw this extremely obvious conclusion was publicly available at the time, and plenty of people were pointing it out. The problem is that saying "stop using plastic straws and shopping bags and you will be a good person" is such an easy thing to tell people who are motivated by guilt that the fact that it's completely ineffective is just not relevant to the conversation.

zoklet-enjoyer• 3 years ago

I thought the straw thing was weird because I don't like straws. Unless you're drinking boba or are disabled, why use a straw?

kibwen2• 3 years ago

This doesn't deserve to be downvoted.

Both of the following can be true simultaneously:

1. Eliminating plastic straws alone won't move the needle when it comes to waste.

2. Plastic straws are entirely unnecessary for the vast majority of people.

Ma8ee7• 3 years ago

I always thought it was planted as a distraction from the questions that really would make a difference. We think about the turtles that don’t have to get plastic straws in their noses while we drive our SUVs from the drive in with the rest of the meals wrapped in different types of plastics.

xnx3• 3 years ago

Zero-waste is a guilting and fetishization of packaging waste at the expensive of other problems. I've seen people fret over recycling yogurt lids, but have zero concern when a cosmetic kitchen remodel generates an entire dumpster full of waste. Throwing things away is only a tragedy in that it is a representation of the shame of how many resources we needlessly wrest from the Earth in the first place.

didntcheck• 3 years ago

What frustrates me the most is how often it manifests as buying new, fashionable bamboo (for example) products and such rather than just reusing an existing item you or your relatives had sitting about, or buying one second hand. It's just more conspicuous consumption clothed in moral fashion

piuantiderp3• 3 years ago

For most it is just an excuse to buy new things. Most ecologically conscious person I know had an old toyota pickup despite being able to afford whatever Tesla or such. He knew the car was a sunk cost

xnx3• 3 years ago

There's so much wisdom in the Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot principle that people don't want to hear.

squidbeak• 3 years ago

I don't disagree your last sentence, but an inconsistent approach of some people in your acquaintance to their resource use and recycling isn't a proof of zero-waste being festishization at the expense of other problems. As if a heaving post-renovation dumpster means we shouldn't be strict about recycling.

xnx3• 3 years ago

True. My concern is that there's a constant flood of environmental news, with almost no attention given to the relative impact of different efforts. There's no conspiracy, but if I was trying to prevent people from making meaningful change, this is what I would do.

cratermoon• 3 years ago

all this individual effort did little to stop the flood of new single-use plastics entering the waste stream every day.

That's the i-Frame "The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray" <https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4046264>

Rather than calling attention to working with what we already have, and simply buying less, it was still grounded in producing and shipping more “things.”

The story called it "consumerism", which again is the i-Frame. The correct word is "capitalism", and the incentives driving it. See "The Gift of Death" https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/

dabber21• 3 years ago

Isn't the problem that companies are not involved in the waste management?

E.g. I remember reading that coca cola used to collect and reuse their glass bottles, but when the plastic bottles were introduced customers could just throw it away and coca cola didn't have to collect and clean them again.

Introduce a deposit system and if you wrap stuff in plastic put some tax on it for waste management

Ma8ee7• 3 years ago

That is how it works in Sweden. The companies are responsible for collecting and recycling the packaging materials.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Also single use plastic have two upsides. Glass bottles are heavy. And washing them to food standard is expensive and consumes lot of energy. Water used with lye is at 80C...

nextworddev• 3 years ago

Greenwashing moved onto AI washing

gsky• 3 years ago

I have a minimalist for more than a decade. The hardest part is convincing others to become more environment friendly. I couldn't change even one person.

I mind my own business and don't give a shit what happens to the world

Tarsul• 3 years ago

you are first and foremost responsible with how you live your own life, not how others live theirs. However, how you live does change the life of others around you (however miniscule it may be). Thus, you did the most important thing and that's respectable. A single person might not change the world but anyhow can make the world a better place.

ericfrazier• 3 years ago

Let's invest in foreign landfills to stop getting plastics into the rivers and oceans, where this stuff gets dumped in countries that lack landfill infrastructure.

Whatever happened to the zero waste movement?

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