Hi Lemmy,
I’m organising a funeral, and one of the ideas that has come up is for people to write memories on a balloon and let them go. However, I’ve also heard that they often end up in trees etc and are terrible for the environment.
Is there such a thing as environmentally safe balloons? Other suggestions are also welcome.
That’s the thing, you usually don’t have that choice. Sure, you can often bring your own containers to buy food. You can also use reusable bags for groceries shopping. You also don’t need those stupid tiny plastic bags for vegetables and fruits. But the impact is very low.
No industry can operate without processing and using plastics and they’re not willing to change because it’s cheaper and easier right now and change would cost them money.
I also just hate glass. I broke a jar the other day and thought I’d cleaned it up properly, but no. I’ve been picking nearly invisible pieces of glass out of my foot with tweezers for days. My feet are scratched to shit. Plastic is bad but glass sucks too.
Did you vacuum?
Yes.
You’re completely correct, until enough of us buy other products to impact their bottom line. Scaled up production makes things cheaper per unit, but if demand drops out because we’re buying it less, then their cost per unit goes up. Then they raise prices to make up for it. Eventually alternatives become relatively competitive and then there’s a domino effect of more people jumping off of plastic. At least for some things. We will never get away from plastics entirely, but we’re way more wasteful than we need to be. There aren’t enough systemic incentives for companies to change their production, and there aren’t enough legislators willing to change that, but we can influence it a little bit by voting with our wallets. It’s very low impact, but talking about it in places like this can make the low impact a little bigger and lead to a bigger conversation about the global responsibility of industrialized nations to bear more of the burden because we can afford to. Idk I just don’t want to grow old and tell younger generations that we knew what we were doing was wrong and would hurt them but we just didn’t feel like doing anything about it.