| ▲ | blueflow 18 hours ago |
| > pieces of plastic that they collected during clean-up events The article is about trash from littering. Surely the consumers fault. |
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| ▲ | CaptainFever 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I agree with you, I think this is primarily an issue with selfish people littering the environment. I didn't like how the article framed it as a "companies are littering" thing, as if it's factory waste. Though... I also agree with the GP. It seems to be too hard to educate or enforce littering laws on consumers (edit: in some countries. Some other countries like Japan have better non-littering cultures). It might be easier to mandate things like biodecomposable plastic or... glass? That would be less harmful even if disposed of improperly. (How else are we going to get sweet drinks? Drink dispensers and enforced personal bottles?) |
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| ▲ | willvarfar 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | When I was young and playing in wasteland we often came across broken glass bottles etc. Very dangerous. They were also regularly blamed as the source of wild fires. | | |
| ▲ | strogonoff 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Some people may disagree that the chance of your child taking a cut from glass while playing in an area with sharp glass debris is a milder option than your child having microplastic with all its xenoestrogens and other disruptors accumulating in body since before being born[0], especially considering that 1) not all glass pieces are sharp and 2) plastic can be sharp enough to cut your skin as well (I personally have received cuts, deep enough to spill blood, from plastic—as an adult), but to me the choice would be clear. Too bad I don’t get to make that choice—the ship has sailed and all we can do is try to clean up the existing mess and stop generating more of it. [0] https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/199/1/81/7609801?log... | | |
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| ▲ | esperent 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Surely the consumers fault. Finding fault is not the same thing as finding a solution. Does it get us in any way closer to a solution if we blame the company, the consumers, or both, or neither? I don't think so. |
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| ▲ | lupusreal 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Littering is a solvable problem though; it's a cultural practice and can therefore be addressed. For instance, in Japan there are very few public trash cans (ever since a terrorist attack which used them) and yet almost nobody there litters. If Japanese people can hold onto their trash until they find a trash can, everybody else can to. We need to greenlight the kind of social pressures which create this sort of conscientious culture, namely intense bullying of anybody who is caught littering. | | |
| ▲ | esperent 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If Japanese people can hold onto their trash until they find a trash can, everybody else can to. Perhaps you're right, but, living in a south east Asian country where trash is a major problem that goes far beyond simple littering, I think that will take several decades to change and we should look for something quicker. There was a storm here yesterday and literally several tons of trash washed up onto the beach, as it does most days during the stormy season. This can't be classed as littering, it's a problem far far bigger than asking people to put things into bins. Much of the trash on the beach probably was thrown into a bin at some point. The problem is what happens after that. Western countries ship their "recycling" off to developing countries, and when it ends up in the sea they get to say it wasn't their fault, while developing countries just don't bother with the plausible deniability step. |
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| ▲ | gaiagraphia 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Foreign companies with armies of staff, nation state resources, and global scale have a responsibility to leave the world in a better place. If not, what's the point of them operating? If their goods are being used irresponsibly, they have a responsibility to educate those they manipulate into consuming their slop, and to develop systems to ensure that those who opt out of their nonsense aren't affected by the negative externalities of their operations. |
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| ▲ | panick21_ 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Costumers are responsive to many things. Littering happens far more often when there aren't convenient options. And people also litter more, if things are already a mess. So you can do a lot to reduce littering. The US figured that out themselves with highways. |
