"Other people don't so why should I."
This meme is terrible.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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The point is to speak up and demand change. The disposition of blame (or the disproportionate onus of responsibility) should frustrate everyone.
There's a great video on this topic.
Where I live, they don't pick up green waste. You have to take all of that to the dump and pay a good amount of money to throw your green waste in with the trash.
It's absolutely bullshit.
start composting, and turn that green waste into green money (or food)
Can't you just put your green waste in the trash?
Yeah, I tried that. They refused to pick up the trash that week and they gave me a nasty little letter.
I'd just get a sort of grinder and grind it all into a paste. Sort through it bitches.
Wtf are they gonna do? Take me to the trash court?
And if they do, I'll dry the paste into solid chunks and throw it specificaly at their mamas
How about we start shipping recyclables back to the company that made them to recycle them?
you know those little dots on the bottom of glass bottles? they shave one off every time it's recycled. whether it goes back to the original manufacturer or not, idk. but you can occasionally get recycled bottles with your drink.
they shave one off every time it’s recycled
I suppose in this case, you would call it "reused"?
They are probably cleaned with boiling water and some chemicals before being refilled.
By "recycling", I would normally think of melting and reforming.
Yes, but the main issue is how mixed the materials are in our consumables. Mixed recycling is basically bullshit. We should have more standardized packaging and more categories of separation strictly enforced. Japan does this pretty well.
You could opt in to pay extra for sorting if you can afford it sure.
And emissions need to be better taxed, and illegal dumping and discharge into rivers and such a jailable crime with big fines for businesses with accountability going right up the chain to investors.
Japan’s ultra-organized and visible garbage separation is mostly for show and establishing “social harmony.” 80% of their municipal waste is thrown into incinerators- the highest of all countries in the OECD.
That's a result of Tokyo and the other biggest cities only separating into recyclable bottles, non-recyclable or non-burnable material (i.e. inorganics) and all the rest which is as you say incinerated.
They also have some, if not the most clean burning incenerators in the world, and they use the waste material for construction and land reclamation.
Burning plastics at very high temperatures is far more environmentally friendly than sending them to landfills or attempting to recycle them.
Nevertheless they are known for excess packaging and obviously my arguments about standardization still apply to Japan as much as anyone else.
Japan is also very short on space which i think is a major factor in why they use incinerators more than traditional landfills.
The UK Government are taking steps to address this, whilst also charging the companies for the material they use as well as charging extra if it’s a mix. The situation is currently a mess with the rules being different only a mile down the road, so even just to have some standardisation is appreciated.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/simpler-recycling-household-recycling-in-england
Washington State does this well too. Almost every bin you see, from downtown Seattle to upstate near Victoria to Mount Rainier, everything is separated by trash, metal, and paper
liberal climate action in a nutshell
it's hard when no true left party can get any attention and fucking centrists are all that's left
Doesn't help with the centrists either claim they're the left or think doing anything is too far left 😭
Hopefully AOC will out shumer (sic) and we can make a start at it
Sorting your trash is the human equivalent of planting a tree, and it's especially valuable if you have/teach children. It's a small activity that helps to build better habits and mindsets.
It won't change the world today, but it will build a foundation for changing the world tomorrow.
This reminds me of something I was commenting about yesterday.
Focus on your immediate environment first, and make your little corner of the world better before you worry about saving the universe.
And like you said, it is a habit and mindset thing. If you plant a tree in your yard or in your community, no it will not save the rain forest, but your mental health and physical health and living conditions will all be slightly better off than they were before it.
If you start intentionally working in these positive actions that provide tiny incremental improvements, before you know it you may be feeling more than incrementally better.
If you start intentionally working in these positive actions that provide tiny incremental improvements, before you know it you may be feeling more than incrementally better.
some of those positive actions and changes can be really fun, too. sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're going to enjoy something before you dive into it, especially when the brain is in misery mode.
It's a small change that everyone can make for themselves, and for their piece of mind. This shouldn't feel like a chore - and even more so a particular blame we take on from the big corpos.
Doing what's technically right is what will change the world - even if our enemy is a corpo cartel.
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Dont forget about paper straws!!!!
I know this isn't the point, but I do like to carry a set of portable cutlery around and often use it eating out. It's usually a smallish case with metal straw(s), chopsticks, a knife, spoon, fork. Which one time lead to me forgetting my metal straw at the restaurant of course...
I’ve got a similar set.
Fun fact; you can get a set of like 12 metal straws pretty cheap, and at least the set I got came with silicone mouthpieces, so if you forget one somewhere you can just throw a new one in!
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Regular recycling isn't even an option where I live. You can literally only get a regular trash container. Sticks/leaves etc they'll take if you bring it to a center but there's no collection for that either.
I just do it to help the people that makes a buck recollecting re-usable garbage like plastic bottles and plastic stuff in general
It's not bad to do. We probably even need to be doing it.
It's just like putting a band-aid on a papercut while the three inch radius hole in your chest sprays blood
Yes it's true, but to me it's not mind, time or physically consuming to throw on the right bin
Yeah if it's exactly zero effort it's fine, but asking others or shaming them for not is counterproductive.
Unless you think you can somehow reason with billionaires¹ there us precisely one way out and we need to stop pretending anything else will help until that is done.
If you are not a killer, you are not helping the climate.
¹you can't. People have tried and it did not go well. That's why we have such a bunker boom!)
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