Memes

Also I don't know about you, but my countries recycling relied on sending it all to China to burn.

dustsv hands yep my work here is done

Recycling is a lie to keep making plastic, nothing more

Ancestors?

It will probably be an alien species who will find a dead planet and wonder how and why so much toxic material was spread around the planet .... and also wonder why there is an orbiting space station filled with gold, paper money and the greyed out decaying bodies of a humanoid species.

the fact that we did nothing unless there was a profit in it.

who are "we"?
I'm not profiting, are you?
Those who already have all the money and power are, don't even let the focus slip from them.

Many of us do it for sport tbh. A healthier way to gamify life sorta. I've been vegan since 2015/16 and it does increase the difficulty setting somewhat, but also it's unlocked a million fun mini games for me along the way and provided much needed community.

It's absolutely not helpless to change your habits. All our consumption is based on collective habits, and changing them will have an effect.

What if that small change In made was assasinating billionaires (sorry, PragerU, people with means) in my spare time instead of just playing Hitman?

Does one person saying that they voted for change in the government make you incredibly, deeply sad? Just one vote in millions after all. Little things can collectively add up to something big.

It is actually a deliberate corp strategy. Plastic straws were never a real concern, save for that ONE turtle. Plastic straw make such a negligible amount of plastic waste that stop using it will have virtually zero measurable impact in amount of plastic waste we create. All it ever was intended for was to make us feel like something was being done while doing absolutely nothing.

That's not to say all plastic reduction initiatives are pointless. But the straws definitely belong in the least environmentally impactful category.

Nothing beats collection of beer/cola can's pull tabs for recycling competition at schools. That forces children to ask parents to buy more of the six packs so that they could have the tabs.

You're treating it like a hypothetical but that is in fact exactly what's going on.

Corporations and the politicians they own are hyperfocused on (relativee to centralised) inefficient end user recycling and regular people taking responsibility for the environment and climate change to distract from the fact that maybe 95%+ of it are the fault of corporations, not their customers.

Even consumer waste is many times worse than it would be if companies didn't for example use all that plastic and design electronics to become obsolete if functional at all in as little as a single year just to squeeze as much money out while spending as little as possible.

Again Apple: We're making everything irrepairable.

fun fact. modern planes consume ~3-4l per 100 passengers per km or 3-4l per passenger per 100km.

efficient ICE cars consume ~6l per passenger per 100km.

add to that, that there's basically no good alternative to fast very long distance or cross-continent transport

One plane flight a year? What if I want to return home the same year?

I feel like this is a whoosh. The environmental impact of our collective straw use is so insignificant compared to the effects of so many other things. The fact that people focus on straws is just evidence that the average person has no idea what to do, in order to decrease their environmental impact and will also complain about the mildest of inconveniences.

I don't use straws at all, but this isn't really the point. There are much more impactful ways to reduce your carbon footprint like biking, walking, public transport, but all this pales in comparison in the massive environmental pollutions that billionaires and corporations do to our waterways and air.

You don't solve this by just recycling harder - you solve this with legislative intervention to minimise packaging, ban private jets, retire fossil fuels, and stop massive food waste.

Pointing your finger at the masses and demanding they muster the will to change enough that entire supply chains are forced to retool entirely is naiive to the point of stupidity - people will go for cost and convenience just as predictably as companies will burn down the world for an extra dollar. The systemic change makes that shift quickly and (for the consumer) easy.

Bollocks! If every private jet is grounded there's no amount of paper straws that can match that impact.

There's still individual changes that impact more than the collective ones!