this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Idk why this got heated this fast, but I'd like to add a normal argument point:
Compared to how much pollution any large scale company makes to even a housing complex, the housing is marginal. You don't even need to think in battery factories, just regular ol' warehouses. The amount of plastic they throw out, just to sit somewhere else, is orders of magnitude greater than me packaging my groceries in two bags.
While I could use one plastic bag less a day, sure, but if a warehouse throws out like 2 pallet's worth of it a day, it's nothing comparatively!
The argument is valid, that I am also in the statistics. However, why should I reduce the quality of my life if anyone who matters in the statistics just simply doesn't care?
It's from another thread, dude followed me. He got banned there.
But absolutely agree. The context of my original discussion was surrounding corporations saying consumers are to blame for climate change, which is obviously wrong. Corporations blocking tech advancement to green alternatives, and corruption of governments for profit is the root issue.
I was teasing out a specific point of they made all that shit for us. The stuff on the pallets wrapped in that plastic is for us. My only point was that we all consume, we are the end of the line. We need to recognize that although the magnitude is very different, we are a variable in the equation.
It's important to check ignorance via internalization of negative externalities.
You might find my opinion on personal responsibility wrong, and that's fine. I'm just out here trying to consume less, and acknowledge my impact. (And shared my opinion on an open forum).
You are right that the companies do what they do because we buy their stuff. But they do it in a way that is not enviroment friendly.
What I mean is, whatever happens there will be shops, and there will be a way shipment gets to them, and there will be a place where the cargo gets stored, and there will be a place where the products come from, and a there will be a source where the materials come from and go into the factory.
We only impact the last part, all the way from the tree in a forest to a shelf in a store we have no impact. It was packaged & unpackaged an unhealty number of times, it produced waste that we don't even know about. Now, imo the problem is that these big corps don't even consider wasting a dollar to recycle anything. if it's cheaper (by any margin) to buy it again, it will be bought again, and the used, well, thrown out (into the ocean, or burnt idk). By the time it comes to me deciding between a paper/plastic/bio-plastic(?) bag it doesn't matter. And the argument that we are the problem because we are still buying it is invalid, because you just simply have to buy food (for example).
I get it tho, if a billion humans all use up 1 plastic bags a day, that's still 1b plastic bags/day. However, think about the plastic (and everything else) that was used to get that product to the shelfs, even the bags themselves.