While recycling is last in that mantra, it is overemphasized more than the other two. It shifts the onus of stewarding our environment to the individual rather than the corporations and militaries, which wreck our planet more than any individual can. They'd rather you not look at what they're doing to the environment, and instead look at the individual.
Moreover, companies don't want you to reduce your consumption, they want you to keep buying their products. Reuse? Nah, here are products that are obsolete, buy the new model.
Repair! We should fight for that. I want to be able to repair not just my electronics (or pay someone to do it for me), but also my tools and machines.
Anything that doesn't imply infinite growth is taboo... Which is weird because it will for sure happen, the question is whether you plan it or suffer from it
Making products that are hard to repair and which don't last long are the huge culprits. Also, when it comes to clothing, it is all fast fashion. Wear a few times, then dump.
Also labor costs to repair in the developed world is another factor.
For what it's worth, the mantra I was taught in the U.S. in the 1990s was ordered "recycle, reduce, reuse," but there was no indication that the ordering mattered. We were just taught about all three things.
It's a crime from a criminal to scam the bank. Instead of the bank being held accountable for mistaking the identity (or don't do enough due diligent), the concept shifts the blame to the account owner, saying it's their fault for having their identity "stolen", despite them was not involved in the scam process.
A good resource for anyone dealing with credit issues due to identity theft. If I recall correctly, the advice boils down to notifying the bank that the transaction was fraudulent and then notifying credit unions that the bank has been notified that the transaction is fraudulent. Of course, doing all this through proper channels. It’s still bullshit how banks sabotaged public knowledge of it but at least the law favors the consumer.
> An organized effort to shift blame/responsibility
That seems like a very odd view to me. The article points out the rising tide of traffic accidents that led to these laws being passed. As automobiles became ubiquitous it was more and more dangerous for pedestrians to walk on roads. So the laws followed this. That auto companies were involved in the lobbying process is a non-factor; even if we had increased criminal liability for traffic fatalities, the fundamental problem is that law is downstream of culture, and that we would reach a breaking point where juries would simply not convict drivers, as it became more and more common wisdom to be wary of automobiles when crossing streets.
No grand conspiracy is necessary here, this is just technology changing society and laws adapting to that reality.
Jaywalking was an invented term but it was not a new concept created as part of a conspiracy to steal the streets from pedestrians.
Prior to the invention of the automobile, if a pedestrian walked onto a public street and was struck and killed by a vehicle, the pedestrian was 100% at fault unless the driver was negligent. Merely operating a vehicle in a normal manner was not negligence.
It has been understood since the construction of Pompeii at the latest, that pedestrians belong on sidewalks and vehicles in the road.
Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris was built in the 1600s with sidewalks.
All of the oldest photos from the 1800s of major cities show a separation of vehicles and pedestrians.
If you have access to a newspaper archive like I do you can run a search for jaywalking and sort by oldest result.
Most of the pushback to jaywalking laws was because they required crossing at corners, not the middle of the street.
People instinctively (wrongly) believed that crossing in the middle was safer. Statisticians know that corners are safer.
Fun fact: you were more likely to die being run over by a horse in New York City prior to the invention of the automobile than you are to be struck and killed by an automobile today.
Much MUCH more likely.
>Horses killed in other, more direct ways as well. As difficult as it may be to believe given their low speeds, horse-drawn vehicles were far deadlier than their modern
counterparts. In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. This contrasts with 344 auto-related fatalities in New York in 2003; given the
modern city’s greater population, this means the fatality rate per capita in the horse era was roughly 75 percent higher than today. Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there
were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city’s fatality rate per auto in 1997.
344 is a lot. In 2024, there were 252 auto-related fatalities (drivers, occupants, cyclists, and pedestrians) in NYC.
I once saw an article that in the 1800s there were over 150 fatalities per year in San Francisco due to street cars alone so I wager the increasing value of human life in the early 1900s also contributed to jaywalking laws.
Everyone just used to accept people dying left and right due to horses and trains.
But again, it WAS NOT a conspiracy to steal the streets from pedestrians.
> People instinctively (wrongly) believed that crossing in the middle was safer. Statisticians know that corners are safer.
I refuse to believe this without attribution. Sure, "jaywalking" might be more dangerous than crossing at corners, but I'm highly confident that controlled zebra crossings in the middle of the street are safer.
Honest/naive question: If something like https://www.preciousplastic.com/universe/how-does-it-work was in much, much wider use, would it have any realistic impact on the problem about recycling plastic? Since it's doing it in a very different way, and seems better at actually reusing the material.
Glass bottle recycling is a pretty cool process, the “How It’s Made” episode on fiberglass insulation is awesome. They basically crush the bottles and make glass cotton candy out of it. It’s nearly a 100% conversion and it ends up going into creating new housing for people. Basically the best kind of recycling.
What gets me about public recycling communications/outreach/programs is that they always emphasize "recycle more" and never "recycle carefully". Really it should be "First, don't put junk in the recycling (do no harm). Second, if you have clean appropriate objects, put them in the recycling."
In fancy office buildings and residential buildings around NYC I've seen inappropriate junk in the recycling all the time, practically every time I put in my recycling. Plastic wraps and plastic milk cartons in the paper. Paper and food in the bottles/cans. It's always unclear about toys and household plastic objects that very likely have additives that make them not recyclable. Nobody ever emphasizes recycling correctly, but in any documentary where they look inside recycling centers you see them dealing with machines clogged with inappropriate materials, huge bales of negative-value mixed materials, etc. This is the stuff that was getting secretly shipped to Asia for dubious handling because it was too low-value for actual processing/usage in the US.
I don't blame oil companies, or manufacturers, really everyone has been in on this collective delusion: teachers, politicians, community organizers, everyone I see is all about more recycling, recycling good. While actually we've been trashing the recycling systems/processes for decades, while cheering it on. And I'm some weird nerd engineer type who cares if thing work or not.
Landfilling plastic is fine. The problem is introducing disposable plastic to places without adequate waste management. If people are just going to throw their empty containers into the river, paper will quickly degrade and glass will sink to the bottom and eventually be crushed back into sand. Metals are usually valuable enough that they are collected for recycling, even in coutries without great waste management.
For recycling one of the hardest problems is separating plastics out from the rest. The rest is causing issues in landfills: landfill gas containing methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, leachates contaminating groundwater. If you have the plastics already sorted out recycling them makes more sense even on the short term.
It's also very easy to underestimate the costs of landfilling, because you have to keep them up basically forever. Having one person look after it for ten thousand years is higher than having ten thousand people look after it for one year, because wages rise faster than inflation.
Removing all plastic from landfills wouldn't really change anything. Landfills are already lined to prevent leaking for decades and then there are monitoring systems for heavy metals and other harmful chemicals anyway.
It's not perfect but it's okay, and better than the alternatives.
In the US they pretended they were going to do it then never did anything to put it into practice.
When people realised this they didn't get angry at the corporations or the politicians they bought. They just decided that the thing that all the relevant experts recommended was a scam that they were too smart to fall for.
See recent YouTube video "Does recycling even do anything?" by Simon Clark for some more realistic takes on recycling.
WHy is your initial answer 'no' when the backend of the answer is functionally "But they got away with the recycling scam."
Seems like your initial answer would actually be 'yes?' Specifically because the "non-functional governments were unable to implement this as a cost to the producers."
Plastics producers are absolutely trying to shift the blame of these failed programs onto "personal responsibility."
Because the scam wasn't recycling, it was pretending to recycle and not doing it.
Just as a company promising to use solar energy and not doing so doesn't discredit solar energy.
And as you can see by the reactions around you, no one is angry that the recycling isn't being done. They're angry at the recycling. A process that directly completes with big oil's product. That's the scam.
Overall doesn't aluminum consume the most energy when processing from ore vs copper steel. I remember watching aluminum production on How It's Made and the vast amount of coal needed to produce electricity to break the aluminum out of molten bauxite ore.
I feel bad for all the sorters that have to sift through trash, who know most of the stuff will just get thrown in the landfill. Some people treat the recycle bin as a second trash can.
Especially on trash day when dog walkers go out of their way to throw their doggie bags in recycling bins on the sidewalk rather than the trash bin next to them.
There's no real punishment for missorting recycling, but I guess it's hard to prove who did what when trash collection is the way it is.
Readit News
While recycling is last in that mantra, it is overemphasized more than the other two. It shifts the onus of stewarding our environment to the individual rather than the corporations and militaries, which wreck our planet more than any individual can. They'd rather you not look at what they're doing to the environment, and instead look at the individual.
Moreover, companies don't want you to reduce your consumption, they want you to keep buying their products. Reuse? Nah, here are products that are obsolete, buy the new model.
I think minimalism/no buy movements are big though.
Also labor costs to repair in the developed world is another factor.
They pause for breaks to sell you things and the pauses are unashamedly called “commercials”
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
It's a crime from a criminal to scam the bank. Instead of the bank being held accountable for mistaking the identity (or don't do enough due diligent), the concept shifts the blame to the account owner, saying it's their fault for having their identity "stolen", despite them was not involved in the scam process.
An individual couldn’t pull that in any other transaction.
A good resource for anyone dealing with credit issues due to identity theft. If I recall correctly, the advice boils down to notifying the bank that the transaction was fraudulent and then notifying credit unions that the bank has been notified that the transaction is fraudulent. Of course, doing all this through proper channels. It’s still bullshit how banks sabotaged public knowledge of it but at least the law favors the consumer.
That seems like a very odd view to me. The article points out the rising tide of traffic accidents that led to these laws being passed. As automobiles became ubiquitous it was more and more dangerous for pedestrians to walk on roads. So the laws followed this. That auto companies were involved in the lobbying process is a non-factor; even if we had increased criminal liability for traffic fatalities, the fundamental problem is that law is downstream of culture, and that we would reach a breaking point where juries would simply not convict drivers, as it became more and more common wisdom to be wary of automobiles when crossing streets.
No grand conspiracy is necessary here, this is just technology changing society and laws adapting to that reality.
Prior to the invention of the automobile, if a pedestrian walked onto a public street and was struck and killed by a vehicle, the pedestrian was 100% at fault unless the driver was negligent. Merely operating a vehicle in a normal manner was not negligence.
It has been understood since the construction of Pompeii at the latest, that pedestrians belong on sidewalks and vehicles in the road.
Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris was built in the 1600s with sidewalks.
All of the oldest photos from the 1800s of major cities show a separation of vehicles and pedestrians.
If you have access to a newspaper archive like I do you can run a search for jaywalking and sort by oldest result.
Most of the pushback to jaywalking laws was because they required crossing at corners, not the middle of the street.
People instinctively (wrongly) believed that crossing in the middle was safer. Statisticians know that corners are safer.
Fun fact: you were more likely to die being run over by a horse in New York City prior to the invention of the automobile than you are to be struck and killed by an automobile today.
Much MUCH more likely.
>Horses killed in other, more direct ways as well. As difficult as it may be to believe given their low speeds, horse-drawn vehicles were far deadlier than their modern counterparts. In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. This contrasts with 344 auto-related fatalities in New York in 2003; given the modern city’s greater population, this means the fatality rate per capita in the horse era was roughly 75 percent higher than today. Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city’s fatality rate per auto in 1997.
https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/20...
344 is a lot. In 2024, there were 252 auto-related fatalities (drivers, occupants, cyclists, and pedestrians) in NYC.
I once saw an article that in the 1800s there were over 150 fatalities per year in San Francisco due to street cars alone so I wager the increasing value of human life in the early 1900s also contributed to jaywalking laws.
Everyone just used to accept people dying left and right due to horses and trains.
But again, it WAS NOT a conspiracy to steal the streets from pedestrians.
I refuse to believe this without attribution. Sure, "jaywalking" might be more dangerous than crossing at corners, but I'm highly confident that controlled zebra crossings in the middle of the street are safer.
#925: A Mob Boss, A Garbage Boat and Why We Recycle
Recycling aluminum cans is fantastic. Clear glass bottles and corrugated cardboard are also great for recycling.
In fancy office buildings and residential buildings around NYC I've seen inappropriate junk in the recycling all the time, practically every time I put in my recycling. Plastic wraps and plastic milk cartons in the paper. Paper and food in the bottles/cans. It's always unclear about toys and household plastic objects that very likely have additives that make them not recyclable. Nobody ever emphasizes recycling correctly, but in any documentary where they look inside recycling centers you see them dealing with machines clogged with inappropriate materials, huge bales of negative-value mixed materials, etc. This is the stuff that was getting secretly shipped to Asia for dubious handling because it was too low-value for actual processing/usage in the US.
I don't blame oil companies, or manufacturers, really everyone has been in on this collective delusion: teachers, politicians, community organizers, everyone I see is all about more recycling, recycling good. While actually we've been trashing the recycling systems/processes for decades, while cheering it on. And I'm some weird nerd engineer type who cares if thing work or not.
Still, it is probably good to remove it from other places.
It's also very easy to underestimate the costs of landfilling, because you have to keep them up basically forever. Having one person look after it for ten thousand years is higher than having ten thousand people look after it for one year, because wages rise faster than inflation.
In places with functional government they actually implemented it at the cost of the producers.
"Extended producer responsibility"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili...
It's not perfect but it's okay, and better than the alternatives.
In the US they pretended they were going to do it then never did anything to put it into practice.
When people realised this they didn't get angry at the corporations or the politicians they bought. They just decided that the thing that all the relevant experts recommended was a scam that they were too smart to fall for.
See recent YouTube video "Does recycling even do anything?" by Simon Clark for some more realistic takes on recycling.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iOtrvBdRx8I
Seems like your initial answer would actually be 'yes?' Specifically because the "non-functional governments were unable to implement this as a cost to the producers."
Plastics producers are absolutely trying to shift the blame of these failed programs onto "personal responsibility."
Just as a company promising to use solar energy and not doing so doesn't discredit solar energy.
And as you can see by the reactions around you, no one is angry that the recycling isn't being done. They're angry at the recycling. A process that directly completes with big oil's product. That's the scam.
It is the most common mineral.
But yeah, it's nasty when you look in the big recycle dumpsters we have here and see the things people throw in there.
There's no real punishment for missorting recycling, but I guess it's hard to prove who did what when trash collection is the way it is.