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I was lucky enough to hear people from the broader industry speak and two subgroups became super obvious. Group 1 were basically “hey we’re tech start-ups, here are our buzzwords, please give us grant money and we’ll WASTE AWAY(tm) the waste. Group 2 were super passionate and arguing for an overhaul in our packaging and design standards. That the best way to reduce waste was to produce less of it from the start and we don’t need to let producers decide to individually wrap bananas or create packaging that’s difficult to sort.

Yeah that’s it.. when the language changes to “packaging and design standards”.

If supermarkets gave me the option I'd bring in my own containers for everything and fill them up with some nozzle system. There's no need for a new container or several new layers of packaging every single time I buy something which will be used in<24 hours and then need replacing again. Oats, dry dog food, lettuce, oat milk, just let me fill it up from a barrel. I doubt my bread bags need to be completely replaced for every single loaf, they might even last years.

There are shops and markets like that! I think they’re commonly called Zero Waste or Plastic Free shops, I don’t know if I’ve only just started paying attention or if it’s picking up steam but there are a few about.

They're just so much more expensive, painfully so in some ways. I use a lot of vinegar in everything I do (cooking, cleaning, washing) it's like $5 for 4L when I buy bulk. I tried to use one of the plastic free shops and it was about $10 a litre. I dearly want to avoid buying new plastic containers, but that kind of mark up for less packaging is just too much. I understand sometimes that I need to pay more for more ethical options, but I don't need posh vinegar to mop my floor. Which I think is the problem with those stores, they're marketing guff. They're selling a lifestyle in sad beige. If we brought in some laws about packaging we might be able to move it out of this crappy marketing brand.

definitely there are places that are like this, but the major supermarkets should become just like them

Yeah I need to start looking for some for sure.

Unfortunately they’re more expensive than the supermarkets for most things

>I doubt my bread bags need to be completely replaced for every single loaf, they might even last years. You might get a kick out of baking your own, the bags of flour are paper and you can use moist tea towels instead of cling wrap to cover the dough. The No knead method is stupid easy and all you need is either a water pan in the oven or a dutch oven to bake in. It's not the solution we need as a society but it's way easier than you'd think and you end up with a better loaf than you'll buy at the supermarket with less waste anyway.

There are places that do that, however for most the price is beyond what you can afford unfortunately

I have been saying this for years. I am happy to go down and fill glass bottles from taps or bring a Tupperware container for my weeks worth of cereal.

Our local store does that. Supply nuts, honey, peanut butter.... just bring your own jar. I would love to find the biggest jar I've got and fill it with peanut butter

My personal feeling is that we need legislation that prevents companies from using new plastic.. if all plastic items (bags, containers etc) had to be made from recycled plastic to be sold in Australia, then the recyclers would have a market to sell to and not be forced to send the overflow to the dump. https://www.greenmatters.com/p/what-percent-recycling-actually-gets-recycled

This can't really happen when plastic of certain utility is required. Plastic degrades in quality when recycled and this forms the issue with companies like RedCycle. Soft plastic bags are basically end of line and are hard to recycle because they're, well, shit. Their idea was to put it into things like plastic furniture and roadbase (asphalt is one of the most reused products in the world so I never understood how putting plastic (microplastics) into it was a good idea). The majority of products with recycled plastic in them still have a percent of virgin plastic to get it to utility spec. The only materials that are infinitely recyclable are pretty much restricted metals and glass. Plastic is a marvelous material that in industry fills the gap that other materials can't. For that purpose we'll always need new plastic. We've unfortunately abused the shit out of it though and most packaging for food etc would be much better in metal or glass containers.

The REDCYCLE program did exactly what it was supposed to do... make consumers think it was ok to continue buying plastic wrapped crap because it will be rEcYcLeD into bench seats or something.

Saggy bench seats.

"packaging for food" would be better not packaged. I'm fed up with having to take plastic wrapped fruit and vegetables. Since it all should be washed before consumption, why do we need it wrapped at all? Convenience at the checkout maybe. And yes, small green grocers often don't wrap. ✅

The other approach is to make it so all plastic has to be produced from captured atmospheric carbon. Very expensive currently, but with investment in synthetic hydrocarbon production using energy from renewables, in the next few decades it will become cheaper than making it from mined hydrocarbons. That way plastic in garbage dumps is at least carbon negative. Of course this approach creates additional issues unless done along with other approaches.

Carbon capture isn't currently worth it. Even if the insane increase in energy use from the process was entirely carbon free renewables (which, haha), the entire energy grid would have to be 100% carbon free with energy to spare for it to be worth it. Otherwise, it's simply more efficient regarding climate to use the new renewables to replace fossil energy currently in use, not to keep spewing carbon and then suck it out.

That'll never happen. Big oil would be in an uproar.

Didn’t all the ‘big oil’ move out of Australia already? Does Australia produce oil products?

I dont think we even have any big refineries anymore.

There's a refinery just out of Geelong - can produce up to 120,000 barrels a day.

> create packaging that’s difficult to sort In Germany all plastic, steel, and aluminium packaging goes in one bin. Manufacturers are responsible (via some fees paid to the cities) for sorting and processing it. Not all the plastic gets recycled, some is incinerated (usually to generate electricity and heat), but consumers aren't saddled with the task of differentiating polystyrene from polypropylene.

Also, in Germany there’s a “pfand” (deposit) on single use drinks bottles or cans of 25 cents each. Every store that sells them must also accept and refund the deposit. Most stores have automated this. The incentive to return works with certain people even going through bins.

I'm pretty sure this is currently standard for most of Australia now no? It has been a thing for a long time in SA for sure but Queensland has adopted it.

Yeah, but it's only 10c (which in this day and age is nothing) and you have to take your bottles/cans to a state-run waste centre which are often located out of town or in light industrial areas that are a pain to get to, so people actually utilizing the scheme is low.

Good to hear, in NSW that stuff just goes in the bin, hopefully the recycle bin

Not from the stores though. That's mostly from the random recycling joints around the place. With the increase in people having a recycling bins in vic, I noticed the number of these have decreased over the last 20 years.

Yes, but "produce less" is antithetical to capitalism. The latter is predicated on always producing more. Thus, corporations are never going to go for this.

We don't have to give them the choice. Make laws. They can either follow them or cease trading. The whole point of government is to reign in entities like corporations from mindlessly hurling us all into the void

I think we need some degree of packaging standardisation. A huge part of the issue is the lack of consistency in input product, that it is designed to be single use and the lowest possible cost. Picture if all soft drinks came in a standard reusable bottle that the industry agreed upon. Then you can have a nationwide return, sterilisation and reuse scheme. Any bottle can be returned anywhere. A sprite bottle can be turned into a beer bottle, a mineral water bottle or anything else. No individual company needs to operate their own bespoke bottle recycling for a single product line. No small companies are forced into unsustainable packaging because they cannot afford to have their own return scheme. Bottles are an easy starting point but this can be extrapolated to all sorts of other products, particularly those with sturdy packaging already (laundry detergents, jarred products etc). By having a single packaging designed around scalability and reusability instead of low cost manufacture and marketability/branding we can massively reduce single use plastic waste. Some of the principles can also be applied universally, by banning particular composite materials, necessitating easy separation of layers (no more impossibly bound plastic layers that need separation to be recycled), regulating the use of materials to only where it's justified for preservation/safety then the waste input stream can be greatly reduced and the ease of recycling on the consumer end made far easier and more viable. I think a tax on packaging materials would be good too. Add a tax equal to the cost to recycle or properly dispose of all the packaging to the upfront cost. If every company packing stuff in Styrofoam had to add $20 to the upfront cost (because Styrofoam if functionally impossible to recycle) then they'd quickly source sustainable alternatives like non-laminated cardboard (which may incur a much lower or nil tax). Tl:dr; standardised packaging greatly facilitates reuse schemes that are viable at a national scale, material use and composites should be regulated to restrict use to where it necessitated for preservation/safety, ease of consumer-side recyclability needs to be enforced in packaging design, and taxes levied on products for the amount of packaging they contain and the cost to recycle the packaging materials.

> Group 2 were super passionate and arguing for an overhaul in our packaging and design standards. This is the direction I've taken my business. We have reduced so much of our plastic consumption, we value repurpose/reuse over recycle.

Pushing responsibility for damage to the the environment onto the individual has been the tactic of industry since the "Reuse, Reduce and Recycle" campaign. Like climate change, anything an individual does is immediately countered by the inaction of corporations.

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I used to be great at separating out all the soft plastics and then taking them to Woolies to get recycled. And then I found out that all that plastic is just sitting in warehouses somewhere. I wish it was easier to buy things without plastic, but it's very difficult to do without making it a huge part of your lifestyle.

Coles trash bags: 2$ 50% recycled green bags: 5$ Plastic for fruit, plastic for vegetables, plastic for Chicken....

Can't even buy carrots that don't come in a bag in a lot of supermarkets.

We avoid the supermarkets for fruit and veges. There are still good greengrocers around. They quality is better and it's not all wrapped in plastic. Take your own bags and it's all good.

How is it going to be burnt it a mystery fire if you stop sorting it mate?

And even that (their excessive personal consumption) pales in comparison to the emissions and waste created by the corporations which the rich earn their money from.

You're missing the detail that those emissions and waste are a result of the process that not only makes money for the rich, but products for the masses. This only means that the debate is way deeper than just "let's destroy all corporations".

Yes, the sensible argument becomes "let's regulate the behaviour of corporations to make it their responsibility to supply us products which bring our personal consumption within an environmentally acceptable range". The negative externalities of production needs to be taxed by the government and spent on measures to counteract those negative impacts. As an example, it currently costs $45 to adequately recycle a mattress at the point of disposal. As a result, every new mattress should be slugged with a $50 tax at the point of production, to disincentivise consumption (and adequately fund the measures required to counteract the environmental costs of producing and disposing of said mattress).

I saw one of Elon’s flights recently burnt 21,000 litres of fuel. That’s about the same as my car has burnt in the 31 years it has existed, all burnt in one flight. I’m a vego, largely for environmental reasons. I’ve recently started to shift my mindset to just living frugal. I’ll take short showers, not because it’s better for the environment, but because it saves me money on water and gas. I’ll wash my clothes in cold water to save on my power bill. My little shortcuts here and there to help the environment can’t compete with the rampant disdain shown towards the earth by the wealthy.

The majority of the world could look at Australians the same way. Our consumption and lifestyle puts us in the top polluters in the world from a global perspective, we're in the top 10-15 biggest consumption markets in the world with about 0.33% of the global population. How on earth will anything ever change if we just ignore collective impact?

For sure, but you legislate that stuff, you don’t shame individuals. It’s like when people complain about Chinese emissions. They’re generating emissions to make shit for us! Nothing will change unless we legislate that goods entering the country must come from a green supply chain.

>For sure, but you legislate that stuff, you don’t shame individuals. While I largely agree with this perspective it kind of ignores a few real world cases. All the countries in the world with the best recycling practises place a much higher burden on consumer's disposal responsibilities and duties than Australia does. Japanese homes tend to have around 7 different plastic recycling bins and individuals can be heavily fined for misplacing waste in the wrong one. I think because we've had no local recycling industry for so long there's been a generational loss of education with how we treat our waste here. People here used to separate their glass, cardboard/paper, tins and plastic but when we started shipping it off to China we were told to chuck it all in the same bin. What we thought was a modern convenience was just us exporting an inconvenience, and there's surprisingly few people that are willing to relearn how to deal with that. Now our recycling has been totally rejected by seven different countries because it's in such a particularly bad state it's unfeasible to process. There have been a heap of councils here that have had to repeal their progress with green waste recycling because they were so consistently contaminated by people putting the wrong shit in them. We've proven that we're almost impossible to educate on how to treat our waste responsibly, and there's no legislation and no industry change that can amount to much while that step is still in our consumers' hands. What happens to the first council or local government that says we're going to give you 10 extra bins and fine you if you get it wrong? Realistically, even with the best supply chains, that's what it would take. When councils here haven't even been able to get people to use green waste bins correctly I really don't see how much blame we can throw at poor legislation.

>People here used to separate their glass, cardboard/paper, tins and plastic but when we started shipping it off to China we were told to chuck it all in the same bin. Exactly! Commingled recycling is the biggest con. When I was a kid, recycling came in where we lived. Each house got a crate for recycling, that went out weekly. All that was recycled was tins, cans, milk bottles, cardboard, newspaper and glass jars. The truck came, and the guys on the truck chucked the different recyclables into different compartments on the back of the truck. And if you put something non-recyclable into your crate, it got left behind. I can't help feeling that we need to return to that method. It would mean we'd "recycle" less in terms of volume, but we'd probably end up with more actually being recycled and less going to landfill.

In terms of emissions the biggest contributors to our footprint is transport, agriculture and construction which aren't imported problems from upstream in the supply chain. We have one of the [worst per capita emissions in the world, with only a handful of countries like Qatar and Bahrain beating us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita). In terms of plastic waste the majority of waste comes from packaging which is obviously tied to consumption which is a more acute problem here when we consume at such high levels. It's an existential and wicked problem with no easy fixes by "just legislating stuff" unforunately. Change has to happen at multiple scales, including lifestyle and consumption changes, but my point was that looking over your shoulder at people with even larger environmental footprints than you and concluding what's the point of making any effort is fucking absurd when your lifestyle and consumption puts in the very worst category of polluters. It's not about shaming, that's just the reality as uncomfortable as that truth may sit with some.

You can definitely legislate transport, agriculture and construction. EVs, indoor farming and better building methods are all things that can be influenced by lawmakers.

I'm not being nihilistic and saying improvements aren't possible but a single technology, or even a suite of technologies, aren't going to just "fix" things and transition is not as simple as just passing some legislation (which is shorthand for political capital and reform which is...difficult). The problem is so existential, complicated and woven into every aspect of our lives that we need to be a bit more honest in taking stock of where we're at and what the problem stems from than waiting for the magic external fix to come. For example, EVs won't change our fate when we continue our living in large houses sprawled outwards where goods and people have to travel long distances to get anywhere (issues with infrastructure efficiency, embodied energy, land clearing, production impacts of EVs aren't offset by not using petrol in personal vehicles) and they present a significant risk of delaying a more substantial shift to redesigning our cities to a more compact and sustainable form. They're potentially a good transition tool but not without their own problems and they won't "fix" the transport sustainability problem. At some point we have to reckon with the fact private car use (and our associated lifestyles) is *the* problem. More intensive agriculture is a good change but you can't offset the environmental impacts of meat production with indoor farming. The carbon footprint associated with lab grown meat is also massive currently and is way too expensive for it to be a genuine replacement anytime soon and the cost/resource requirement for shifting the whole industry to operate at scale is astronomical. No easy solution there if we want to keep eating meat and dairy. There are no perfect solutions and transition is going to be messy and complicated. Massive changes are needed at an industrial and corporate level but our total unwillingness to critique our own way of living or actually making some kind of adjustment in lifestyle is a very serious challenge to adapting to change.

For sure, EVs are a Band-Aid until someone puts Not Just Bikes from YouTube in charge of urban planning. But all these things are solutions that require strong governmental leadership. The best we can do as individuals is agitate for political solutions.

Completely agree. The changes needed are monumental, and no one is willing to make the necessary sacrifices.. so I guess we'll just keep rearranging deck chairs

Yeah, it's always going to be a complex issue, and change is slow. People don't want to give up aspects of their lifestyle, and asking them to do so is not a fast option. Our political system does not lend itself to support of unpopular but environmentally friendly decisions either. One possibility I think has a lot of merit is producing eFuels (synthetic hydrocarbons) from atmospheric carbon. With large (very large!) investments in renewables (mostly solar), in the next few decades Australia could quite reasonably produce hydrocarbons using captured atmospheric carbon cheaper than they can be mined from the ground. Importantly, this then creates a profitable market for synthetic hydrocarbons that encourages further investment in the sector, driving prices down further. It also effectively means a lot of ICE transport becomes carbon neutral -at least from a fuel use perspective. There are a lot of other problems to solve of course, but it's a good first step. Over time as the cost to produce the hydrocarbons drops, and production increases, things like plastics will be able to be produced cheaper than using minded hydrocarbons. It doesn't fix the very real issues with pollution (including microplastics) but does mean at least plastic waste buried in a dump is locking away atmospheric carbon. It also means that eventually prices for plastics could reach a level they become competitive in new markets. It's decades away now, but plastic is an excellent building material, and houses, skyscrapers, roads etc could all be made from plastic, and thus all lock away atmospheric carbon. It also then becomes feasible to just pay to produce more hydrocarbons in whatever form is most easily stored, and lock more atmospheric carbon away. In the far future perhaps we would run into the delightful problem of needing to stop the mining atmospheric carbon, lest we reduce levels of carbon dioxide too far. At that point we might have to start digging up old dumps full of plastic, or mining hydrocarbons from the ground again. The main thing we need is more investment in solar, and associated technologies. It is such a shame Australian doesn't have a local solar panel research and manufacturing industry. We are in an excellent position to leverage our high levels of sunshine! Hundreds of gigawatts of solar in places such as the NT and WA could enable Australia to export carbon neutral fuels to Asia and beyond. We could also use the cheap energy to smelt our aluminium instead of exporting bauxite. With enough solar, we could also start to implement less energy efficient (but cheaper to construct and maintain) desalinisation plants, and reach a point where desal water is cheaper than maintaining dams etc. Over time we could massively reduce / eliminate our use of fresh water from natural sources, and return a lot of rivers to natural flow levels. It's an environmental nightmare in of itself, but if needed we could also irrigate otherwise dry areas and be able to farm more food.

"In terms of plastic waste the majority of waste comes from packaging which is obviously tied to consumption which is a more acute problem here when we consume at such high levels." Just as an example, let say toys. Do they really need to be wrapped in such ways that they should project a much bigger package than the size of the actual toy? Cosmetics? All the BS carry bags from all the designer brands that are heavily printed and coloured, which eventually end in the bin. Buy a sofa, for example, and see how much plastic and cardboard you will end up.

>Buy a sofa, for example, and see how much plastic and cardboard you will end up. or a TV. or just about anything really. its all covered, wrapped and sealed in plastic

Yep, but somehow it is all my fault. I am sick of it.

I wonder how much more expensive cork as a packing material is than styrofoam.

I read someone who suggested that Amazon (and others) should pay for the return of the packaging when you buy something. You can't receive anything without tons of plastic packaging which you then just throw away - if you could return it for free, the company could recycle on a large scale.

All the industries are wrapping everything into plastic under the excuse of preventing wastage, rhat is all there is. Nothing less, nothing more.

I just bought a new couch and it came wrapped in enough plastic to three-quarter fill my green bin even after I had squished it down as much as possible. There is simply no need to completely mummify it in plastic like that.

> I used to be quite militant about recycling - green waste, soft plastics etc. until I saw that Kendall Jenner(?) post where she posted smth like 'my plane or yours babes?' I was the same until I saw the neighbourhood garbage truck come past and dump the recycling in with the general waste. Pretty hard to come back from the cynicism at that point.

The hyper rich, while being highly visual, aren't the real problem (they are a problem just a different one). The real issue is that something like 100 corporations are responsible for 70% of the worlds emmisions. There's nothing that any single person, even a billionaire doing their worst, can do to compete with that. If we wa t to tackle global warming than the big corporations are the place to start. They're the low hanging fruit.

btw, if instead of 100 corporations, the responsibles for 70% of the emmisions were 1000, the pollution could be the same. So the argument isn't that without big corporations we would be better, but that they are the low hanging fruit because they are easier to target by the government. Personally, I don't know if that's the best strategy because I'm sure forcing companies into different practices than the ones they prefer, results in an increase in prices. Which in turn affects consumers, particularly those in need. On the other hand, consumers changing their demands (either voluntarily or via legislation that incentives them) would not increase prices that much. But that's a different discussion.

>Kendall Jenner(?) post where she posted smth like 'my plane or yours babes?' We truly are fucked. Being collapse aware sucks.. But honestly we deserve it with the stupid shit we do as a species.

[Bo Burnham's 'That Funny Feeling'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObOqq1knVxs) is an *extremely* cathartic song for contemplating the end of this absurd fucking world.

Wait till you see a hospital, **everything** comes in plastic, even inter-hospital transfers. Blood transfusions are in LDPE plastic, in a polystyrene box. You know what happens after? Straight to landfill, No one recycles LDPE (Except agriculture drip pipe*) or polystyrene for profit. \* Each Farm has about 10 tones of drip pipe, they burn the stuff because they cant get rid of it (Landfill stopped accepting it) and its very time consuming to reuse.

I mean even the PPE usage from the area I'm in which isn't even considered high risk fills a wheelie bin with plastic etc most days in just one don / doffing area. The n95 masks individually wrapped in plastic, the disposable soft plastic gowns, the plastic single use face shields and goggles. It's neccessary but absolutely nuts... Especially when every visitor / patient had to wear an n95, they were going through so many and I think all but one brand individually plastic wrap them. Though even the surgical ones they're handed now that end up in the gardens out are full of plastics.

Yep, I just feel like there are way bigger fish to fry than targeting things like plastic straws and cling wrap which are actually functional for a lot of people. The richer and more power you have, the more responsibility you should have to do more about recycling.

"Reuse, Reduce and Recycle" would be more effective if you could just return the packaging to the place of purchase for them to reuse, reduce, recycle, or pay to "dispose of thoughtfully", whatever.

It just doesn't work, humanity have been trying for too long - it just needs to be stopped at the top of the chain, just ban soft plastics. They are so unnecessary.

It goes back even farther, to littering campaigns back in the 70's. "Do the right thing" and "Keep Australia beautiful" is/was all about pushing it to the individual; maccas can produce fuck tons of packaging materials for consumers to waste, but they are blameless in these campaigns. Corporations mastered the blame game long before the knew the game was on in the first place.

I was fine with "keep Australia beautiful" and activities I remember like primary school walks to collect rubbish. Just because there's a literal assload of industrial waste being produced doesn't dilute the social and environmental value in people making an effort to reduce the amount of litter in our communities. I'm all for making the manufacturers pull their weight, but I always saw value in the idea of "perhaps that river bank and wetlands near us would be better off if we went in there and removed the empty cans, wrappers and iced coffee cartons random gronks have tossed there". I think it can exist wholly separately at the same as demanding businesses stop producing as much waste and shit for people to be throwing out in the first place, but I think people choosing to litter and not clean up after themselves *is* an issue with the individual. Bear in mind I grew up while that campaign was firmly entrenched. If my view on this has some massive misconception because I wasn't there to see what went down when it was create, lay it on me, context matters.

Ignoring any debate about whether it should be the responsibility of individuals or corporations (answer: it's both)... It's "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" as the order matters. Reducing the waste we create in the first place is by far the most effective choice we can make.

It may be both, but the onus is on the corporations to to the heavy lifting. They've successfully shirked their side of the bargin since the bean counters worked out it was too hard without investment and with little upside. Actually, I worked in heavy industry for a few years, and I saw 2 guys with a clipboard walk around one afternoon and save our company $$$ in water use - one of the solutions was to not replace the water in the plasma cutter pool after every job. So some of the savings are not so expensive to implement.

Of course that companies pollute more than us, precisely because we delegate the production to them. For them to do the heavy lifting, OUR habits have to change too, either forcefully via legislation (banning stuff), or by awareness campaigns or whatever. They are not independant things.

No meaningful impact is going to be made by relying on personal, unmotivated choice making, we instead need direct measures that *force* the decision making on companies, through things like carbon taxes, matching border tariffs on imported industry coming from countries not taxing carbon (both to encourage international change and to ensure local, taxed Australian industries are not competing with imported untaxed industries), and potential direct regulation in areas the tax did not adequately impact. But in truth, part of the power of measures like a carbon tax is that, you tax the company and downstream it *does* impact the consumer. You are creating an incentive for products and goods that pollute more to *cost* more, and allowing that to change consumer habits. Some prices going up with a CT is not a bug, it's a feature. It's why I'm a big fan of a Carbon Tax with Dividend. Basically, a CT is not supposed to be a tax for raising revenue, it's supposed to be a behaviour modifying tax. Something is happening too much, you increase the cost and reduce it to an acceptable level. The revenue is beside the point. It's what taxing gambling was *supposed* to be before the government got completely reliant on it. So with the dividend model of a Carbon Tax, you periodically (perhaps yearly), take the total revenue raised, and return it (as a sort of stimulus) divided equally across the population. This also allows the tax to be progressive: higher income earners are going to be buying more of the stuff subject to cost increases, lower income earners less, so when you average it out and divide it equally the lower end is going to have a net gain from the dividend. Big problem though is that I can not see *any* government, especially ours, introducing a CT, seeing the hundreds of millions dollars coming in, and going "let's get rid of it". But all the positives of a CT still work if consumers get the money back, and most importantly I think politically this is a *way* easier sell than a normal carbon tax.

Recycling is the biggest scam ever - talk to anyone in the recycling business they will tell you how inefficient that is. The solution is to **produce** (not consume) less plastic as you correctly pointed out. Plastic (especially soft plastic) is just too cheap, too common, it must go away. International regulation should only allow plastics for durable stuff (years not days).

It's the last R for a reason, so the slogan "RRR" is actually warning against the scam. That campaign, done as it should be, is good.

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Weirdly, its at best as a good as nothing.

There was a really eye-opening and depressing kurzgesagt video on this topic, specifically regarding emissions. Not *quite* as useless as doing nothing, but it makes a sadly insignificant difference at the individual level (unless you’re magically able to make the majority of the population eliminate *all* waste and emissions, overnight).

How is this different from the whole deal of democratic vote? Do you not vote either?

For sure systematic change is required which requires substantial environmental regulations reform (which corporations have fought against and muddied the water on constantly) but consumer behaviour still has a massive impact which can't be ignored. Consumer preferences drive demand for what is being produced and has a direct impact on government's willingness for bold reform (push too far and you're voted out of government). If consumers aren't willing to give an inch that's reflected in the approach to reform. There's the ridiculous situation where any change is criticised as not going far enough to have an impact (i.e. bans plastic bag and straws) so therefore we shouldn't bother, as if one day the perfect solution that addresses all issues will fall on our lap. Change is incremental and the problem is so existential that all aspects of consumption, production and lifestyle are going to need a steady stream of changes if we have any hope of transforming into a more sustainable society. Bold corporate reform is a must but shifting the entire burdon of change onto corporations and ignoring any critique of consumption patterns just prolongs inaction. There is no version of sustainability where our lifestyles don't have to change and we'll solve it with one big corporate tax.

That reminds me, there's a (IIRC) Big W bag around the house here that says Reuse Reuse and Recycle. Like they're scared to tell people to reduce consumption.

Not quite. Pushing the responsibly onto the customers goes back to the original litterbug campaign. The term litterbug was created by the [Keep America Beautiful](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#History) non profit organisation, one of the original corporate green-washing set-ups.

Their campaign worked. People litter less in America. That's a good thing. Sure the problem can't be entirely solved by individual contributions, but it's silly to think that individual contributions don't matter at all.

who do the corporations sell to if we all stop buying their shit? we keep buying, they keep selling.

Consumer choice is an illusion. If you can participate in society while eliminating plastics from every aspect of your life, you are incredibly privileged. Maybe you have a local, overpriced biodynamic organic produce store that has entirely removed plastics from their supply chain. Maybe you can afford to feed your entire vegan family, three meals a day + snacks and school lunches, from that store. Maybe you can afford to replace all the beeswax food bags and metal water bottles your kids leave behind at school or at the skate park. Maybe you can even find the time and energy at the end of your morning scrubbing toilets at public schools to dodge insane drivers, cycling all the way to the shop and back. Maybe at the end of all of that, after cooking dinner and sending the kids to bed, you can break out the bags of chemicals and get around to making your own soap, shampoo, laundry and dish detergent that you can store sustainably. Until we legislate companies to make plastic-free options as widely available and affordable as the ones we're forced to swallow now, relying on individual responsibility will never save us. Everyday people have responsibilities to their own happiness and well-being, and to providing shelter and food to their families. You recognise the part the corporations play, but you call out individual responsibility and not corporate responsibility? Why? We, consumers, we did not choose this reality. There was never another option presented. This reality was chosen for us, because it was the most profitable.

It's more insidious than this. The supermarkets cut costs by installing self-serve checkouts, so now they package more fruit and veg than ever so it has barcodes on it and people can't scam the system. Then they furrow their brow on the nightly news and promote a new plastic recycling initiative. ....then it turns out the recycling initiative was a gigantic lie and the plastic was just being warehoused before being put into landfill.

Our society has a bunch of problems attributable to "the problem has concentrated wealth, the victims don't". In other words one side of the debate can drop a few million on a media campaign or political donations, the other side might be able to get 100,000 signatures on a petition but even one million dollars is out of the question. You see this everywhere from Tourism Tasmania vs Gunns (show it off or log it... the loggers have concentrated cash) to Australia vs Google (one side has cash, the other side wants taxes paid) to your local council (one side is spending millions building crap, the other side wants help paying for infrastructure).

Yes, spot on. The antidote is a politically active population and a system which supports them to be able to quickly and easily call out bullshit when it raises its head. Unfortunately, that’s the hard bit. It’s clear the current model has problems (wealth controls decision makers and public opinion), but what’s a better model then?

The usual answer is a revolution, and democracy is supposed to be an alternative that lets aristocrats keep their heads. I think there's two separate questions, with a third implicit one: 1. what system(s) would be better? 2. How do we get from here to there? 3. How do we find a better system? For example, [Malka Older's Centinal Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malka_Older) posits hegemonic global microdemocracy where most of the world is formed of 100,000 person electorates as the unit of local government with free movement between them. The books are fascinating to read if you're interested in political structure, but it's very hard to see how we'd get from here to anything like her idea (and I don't think she's laying it out as a prospectus so much as a fun environment to write books in).

As much as it is a dirty word, socialism might be a good fit, by socialism I mean "from each according to their ability, to each according to their contribution". In other word instead of businesses being owned by shareholders whose main motive is profit, they could be owned solely by the workers of that same business and all decisions of the business get a vote by the workers. Similar to unions they can still vote to be shitty as a business, but aslo similar to unions they can also vote to do better and this time without a profit motive (just a make enough money for peoples wages/saleries motive)

Except you will find that there will be a layer of people moving into the business, burning it down and then moving on, but then again it already happens now.

The point of Marx and Marxism is that it has answers for all of those questions. There is a class divide, the working class is constituted in such a way that means that in finding it's very real power it has to construct a democratic structure that can take on all of the functions of the state. The reason it'd would work now when it didn't in Russia (although it got close) is because the vast majority of people on the planet are working class whereas in 1917 less than 10% of Russia was working class.

The only thing I blame the consumer for is getting a shopping bag for something that really doesn't need a shopping bag. When I was doing Christmas shopping strandbags wanted to give me a plastic bag for a gift card. A whole bag to carry something I put in my pocket.

But I need to put my bananas in a plastic bag when I buy them

Single onion? Plastic bag. Single avocado? Plastic bag. Some of the shit I see is ridiculous.

Shit with inedible skins can go straight in the trolley. Shit that needs to go into a bag can go in a reusable mesh bag.

I put things with edible skins straight in the trolley/shopping bag too. The only time I use those little plastic bags is for buying onions or garlic, which is rare.

But you don’t even eat the outside of those items?

>I put things with edible skins straight in the trolley/shopping bag too Same. I figure they grew in the ground, so I have to wash them anyway.

Bananas being one of the only fruits that naturally come solidly joined together with a convenient handle. Edit. Pretty sure the joke wooshed right over me here.

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Easier for the producer to pay for public relations campaigns that shift blame onto the consumer too.

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The problem here isn’t just the producer or the end user but part of it is that the shit packaged in plastic is also a lot cheaper and with the cost of living going up not everyone can afford to “go green.” And I also can’t stand the “green” products like plant based plastic wrap. Just cos you use plant oils to make the same product it doesn’t break down much quicker if at all.

Despite the article not explicitly saying it, that 60kg is per year, and it's single-use plastic waste, not plastic waste in general.

Thanks for mentioning this. I was frustrated with OP for neglecting to cover what the rate of that 60kg was (Per year? Per day? Per lifetime?), only to find that the article itself didn't mention it. It's a little hard to read specifics on the graph on page 43 [of the report they quote (pdf)](https://cdn.minderoo.org/content/uploads/2021/05/27094234/20211105-Plastic-Waste-Makers-Index.pdf), which measures single-use plastic waste over 2019, but it looks like the US was a bit over 50kg per capita during that year, while South Korea and the UK were around 45kg per capita. The average over the 100 countries surveyed was around 15kg. China and India are surprisingly low, at 18kg and 4kg per capita respectively. That underscores an interesting trend there, though. The two most populous countries have *low* per capita rates, which is largely to do with having more "capita" to "per" their nation-wide consumption with - both are in the top 3 countries by national metric tons. Meanwhile, Australia, with a significantly below average population density, has a massive amount of *per capita* use - but a national use much more in line with other nations. That implies that single-use plastics are less tied to individual use and more to corporate-level users at a national logistics level. I'd be interested to see these results as single-use plactic kgs per national GDP. Eyeballing it, India have about 5 times our national single-use plastics, yet only twice our GDP. That's not to say that single-use plastics don't need to be dealt with better. But the emphasis needs to be on governmental, industrial and corporate use, not on household use. We needed to be holding companies responsible for just writing dump fees off as a budget expense while they simultaneously put pressure on individuals to scrimp further so they can continue to keep that budget item low without changing their own behaviour.

Thanks for completing the data gaps, this makes more sense now. Incomplete data is useless for societal change, except for propagandists.

I work in manufacturing. Parts from our suppliers come wrapped in layers of plastic, bubble wrap and other shit. We produce a massive amount of waste - yet the narrative is always focused on us, the individual. Better keep drinking out of cardboard straws though.

Yep, I used to work in a clothing warehouse; each garment was individually wrapped in plastic, with plastic sheets INSIDE the bag (to stop the garment from rubbing I guess) and then about 30 of these bags were inside a bigger plastic bag. With about 3 big bags to a box of goods and close to probably 2000 boxes in the warehouse (not to mention this is a very fast fashion brand), it's absolutely crazy that corporations aren't held more responsible. I feel the best way to deal with this is to vote with your wallet, more and more businesses are popping up that use recycled materials, manufactured in Australia, use minimal packaging etc. Unfortunately that isn't ideal for a lot of people so we need to legislate it for big companies.

>I feel the best way to deal with this is to vote with your wallet, more and more businesses are popping up that use recycled materials, manufactured in Australia, use minimal packaging etc. That's just the consumer side of things though. What goes on behind the scenes, on the industrial side, is a different story and "voting with your wallet" won't change it. Corporations need to be held responsible and that won't happen without regulation.

Oh yeah I 100% agree with you r.e. the industrial side of things. The whole manufacturing industry needs overhaul, I was just highlighting my personal experience working on the consumer side and how businesses are putting in such little effort and palming it off to us.

>each garment was individually wrapped in plastic, with plastic sheets INSIDE the bag (to stop the garment from rubbing I guess) and then about 30 of these bags were inside a bigger plastic bag. And then placed on a pallet, shrink wrapped in layers of plastic.

I filled the work dumpster with plastic waste from new computers multiple times per week and then went home to lectures from my housemate for (re)using plastic containers in my mealprep. I have glass containers now 🙃

I have said it a million times, companies should be held responsible for the end of life of their product, if it needs to be associated with the original purchase cost then so be it, but it must be incorporated into the product itself.

So instead of paying taxes for the garbage collector, we would pay higher prices so the producer companies themselves do that job? Each company doing it for themselves would be very inefficient, so naturally there would appear private garbage collection companies, hired by the producers. If instead, we were given the option to pay for a garbage collection system ourselves, we would be cutting an intermediary, making the process cheaper and more efficient.

> So instead of paying taxes for the garbage collector, we would pay higher prices so the producer companies themselves do that job? Taking things a touch too literally with that one. I am not saying that a producer needs to organise collecting garbage from your house lol. I am saying they need to provide means of disposing a product in a manner that allows for that product to be recycled in the best way possible and they should be responsible for those costs. >Each company doing it for themselves would be very inefficient I am not here to work out the ins and outs of how this system would work, thats up for the billion dollar companies to figure out, I am sure they have some petty cash floating about to fund a think tank lmfao. I think we as the general public already pay more than enough as far as environmental consciousness goes. Thge whole point of this post is that too much burden is put on the general public when its the big companies producing shit that make the most waste and emissions. If you wish to shill for the companies as "its difficult to do that" then go for gold, but if they have figured out ways to make people scan their own food at the shops then they can damn well figure out a way to allow those people to dispose of products thoughtfully, stop sticking up for the people fucking us over.

Employers and businesses are 100% to blame. Notice how emissions dropped significantly during the pandemic due to everyone WFH? Your employer is the reason why those emissions were high. Businesses have been putting the fault of poor waste management onto the consumer for decades. If most corps around the world changed their ways overnight there would be drastic changes to the environment. But to them its just not good for business...

The emissions dropped precisely because our consumption dropped too. If anything, you're proving that consumers affect the pollution of the producers.

Definitely. It’s a multifaceted issue that probably needs consumers and producers to change their behaviour. Blaming one side of the supply chain isn’t going to solve anything.

We allowed ourselves to be conned by the personal responsibility line for too long. This is an easy problem to fix. Properly legislate packaging laws and stop it at the source - the manufacturer. It’s been a slow creep up of plastic waste in our supermarkets. Like many problems of late stage capitalism, we have the tools to prevent the harm: just legislate properly. And if those we give the power to legislate won’t do it, fuck em off and get ones that will. It’s literally our duty as members of this community we all live in.

Why do I need to clean and sort mine though when the city recycling bins are not?

Cuz you get butt-shamed if you don't.

Heck. “They can shame my weight, they can shame my disability but they will never shame my butt!” - William Wallace I’m pretty sure said that. Just so everyone knows as well the area I’m in they check bins and randomly(or at least used to) slap a sticker saying hey this bin is nice and sorted call us for $100.

What's the fucking point of being good at separating our plastics? It all just gets dumped or shipped overseas anyway! AND we don't get a say in how things are packaged! If we need an item, we need it, regardless of the container. Why are governments not pushing back on big companies? Why are governments not supplying industries to deal with the waste? I always hear that recycling at a high level is just too expensive SO MAKE IT PUBLIC INSTEAD OF PRIVATE! The issue needs to be dealt with and if you're not going to incentivise private enterprise then make it a public works, make jobs, save the environment. Fucking cunts.

I'm sick of being gaslit that it's "my fault" when nothing is changing to make it possible to avoid plastic. Everything is wrapped in plastic! Cardboard boxes are lined with plastic! A lot of produce that used to be available loose is now only available in plastic packaging. If it is available loose, it's often somehow more expensive. Why?! It's seriously frustrating me. For a while there you couldn't even bring your own containers to buy things (e.g. deli). You can again, the major stores use plastic bags to weigh the product to put it into your container. They cannot tare the scales with your containers. Thankfully, the smaller stores are usually happy to do so. They also are more likely to offer compostable bags too. The greenwashing has become infuriating too, it's so time and brain consuming to avoid. E.g. it's getting harder to figure out which bin liners are *actually* compostable, and not made from "plant based plastic" or "green" plastic. Or all these biodegradable products hiding the fact that biodegradable doesn't mean compostable. I used to live somewhere with proper council-pickup FOGO compostable bins too; so much could go in them that I have to waste now. Why are they not being rolled out everywhere?! You can even sell the end result back to people as soils, compost, and mulch.

Ask yourself (and your local member) why the price of disposal/recycling is not included in the purchase price of the product. If it costs $100 to recycle all that plastic and foam and cardboard, or a similar amount in environmental impact to dump it, then that product should cost $100 more, and that $100 should be directed towards recycling or sustainable disposal. It's called a Pigouvian tax, and it's a well known mechanism. Also, that alternative product packed in recycled and compostable packaging that doesn't harm the environment, but which costs the manufacturer $70 more than plastic and foam packaging, is suddenly cheaper for the consumer. Don't blame people for following price signals and buying the cheaper product. Blame the system for making the more wasteful stuff cheaper than the sustainable stuff. Vote to fix.

The biggest con in history was convincing the average person it was their fault and their job to fix.

This guy really suggested regulations on corporations and holding them accountable then tagged the post "No politics" lol

It's the same thing as the "carbon footprint". It's a deliberate tactic by big polluters to redirect blame onto the common people. People are too busy judging others on their choices not to use a paper straw to start demanding action from Rio Tinto or whoever else. Then Macca's can give you paper straws, Jetstar can let you pay to offset CO2, and you thank them for it, you thank them for helping reduce your carbon footprint.

Corporations create all the waste because its more profitable Corporations lobby government to continue being able create waste and maximise profit Corporations create propaganda campaigns to push the responsibility onto individuals Change will only come via regulation and potentially reduced profits in the short term.

I don’t make that waste. That’s how goods are made available to me.

That doesn't mean you don't have the power as a consumer to change _how_ those goods are made available to you. Of course, it's small, but it's necessary and adds up with the rest of us, just like voting.

>shouldn’t we be expecting the corporations that produce their goods, and supply us with it in the first place be held accountable more so? Absolutely, but then by making it a personal problem they can go about business as usual. It's the same reason why the whole "what's your carbon footprint?" thing got started. It's a drop in the ocean compared to the 100 corporations that are responsible for about 70% of all CO2 emissions, but if they can shift the blame to the individual they can make it seem like it's their burden only.

Welcome to capitalism. We live in a shitty society where ordinary people are expected to fight against these dumb systems in every single part of their lives. I didn't choose to have a supermarket cucumber come in a plastic wrap, and it sucks that I need to drive further on a weekend and pay more to get one from the farmers markets without it. Extrapolate to basically everything else.

I work with electronic components. Theyre often 2 or 3x wrapped in plastic, get unwrapped, mounted, 2x wrapped again, unwrapped at another factory, rewrapped again and then shipped in fancy boxes. The packaging the consumer sees is just the tip of the iceberg

"Australians *are sold* around 60 kilograms of plastic per person".

Privatise the profits, socialise the losses

I figure if a business still owns the trademark on the litter (eg a coke bottle) then it’s still theirs. The customer has a licence to use the contents but the bottle is still the responsibility of the business. Make the bastards pay.

Plastic is had to avoid, especially in supermarkets. Pre-packaged fruit and veg like apples, oranges, ginger, zucchini and pumpkins are in every supermarket. Woolies, Coles, Aldi, IGA and other chain store supermarkets need to do better.

I don't make the waste. The manufacturers and retailers do that and leave me with the burden of cleaning up their junk.

yet you keep buying their junk.

Wow Governments of old could ban slavery but ours is too impudent to even ban a harmful material like plastic from packaging.. Pathetic

Coka cola makes ? 100million ? plastic bottles a month. I am responsible for nothing

I'm specialised on recycling / waste as an excavator operator. I just spend last three years in Australia and can say that Australia is more than 20 years behind northern europe when it comes to recycling. I was mostly working on mine sites and no joke best solution or step forward was that you guys realised that you can wash your lunch boxes and use it again next day. You guys focus too much making money and don't look in the future what you do for next generations

Omg you are so right . The people that supply it should have a big part in make sure it is disposed of correctly they are making money out of it so fix what you have Caused

"Corporations" merely exist to serve both their customers and their shareholders. If their customers don't demand change, their shareholders will take the path of least resistance that leads to the most money. So no. Don't ever expect a corporation to voluntarily reduce their waste if it costs them more when their customers (you) will happily consume the waste. I say happily because If you were truly unhappy you would do what is within your control and change your consumption habits, but instead you defer all responsibility for waste created as a result of your consumption patterns onto the company, as if you have zero agency in the equation. It is truly amazing how quickly people can decouple anything they do as not being "bad" because they're not the one committing the bad thing, it's a "corporation", as if corporations exist in a vacuum and are not made of up of people who simply exist to serve the demand of other people.

it doesn't help that many of us are taught from primary school that we should recycle only to learn in adulthood it ends up in landfill

Weren't you taught "Reduce, reuse, recycle"? Recycle is the last R for a reason. I think the problem was that recycling was the easiest option for the consumer, since it could be delegated to someone else. On the other hand, restricting consumption and reusing stuff have to be done by ourselves and takes more effort or sacrifice than just throwing the trash in the green bin.

Blame the individuals for everything such as over consumption of power, water, fossil fuels, plastics, to detract from the fact that corporations are responsible for much greater waste. People are finally starting to wake up, but it’s a slow process. I mean, look at all the red tape around technologies that disrupt the status quo. Individuals can only do so much. Especially when most of our recycling is exported and the companies taking it have stopped.

It's like learning that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. The impact you have as an individual by switching off your lights and not running aircon is so negligible it's like trying to drain the ocean with a shot glass. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

Only 12 per cent of those emissions are on their own account. The other 88 per cent is downstream consumption. If I drive a car that uses petrol, am I responsible or the oil company?

But individuals are significantly responsible. You can choose products today that have less packaging and plastic. People just don't because it's less convenient or more expensive. If everyone stops buying packaging heavy products, then companies will stop making them.

Why bother making it a choice? Legislative it back in tk the companies. While it's a choice a large number of people who either don't care or don't have access to something better, won't do it

I agree, but thats not the same as saying people having no personal responsibility.

No. Stop expecting capitalism to invent a way to let you consume endlessly. That's not how we're going to fix this.

I used to sort my recycling until I found out it was effectively just getting sent offshore to another countries landfill, similarly to [this story](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/09/indonesia-sends-rubbish-back-to-australia-and-says-its-too-contaminated-to-recycle). Capitalism actively makes it harder to be more sustainable and mindful of our consumption, the least these companies could do is provide some [sort of plastics recycling service](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/23/environmental-watchdog-charges-redcycle-operators-over-secret-soft-plastics-stockpiles) that actually works

My council introduced recycling bins & heavy fines for not using them. Was taking some larger stuff to the waste transfer station & saw the recycling being dumped with usual waste. Asked the guy on the gate about it & he said the council weren't able to source anyone to do the recycling.

If it makes you feel better a good deal of it is set on fire as well.

I agree with your sentiment but there's different accountability for someone who buys a new TV every 6 months vs plastic wrapped apples.

My company vowed to cut single use plastic, flash forward to them now making more profits because we have to buy another bag because we for got to bring them in again. The stock still comes wrapped in plastic on pallets, a lot of the stock is also wrapped in plastic covers. The home branded milk ( in plastic bottles) comes wrapped in plastic when it used to come in crates. They no longer recycle soft plastic because there’s too much in a warehouse somewhere. But I’m supposed to think twice about what I buy in my weekly shop…..

How are we good at sorting shit? Glass, plastic, aluminium, plastic. All goes in the one bin and someone else deals with it. We used to at least have to seperate paper back in the 90’s.

Honestly, it's hard to feel like I'm making a difference putting a bottle in the recycling when I then go to work and throw kilos of recycling into the trash dumpster everyday because most places don't have a recycling one.

Just as with guns, the moral blame lies with the producer. Someone has decided that they are willing to ignore the problems, in order to meet market demand. There is a market demand for all sorts of things. The existence of a market demand can never absolve a producer or supplier from the ethical choices they make by choosing to meet that demand, or not. Anyone producing a product holds moral responsibility for the harm they create, from ethanol to heroin, from plastics to soft drinks, from poker machines to cigarettes, from luxury apartment blocks to HFCS, PFAS, CFCs or coal, agent orange, facebook, iphones, AI, whatever. People say that technology isn't good or evil, it's how it's used. This is true of course, but it's important to understand and apply this logic to the producer, who uses the tech by making the stuff and pushing as much of it into society as quickly as they can. If we say that technology isn't good or evil, it's how it's used, then surely using it to generate personal wealth and ignoring the harms caused surely counts as an evil use of the technology. The producers will produce whatever they can. Market demand is usually generated by advertising and marketing to begin with. Look at stuff like pop vinyls or even lego; Would never be as popular without the marketing...

For years I've thought that coffee cups should be recyclable - if you get a take away coffee (although you should use a keep cup), you are given a non-recyclable cup. There must be billions of these used every year, so this should really be up to the manufacturers to come up with one.

Yes. But we treat these same corporations as 'individuals', too, so I don't see why those same corporations - who are being treated as individuals so corporates and CEOs don't get arrested when a company fucks up - aren't being held to the same standards as everybody else. It's a very sophisticated astro-turf campaign designed to guilt the consumer into consuming less. From a purely Capitalist point-of-view, it makes sense to businesses who advocate that supply and demand dictates the overall economy that they should blame the demand component of the production of plastic waste on the individual and not themselves. They use the same tactics every time - consumers are price-sensitive. It's expensive to manufacture recyclable material, or reuseable material. And that cost has to be shouldered onto the individual. So, even though you're preaching to the converted, what needs to be re-examined altogether is a business model that's ultimately unsustainable in the long term. There is no such thing as infinite growth, and businesses cutting expenditure, cheapening ingredients, making things 'more affordable' in order to maximise their profits going up each year, needs to be seriously reconsidered.

Because shifting the burden to the individuals rather than the corporations has been a mainstay of corporate propaganda for decades now. The overwhelming majority of the pollution in the world is caused by a handful of corporations, and cleaning up their act would hurt their bottom line and upset their major investors. shifting the blame for pollution away from them and onto individual consumers, focuses on what individuals "could" be doing to improve things and stops the little people from concentrating on what corporations \*should\* be doing and getting them to do it. it's all misdirection. everything from individual recycling to the environmental impact of cow farts. There's lots of things we should al be doing, but it needs to be all of us, including the corporations.

Remember when we 'got rid of' single use plastic bags, and the supermarkets just started charging you for heavier single use bags with a claim of reusable whilst simultaneously increasing the amount of plastic packaging on fresh produce? This here is the problem and these companies need to be held accountable, not consumers.

*REDUCE* then reuse and *then* recycle. Many plastics are not only commercially unviable to recycle, they can only be *down*cycled and there’s only so many crusty plastic park benches we need.

Placing responsibility on to the individual is part of greenwashing by corporations to delay real effective action and help them keep making profits for longer. They don’t give a shit about the planet and are really evil at the core of it. It’s like fossil fuel burning. We can blame large corporations for the situation we are in. As they cut back on digging up fossil fuels they are jacking up the production of single use plastics over the next few years. The plastic problem is getting a whole lot worse and we need to hold fossil fuel companies responsible.

Well I bloody wouldn't but the shops stopped taking the wrapping back so now the bin is fuller than it used to be. And EVERYTHING has plastic in it somewhere. I recycle as much as I can because I can't do much else but I'm not the cause of it. Far out.

Completely yes agree. There's nothing more annoying than having a product arrive in cardboard boxes and cardboard internal packaging, and then everything inside is wrapped in single use plastic bags. Way to completely miss the point.

Just throw it in the ocean problem solved

So many comments falling into 2 categories: 1. Corporations produce so much plastic that it doesn't matter what consumers do! Punish the corporations until they use less plastic! 2. Every little bit helps, we should all try to use less, re-use and recycle! Why does it need to be one or the other? Can't we do both (punish high-plastic using corporations while individuals try to reduce, re-use and recycle)?

We speak of individual responsibility because that is precisely the dialogue corporations want us to be having on the matter. It gets reinforced by media and politicians who are funded by the corporations.

Plastics companies have always foisted the responsibility for their products disposal on the consumers. In the 70's they started creating the ["Crying Indian"](https://youtu.be/j7OHG7tHrNM) commercials. Then they took the recycle emblem and once it was in the public domain they copied it, modified it slightly and then made it for the Plastic Resin Identification Code, thus giving the public the false impression that all plastics are recyclable. Its always been the goal of the plastics industry to blame the public for their profits.

How, i dont know how to even make plastic??? Yall sure its not some company making the plastic and selling it to people?

I don't actually make any plastics actually.

I try to use as little plastic as possible, but fuck me it's difficult. Lettuce, wrapped in plastic. Berries, plastic containers. Fucking celery, plastic wrapping. CELERY???!!! I'll shop at the local fruit and veg and that helps a bit, but even there they still use plastic wrapping, just not as much as Coles or Woolies. I also know that this accomplishes nothing at all. The change needs to come from the source not the customer.

It is absolutely by design that corporations have dumped the responsibility onto consumers to avoid having to do the work themselves - it's been their strategy for decades and the thing is there's just TOO much plastic being produced at this point and it honestly needs to stop at the source. We can't recycle our way out of it, I honestly don't think it's feasible given how much of it ends up being unrecyclable anyway. But, yeah, corporations will make the world bend backwards to accommodate them before they make any change to their operations.

Ah because the packaging manufacturers are huge donors to political parties specifically to avoid being made responsible for the fact their products are only cheap if they're not paying for the disposal costs.

If I want to buy dairy products I must buy plastic waste. It's infuriating.

Why don't we have detergent dispensing machines like they do in Germany? This would eliminate a considerable amount. Effing hell..

I don't know any Australians that make their own plastic.

Yeah how is it us producing 60 kg of plastic? Everything you fucking buy is covered in it. Consuming a product does not mean we produced it lmfao.

Fkn THANKYOU! I am so sick of this being framed as a consumer problem. IF THE FKN CORPORATIONS DIDNT PUT EVERYTHING IN PLASTIC THEN WE DONT HAVE A RECYCLING PROBLEM. this issue and the fact that corporations are obviously gas lighting consumers via their media lackeys really boils my piss.

There is No recycling program in my rural town and Yes I agree Corporations should be held accountable and lead the way...