• Butterbee (She/Her)@beehaw.org
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    5 days ago

    It was always an empty gesture designed from the start to put the onus on the general population so that plastic could still be produced and sold at ever increasing rates without any responsibility for its outcome. This is also why the least effective part of reduce, reuse, recycle was always emphasized.

    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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      5 days ago

      That entire motto is a distraction, so that corporations can whinge about consumers not doing “their part”.

      And don’t forget, corporations are also encouraging people not to reduce purchases, and designing their products such that reusing is either impossible (good luck reusing a torn potato chip bag), infeasible, or even dangerous.

      Recycle is just the final, catch-all lie at the end. It only works for very specific types of plastics, and even then usually can only be done an astonishingly few number of times.

      As the article notes,

      the recycling push has encouraged consumers to accept wasteful packaging, particularly plastics, when forcing the use of more biodegradable material would have been a less damaging course of action.