The fact that it’s the consumer’s responsibility to sort their waste and to try and minimise its impact on the environment in the first place is completely wrong to me.
Most people in urban areas rely on stores for basic survival, and the vast majority of products we buy there come with unnecessary waste. It doesn’t make any sense to then tell these people “by the way, you’d better clean up that mess when you’re done because it’s bad for the environment”. If governments were truly concerned or willing to act, this waste wouldn’t make it into our homes in the first place.
If a company wants to sell a product, they should be held accountable for the waste that comes along with it. They should have to prove that they can reuse the waste and be incentivised to reduce it. If they can’t, they can’t operate.
Ecocide laws need to become commonplace, and the consumer should not be responsible for their waste if they haven’t got legitimate alternative options. I understand this community is more willing to do their part in this regard, but I don’t think it’ll ever be feasible to expect this from the wider population. We need to stem the flow, not just handle the mess.
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Imagine if you could go to the store with reusable containers and fill them up with foodstuffs. I eat a lot of beans, I could just fill up a bunch of sacks or cannisters at a dispensary rather than buy all these cans and bags. Need soap? Just go to the soap dispensary and fill up a jug. Etc. Etc.
I’m imagining this rather often.🥹 Going to the store with our reusable containers and filling them with what we need (~ideally in a moneyless society)
There was a shop like this at the last town I lived in. I’d always leave with an absurd volume of things for the amount of money I spent.
There used to be a few shops like this in Norway! Came to my town after I moved to Denmark, but I think they went bankrupt. At least, the shop is not in my old hometown anymore.
Unfortunately these types of dedicated shops tend to be expensive - at least this has been the case for the soap dispensaries I’ve been to. Until they’re more widely adopted, I guess that problem won’t go away. It’s an unfortunate paradox! I’d love for governments (or benevolent rich folks) to subsidise businesses like these so they can appeal to a broader audience.
For sure! However these are conscious choices that informed consumers can make. What I’d love to see is a world where an uninformed consumer can choose default products that have no impact on the environment because the government has made it so. No additional effort is required on the part of the consumer.
Want foodstuffs? Those are purchasable by weight and if you need a container they’re cardboard or glass. Want soap? The store stocks bars of it or liquid by weight.
I did not mean to imply that consumers should have a choice. They can go to the refillable bean dispensary and they’ll like it.
Haha, I like your style!
Retiring plastic packaging (e.g. blister packs) wherever possible in favor of cardboard or other biodegradable alternatives would be a huge step in the right direction. The amount of plastic waste from basic things that don’t require it is pretty ridiculous. There’s no reason that a tool (for example) needs to be packaged in plastic. It doesn’t even need packaging in the first place in most cases.
good thing that’s exactly what the EU recently legislated for :)
Another win for the EU! Forcing Apple to adopt USB Type C was such a huge triumph also.
We need packaging minimisation legislation that requires manufacturers to minimise packaging to an absolute minimum both in terms of sheer volume but also in terms of material complexity meaning no gluing together plastic and paper or fused metal plastic wrapping where it is not needed. And finally minimising the packaging also inadvertently means you cannot make bottles weird shapes to fool you into thinkng the bottle is bigger than it actually is, because that means unnecessary material was wasted
100%
At a minimum, if a company wants to use a certain type of packaging for their products, they need to prove that they have the means to fully reuse it as part of their own mini circular economy. If their packaging is found at the beach, it can be placed into a bin, sorted and sent right back to them, and they’re happy to receive it.
Even better of all packing is 100% natural compostable in the first place so of it ever ends op in nature it’ll be gone before you even find it.
Sometime in the past year or so I started wondering aloud about the amount of paper and plastic packaging that was thrown into bins by the checkout in my local supermarket. Pretty much any outer wrapper or carton that would have an inner sealed bag/box.
I genuinely didn’t understand what was going on, as I never saw other customers unpack and discard all this. A kind mastodon user then told me about a movement to put the burden of excessive packaging back on the shop rather than consumers:
By unpacking double packaged goods and discarding the outer box/wrapper in the supermarket’s bins, these shoppers make visible to the staff and (ideally) owner that this is superfluous and unwanted materials, and BTW you get to throw it out now.
I haven’t managed to track down any other information about this sort of everyday activism, but I think it’s an appealing way to protest the amount of waste going into our homes on a daily basis.
