Comment by WorldMaker
2 days ago
Reminder that corporations spent a ton of money on propaganda to make us all believe individual sacrifices can have a noticeable impact when the largest offenders are all corporate. Even if everyone reduced their personal carbon footprint by avoiding meat/dairy and the industrial cattle farms mysteriously disappeared overnight, that's still a drop in the overall greenhouse gas emission problem. Also note that "everyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence and also means collective effort is required to make the change noticeable/effective rather than individual efforts.
Collective action is what matters. Corporate regulation is what matters. An enhanced EPA with real enforcement powers (not just fines, but the ability to shut down companies and/or outright murder them; which is also a larger debate because right now Americans generally don't believe in corporate murder and think corporations have a right to indefinitely exist) is what is necessary.
It is because of our selfishness, but also our selfishness extends to not working together in enough solidarity and instead fingerpointing at individuals to "do their part, alone, and without support systems and systemic change". That's pretty selfish, too. We need systemic change. We need support systems. We need a government that prioritizes the environment and our collective health and well-being. We need companies to understand that ethics matter as much as profits and if they cannot find profits that are ethical, including and especially in relationship to their externalities like greenhouse gas emissions, then they do not deserve to make those profits and may not deserve to continue operation as a company.
Me in Europe: 5 different bins on 5 days of the week for all the different types of recycling.
Me in USA: insert John Travolta looking around meme consumer recycling is practically unheard of in large parts of the country.
There are US states that are very deep into multi-stream recycling with 5 or 6 different bins. (Most of them are on the West Coast.)
There's an interesting debate on single-stream versus multi-stream recycling and its perverse incentives. Multi-stream recycling is more labor efficient, so in some cases more profitable, pushing labor to the unpaid consumer so that fewer laborers are needed at the recycling plants. Multi-stream recycling is often less efficient at overall recycling. Improperly sorted items are more likely to end up in landfills when the specialized recycling plant is an entirely different company with its own delivery schedule and process, versus a single-stream company that has to sort everything anyway.
In a somewhat surprising twist, some of the most efficient recyclers are the landfill companies themselves. Landfills take up space and don't produce income on their own. Finding any things that are recyclable and resellable is sometimes big profit. Sorting work is thus incentivized as profit growth. There are cities investigating going truly "single stream" again for all trash and continuing to incentivize the landfill companies to grow their recycling sorting processes.
Not only is that itself an illustration that companies need to be incentivized to do the right thing more than people need to be incentivized to do extra labor that result in less efficient outcomes, but it is also another example of how certain corporation's propaganda pushed the narrative from corporate action to consumer action.
The original lesson plan in the 1990s designed by some smart teachers was the Three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They were put in this order specifically because they are in order of importance. Debates on if we are doing enough our own individual parts for Recycling have already lost the battle on how much corporations are helping us to Reuse things rather than recycle them, and better yet, to Reduce the number of things we need to even consider reusing or recycling or trashing. Both reduce and reuse require more collective action. They require companies to work outside of the "single use" box. Single use is more profitable, because it sells more single use things.
Thank god for that. I can’t imagine spending more of my limited lifespan doing more busy work
Why do the corporations pollute so much? Is it just for the love of the game?
To some extent, yes, it is deeply for the love of the game: planned obsolescence, single use products, nothing built to last, "razor blades and ink cartridges" where worse user experiences sell more products, intentional over-production to drive over-consumption through consequent demand for artificially low priced goods ("the Wal-Mart effect"), and so forth.
If we don't find ways to price in externalities into the markets and/or the regulations, companies find ways to push things to externalities to cut corners and artificially increase sales and/or profits or have easy ways to market "cheaper" products versus better quality products.
You may want to point fingers at the demand side, but even the most basic, simplified micro-economics is all about how supply-and-demand is a complex dance, supply has more tools up its sleeve than it seems, and a lot more control than demand. Consumers can demand more durable, more reliable products until they are blue in the face, but suppliers are free to just not supply them because cutting corners makes more profits and somewhat happy return customers are more profitable than a very satisfied one-and-done-for-life customer.
> planned obsolescence, single use products, nothing built to last
Planned obsolescence is a conspiracy theory and there’s no evidence of it occurring at any kind of broad scale.
Consumers generally prefer cheaper, less durable products, which is why the market adapted to better fit that preference.