Earth matters

[Speaker to Animals]

Asians do not give a fuck.



Our plastic bags do not for the most part end up in the fucking oceans. Get real.

[Montegriffo]

Yeah, yeah, it's everyone elses fault.


The west is as guilty as everyone else.

[Speaker to Animals]

It's interesting living in the PNW and seeing how people do things differently. These mofos plastic bag everything. My favorite is when they plastic bag iceberg lettuce or the more common, package of meat. It's something that's wrapped in plastic, that gets wrapped in plastic, that gets put into another plastic bag when they bag it at the cashier.

I was out and about one day and thirsty, had to hit the grocery anyways, so besides picking up some food items I grabbed a gallon of water - get behind an elderly woman at the checkout with just a bottle of water, Perrier or some name brand (vs my generic gallon). She rings it up - $1.39 for a 16oz water. I look at her and hold up my gallon jug and say "89-cents for a gallon". She said she forgot to take her medication that morning so it was just to wash down a pill.

So I get rung up... And there's someone bagging who promptly takes the gallon jug of water, with a nice jug handle on it, and goes to put it into a plastic bag (??). I had to stop them and explain the jug already had a nice handle on it, plus it's heavy enough the bag might break, why waste more plastic bagging a jug with a nice carry handle on it already? The concept seemed to baffle them (though they did take it out and use the bag for the few other items I had).

I use the plastic bags as liners for the small trash bins in each room... And I stopped paying for trash pickup (at $50/mo... +$2 for recycling), made no sense - I generally toss a grocery bag or occasionally two a week, I dump them in the bin at the grocery store, gas station, etc, when I'm there anyways. And then every 3-4 weeks I'll take a couple bags of recycling to the drop off, for free. Not paying $52/mo for the "convenience" of having someone pick up maybe one 30gal trash bag and two of recycling every month when I can do it for free.

That’s called Dumping, and can get you a stiff fine. Don’t get caught.

I think some states put that under theft laws.

[Speaker to Animals]

Yeah, yeah, it's everyone elses fault.

It literally is every one else's fault. White people are not the problem.

#1. Plastic doesn't magically appear in the ocean. It has to arrive there. How does it do that? One way is through carelessness, such as littering. Litter can end up in storm drains, then washed out to sea. But if you're a responsible adult, and you put garbage in a trash can and recyclables in a recycling bin, everything will be okay. So, how does so much plastic get in the ocean?

#2. You aren't the problem. Asia is. Some of the nastiest, most polluted rivers in the world are in China and India. One study, published in October 2017 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, estimated that 88 to 95% of plastic pollution in the oceans came from just 10 rivers. Eight of them were in Asia, and the other two were in Africa.

Why are these countries such big polluters? Well, they're poor. They don't have good infrastructure for dealing with waste. As countries become wealthier, they are better able to clean up their messes. This is a phenomenon known as the environmental Kuznets curve. Instead of banning plastic straws, we should be focusing our efforts on helping developing countries become wealthier and healthier.

#3. Consumer plastics probably aren't the biggest problem. While a picture of a sea turtle with a straws in its nose is sad, photographs aren't necessarily representative of reality. Think of them as digital anecdotes. When surveys of ocean pollution are conducted, what researchers find is not plastic straws or bags but fishing gear. Lots and lots of fishing gear.

The Conclusion

The data are fully convincing: The developing world -- not America or Europe -- plays, by far, the largest role in polluting our oceans with plastic. If we want this pollution to stop, then we might want to consider helping them modernize their infrastructure. Finally, we should consider policies that punish commercial fishermen who leave nets and other gear in the water.

True, these policies are boring and spiritually unfulfilling. But the upshot is that they would probably work.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/as ... eans-13233

[jediuser598]

Asians do not give a fuck.



Our plastic bags do not for the most part end up in the fucking oceans. Get real.

Parents didn't have enough money to pay for trash service on the first house they rented out in the country, so my father being a drywaller traded service for service and had a gentleman use his back hoe to dig a, perhaps 10 foot deep, 20 foot wide hole in our back yard. (don't know the accurate dimensions, but it was huge to us kids) What'd we do? Dumped all of our trash in it. Of course as children (5-9 year olds) we played in it, was an adventure when it started filling up with water. We'd gather the garbage and build bridges and try not to fall in.

Gotta love growing up in the 90's. Asians? Hell that'd be an accurate picture of me and my siblings in the 90's.

[Speaker to Animals]

That's the source of the garbage in the oceans.

We ought to focus on that.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech ... ivers.html

[Speaker to Animals]

God knows these people are not going to do it either. The idea that they will develop and magically become like European peoples is fucking laughable. The best we can do is just offer to deal with it ourselves. We need some kind of large-scale technological solution to stop the garbage from those rivers from entering the oceans.

You can stop right now with the idea of somehow teaching these people to recycle or bury their trash in environmentally safe dumps. They really don't give a shit.

[Montegriffo]

[Ph64]

I was out and about one day and thirsty, had to hit the grocery anyways, so besides picking up some food items I grabbed a gallon of water - get behind an elderly woman at the checkout with just a bottle of water, Perrier or some name brand (vs my generic gallon). She rings it up - $1.39 for a 16oz water. I look at her and hold up my gallon jug and say "89-cents for a gallon". She said she forgot to take her medication that morning so it was just to wash down a pill.

So I get rung up... And there's someone bagging who promptly takes the gallon jug of water, with a nice jug handle on it, and goes to put it into a plastic bag (??). I had to stop them and explain the jug already had a nice handle on it, plus it's heavy enough the bag might break, why waste more plastic bagging a jug with a nice carry handle on it already? The concept seemed to baffle them (though they did take it out and use the bag for the few other items I had).

I use the plastic bags as liners for the small trash bins in each room... And I stopped paying for trash pickup (at $50/mo... +$2 for recycling), made no sense - I generally toss a grocery bag or occasionally two a week, I dump them in the bin at the grocery store, gas station, etc, when I'm there anyways. And then every 3-4 weeks I'll take a couple bags of recycling to the drop off, for free. Not paying $52/mo for the "convenience" of having someone pick up maybe one 30gal trash bag and two of recycling every month when I can do it for free.

That’s called Dumping, and can get you a stiff fine. Don’t get caught.

I think some states put that under theft laws.

I'm always buying something, pumping gas, drop it in as I'm walking into the grocery store, etc. And one grocery bag, if I have more than one I get rid of it at the next place (grocery then gas station or vice versa typically). I'm just availing myself of a service they provide to customers, and being a paying customer...

And I'm dropping one grocery bag in a trash bin between the pumps, or by the door, etc. I've watched people dump full sofas and lounge chairs into the dumpster behind a local convenience store (they put a camera out to record it eventually), I'm not abusive of their trash like that. "Could" just be I've kept a bag in the car for trash and I'm dumping it while getting gas after a few weeks of collecting stuff in it?

If I felt like it I'd save it for a month or two, fill a big black hefty bag, and drop it off where I take the recycling. Recycling is free, trash is $1/bag. It's just easier to get rid of it a little bit here and there if I'm buying something anyways.

[Speaker to Animals]

Absolutely booming.




That is a river, by the way, in case you were curious.