I recently visited China, to meet my wife’s extended family.
Let me tell you, the sheer amount of single-use plastics that are consumed by any individual throughout a regular day in a metropolitan environment, is absolutely and mind-numbingly depressing.
Given that there are 1.3b people there, and that no matter how much we in the US/AU/EU reduce/reuse/recycle - we will never be able to truly offset that sheer amount of plastic pollution produced.
Now I’m not saying this to be a doomer, but more-so to say that individuals can’t enact sufficient change to save this planet, we need Government and corporate incentives to shift towards sustainable alternatives, and punitive policies to disincentivise plastic production globally.
plastic waste per capita: the US is at top(if we exclude small island nations)
plastic waste in absolute terms: the US is not far behind China, with India at a distant third place.the reduction is plastic waste generation in China is far more than that of US1.
so, what I mean to say is that more people ≠more pollution. but I do agree that the problem is to be tackled with active participation of the government, which won't be there because of muh economy.
[1]: By 2016, China's overall plastic waste production had fallen to 21.60 million tons, a reduction of nearly 28 million tons (for comparison, U.S. production fell less than 4 tons during the same time period). Moreover, despite being one of the largest overall producers of plastic waste, China's per capita production of plastic waste was one of the lowest in the world in 2016 at 15.6 kilograms a year per person.
Nice!!
Lots of places in the US won't recycle the supposedly "recyclable" plastics, it ends up in a landfill regardless of what you do. I remember all the educational initiatives about the importance of recycling when I was a kid. Turns out it was all just propaganda to make us feel responsible for problems caused by corporations.
Given that there are 1.3b people there
The majority of Chinese residents don't live in metro zones, work office jobs, and eat fast food, though.
Also, very common to find reusable metal straws (and cups and utensils) outside the US. Korea and Japan both overwhelmingly favor washable utensils, as do cities south of the US border (I stopped seeing disposables once I got outside Mexico City proper and I never saw them in Jamaica or Cozemel outside the airport/seaport). There are zero disposables in Havana. The very idea is alien to them.
Something like 60%+ of China is urban. The majority definitely live in urban areas.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/278566/urban-and-rural-population-of-china/
Oh man that's a drop in the bucket compared to medical/industrial/commercial plastic waste lol.
I did the ambulance thing for a bit. CPR calls, the back of the ambulance, despite being covered in fluids, looked like a recycling center. And none of it gets recycled, obviously, all just gets red bagged or containered. Everything is individually wrapped, and for obvious reasons, but I'd have days where I could match my family's plastic use for the week or more in 12 hours.
notice how they wrote billionaire and not Taylor, very good
I didn't make that meme myself but I debated changing it to something Taylor Swift related for a moment, but then I thought that horse was pretty much dead already so I just left it as it is. She's certainly not the only one doing this sort of stuff.
Implicitly includes Taylor though, she's not off the hook
Just all the others are also on the hook now
Sure it does, but we should ask why she became the meme and not any of the other billionaires, who are overwhelmingly white men.
It's like when I pointed out to my kid that the Karen meme is pretty sexist, they pointed out that there's also Ken. And I asked them, in all the meme compilations they watch, how many Kens are there for every ten Karens? They said, "maybe 2 or 3." I pointed out that that imbalance is the problem, and they were like, "oooohh yeah."
A 10 year old gets this when it's explained to them simply. Anyone who pretends they don't get this is covering for something they don't want to admit.
Taylor on the way to, ah forget it.
There's something about having a lot of money that makes you hate mother nature. It's weird.
Taylor Swifts private jet/boat circling the globe to pick up her boyfriend
i really do not understand where this idea that plastic has something to do with the climate came from, how do people imagine that to work?
No, the point of not using plastic is to not have plastics blowing around on the street for 50 years before it's degraded into microplastics that instead enter our bodies.
Oil is processed into polymers and has plasticizers added to it to become a drinking straw, a process that emits mucho carbon.
Honestly, I'm just sick of picking it up on my local beach. That and plastic bags. I'm sick of picking up plastic bags.
Some materials have higher carbon emissions than others, in terms of refinement, processing, and transportation. The third point is location dependant, but creating and shaping different materials will have different contributions to global warming.
Edit: There are also concerns with the product's end of lifespan. How long it takes to biodegrades, how easily recyclable it is, and how much the available disposal methods will effect the environment. Plastic is not great on several of these accounts. Recycling plastic water bottles isn't very efficient either, compared to glass bottles for instance.
Someone always says this. Predictable now.
Plastic is made from oil that is pumped up from the earth. This oil contains carbon that eventually gets released into the atmosphere.
The climate change is caused by carbon that is pumped up from the earth and released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Do you have enough imagination to see any kind of connection?
Also fuck bamboo straws and other paper straws filled with PFAS. just use a normal straw or none at all
I was recently served a long macaroni as a straw in a restaurant. It was honestly amazing how well it worked! At no point it was mushy and there's nothing in it that I wouldn't eat with my pasta dish anyway.
I use my own metal straw and it works great
Despite very limited usage, metal straws have caused major injuries including fatalities. Turns out having a metal stick pointed at all sorts of sensitive soft tissue is a risk.
Meanwhile, if using your own straw with a restaurants disposable cup, hardly helps since the cup is still being waste. If using it with reusable cups, it won't save you from any sanitation issues, since the drink is right in contact with the container. It may be useful for sanitation reasons with a can, but again, the can is disposable. Even if you recycle it, the coating on the inside and the paint on the outside probably are about as much as the plastic straw you spared.
Taylor Swift needs to relax her Triangle of Sadness.
The thing is billionaires will always use more resources than you. They will have more stuff. It'll have more houses. They will have boats, private planes, huge mansions, and more money than they know what to do with. They will always use more resources than you. If your whole statement is we shouldn't try to solve global warming because some people are rich, and we're doomed to all die. And by the way, The billionaires will have a nice air-conditioned bunker while the rest of us die.
I'm all for trying to solve wealth inequality, but it shouldn't get in the way of solving a major environmental disaster.
If your whole statement is we shouldn't try to solve global warming because some people are rich
I don't think that's what they're saying at all. Any solution to climate change is incomplete if it doesn't also address inequality and overconsumption
Not just incomplete. You probably need to start with inequality. 25% of global emissions are created by the richest 1%. 50% by the richest 10%
Well, I can't help but notice it's mostly those billionaires and the people who work for them who are telling us there's a climate issue and WE need to solve it while they continue to fly everywhere on their private jets and buy more waterfront mansions they tell us will be underwater in 10 years.
So IDK man... I'm certainly not a climate scientist but something doesn't add up here.
More people than billionaires are telling you there's a climate issue. Scientists are, normal people are, etc. It's the biggest environmental issue of our lifetimes. And there are some celebrities that are also trying to use their popularity to promote the message to get the government to create a set of rules that will actually impact out much CO2 we're putting into our atmosphere. The right-wing talking heads have found that it's really effective to point at them and say "LOOK! They have big houses! They fly around in private jets! They use more resources that 100 of you normal folks, therefore we shouldn't do anything."
The reality is that they're using more resources than 100 of us normal folks, but there are 100k of us normal folks to each of them so we make a much more significant impact on the climate than they do. And yes, lets make the laws affect them also. But the "they're flying around in jets" talking point is lame. They're going to be flying around in jets no matter what. They're going to have big houses no matter what. So lets make them have lots of solar panels on their big houses or make flying around in private jets more expensive. That's just a reason to make the laws affect them also, it's NOT a reason to do nothing and let the world burn.
I don't know if all these recent jet memes are people just joking around or are you people actually convinced private jets are the problem?
Taylor swift, and every single billionaire alive could be flying 24/7/365 OR NOT and it would make absolutely no difference to fighting climate change.
The main polluters are industry and farming.
All this other shit around are just distractions keeping you from actually going after the people that are causing our crisis.
I don't know if it's astroturfing or what, but it seems like it's deliberate manipulation to keep people inactive.
You memeing on Tylor or using wood straws, or recycling your soda can does fuck all. A single paper plant will dump out so much co2 and pollution that will negate the effort of millions.
Well, none of that matters anyways when China now emits almost twice as much CO2 as the US and is basically single-handedly not just absorbing all the rest of the world's reduction efforts, but increasing the global output enormously.
Double the emissions for 4 times the people? Damn that's pretty efficient in comparison.
the data you shared only shows half the picture. if you take into account cumulative emissions, the US isn't doing any good. it's responsible fit a quarter of emissions to date.
source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions
A lot of it is political at end of day.
Taylor Swift is looking to be a supporter of the Democratic Party in US, so the Republicans are running targeted attacks on her to reduce credibility as the election is coming up.
It's nothing new but just be aware that people posting these memes may just be bots/paid marketers essentially.
Yep. I’m all for limiting waste, but we never should’ve gotten rid of plastic straws. Paper straws DO NOT WORK. It’s as simple as that.
I’ve resorted to carrying my own straws these days, just so I don’t have to use soggy paper.
And frankly, I doubt getting rid of plastic straws had any effect anyway. They claimed here it was to protect sea turtles. I live four hours from the ocean. Unless a sea turtle knows how to use public transport, they’re not likely to get near my straw. Especially since I actually put it in the recycling bin anyway.
