Yeah, I spent some money on nice re-usable bags, and have liked how much easier they are to use.
I do like to get plastic bags every now and again, because I use them as garbage bags for the kitty litter can.
Yep, our outside cat is inconsistent about his litter box usage(suddenly more consistent now that there’s snow) and it’s really nice to be able to just use a small plastic grocery bag for cleaning that. So I guess it’s good that I’m still awful at remembering to bring in the reusable bags that live in the back of my car.
Aldi also doesn’t have single use plastic bags. Bring your own or pay for the decent paper or reusable plastic bags they have for sale at the checkout.
This is a failing of mine as well, I don’t know how many times I somehow end up forgetting to bring them with me. Gonna add it to my list of things that I need to improve on this year.
Reusable bags are great, but everything you put in the bag is packaged in plastic!
One thing about a lot of reusable bags is that lots of them are still made of plastic, and they use as much plastic as like 1000 of the cheap ones.
Yeah. They’ve phased out plastic grocery bags in Ontario, but to my eye it hasn’t had much impact on plastic going to the recycling or garbage. I used to use them for smaller garbage receptacles around the house but since my stash of old plastic grocery bags is depleted, I’m not buying purpose-made bags for that.
Kids toys these days seem like the worst. Little bits of plastic to play with, out-weighted 10:1 with plastic packaging and “mystery” wrapping.
One of the more depressing things I’ve heard recently is that oil companies are predicting an increase in the use of electric vehicles in the future. Good, right? Well, the oil companies still have to sell their stuff somewhere, so they’re engaging in a global lobbying effort to get people to make more stuff out of plastic.
We’re doomed.
Perhaps capitalism is the Great Filter.
Blaming capitalism seems like a common knee-jerk response. I’m not saying capitalism isn’t the root of many evils, but what’s the better realistic alternative?
Let’s make everything out of metal and wood, like God intended!
I feel like there’s a median response between “use all disposable plastics for everything” and “make everything out of metal and wood”
Well, it’s clear that packaging decisions are made on the basis of direct cost rather than on the basis of externalities, isn’t it? So in this case it’s the right thing to blame?
I was kind of joking.
Wouldn’t a solution be to use things like biodegradable plastics for lots of stuff?
Or even paper, or plant-based packaging. Or good old glass or aluminum, for processed foods.
It was a specific poke/joke at what JoshL just posted about the oil companies. They must maintain if not increase profit margins, so if EVs are gaining in popularity then it means a global lobbying effort into making even more plastic, environment and human health (potentially) be damned.
At least locally there was a push for reusable bags - Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) even enacted a plastic bag ban! - but COVID did a number on that initiative. Many stores at the time even banned reusables and I suspect it’s been hard to get back into the habit of bringing them again.
Most of my groceries are either from a local farm share or Costco so I’m doing what I can. Unfortunately as mentioned a lot of these products are packaged in plastic regardless of grocery bag usage.
I guess, though I feel like it’s moot without a reasonable alternative. Overpopulation is probably our biggest problem, but the remedy seems problematic. Capitalism has lots of benefits in addition to its problems. I think it’s worth spending lots of effort mitigating its problems, but I’m not convinced there’s a better viable economic system out there for large scale human cultures.
Maybe there’s a version of capitalism where robber barons aren’t allowed to take the Earth’s resources and then make the public pay for the resulting environmental damage.
But as far as I know, it hasn’t been discovered yet.
But there is the version that’s raised the standard of living for billions of people.
I mean, that is the rub. Capitalism is broken at the core. It rewards min-maxing to a degree that in the late stages all there is left is exploitation of a class below you to enrich yourself. It is designed to reward this.
You are either exploiting someone, or being exploited (and in most cases, both).
I saw in Hamilton Nolan’s most recent newsletter, that he pointed out that every pay raise you get is an admission of guilt. The money was always there to pay you more, they just decided not to give it to you. He is speaking mostly about the recent raises in plants that are now seeing unionization efforts.
The answer, of course, is that the money was already there. Your boss was just taking it instead of giving it to you. This is the simple but critical point that we all should chew on. Because when you chew on it, the flavor of revolution leaks out into your gums, real sweet. Every celebration of a union’s hard-fought gains in a strike or in bitter contract negotiations should be accompanied by an equal and opposite condemnation of the company itself for making its own valued “team members” go through such a struggle just to get what was clearly there all along.
By exploiting the other billions of people below them?
The fact that, when during a recent podcast, we were perusing the “Combos” flavors webpage, and I scrolled down past “flavor blasted taco tortilla” to see a disclaimer about their “anti-slavery” policies tells you everything you need to know about late stage capitalism. Someone, is always getting fucked, it is how the system works.