[patrec]

> Great Netflix is shutting down the business that produces so much unneeded plastic.

I'm baffled to see such an innumerate take on HackerNews of all places. Yearly US per capita plastic consumption is a few hundred kg. How much do you think a netflix subscription adds to that?

[Sankozi]

You are calling it innumerate while forgetting those plastic consumption number consists of lots of tiny things like the Netflix DVD consumption.

Almost every problem can be divided into many tiny ones, and solution to each tiny problem can be ridiculed that it solves only tiny bit of a problem.

[tfgg]

Honestly this sort of climate & environment tokenism frustrates me - spending a lot of energy trying to reduce and elimate things that barely matter (or even actually make things worse by displacement), while ignoring the big ticket items. At best it's innumerate, at worst it's greenwashing.

[Sankozi]

But nobody was doing that in this thread. Walteweiss was just pointing that Netflix DVD service closing has a significant positive side - less trash generated. Pointing it was called as "innumerate".

There are bigger problems for sure but there is also "there are bigger problems" fallacy (aka fallacy of relative privation).

[FeepingCreature]

The disagreement is precisely over whether the positive side is significant.

[im_z]

Again, ignoring the data centre side. It's not from thin air that you can stream.

[behringer]

Considering each disk is reused countless times, it wouldn't surprise me at all if streaming causes more pollution in aggregate.

[hombre_fatal]

What about shipping the disc back and forth?

[behringer]

It goes through the envelope sorting system. Incredibly efficient and due to ads being a usps money maker, you'll get mail regardless.

[bawolff]

> Honestly this sort of climate & environment tokenism frustrates me

As an hn'er you should be used to premature optimization ;)

[walteweiss]

I replied in the other comment, but I thought I’ll mention you as well. I agree that this is a tiny drop into the ocean, but I thing it’s still a positive change.

[Xylakant]

How much plastic does this actually produce? The DVDs are reused multiple times, as are the boxes. They are comparatively unlikely to end up in the environment, since they are in a closed and controlled environment - people are unlikely to just throw them out in the garbage. Packaging may be an issue. But there are many better ways to reduce plastic pollution - for example just driving a few miles less per year, or driving a lighter car: Tires are a much bigger source of plastic pollution and they shed microplastic directly into the environment and water runoff: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...

I'd rather have people kick back on their couch and watch a Netflix DVD instead of feeling great that they saved so much plastic, and then smugly drive their SUV to the next shopping mall.

[iFreilicht]

I wonder if the total amount of energy required to stream the same movie from a datacenter across the country might even lead to more CO2-emissions in total. The internet isn't carbon neutral yet.

It's probably an impossible question to answer.

[Xylakant]

Maybe, but the point here was plastic pollution. And there, streaming clearly wins, but I believe only marginally.

[patrec]

Plastic consumption only consists of lots of equally important tiny things like Netflix DVD subscriptions if you unable or unwilling to do basic arithmetic (i.e. are innumerate).

In reality of course there are a few big things that matter, and lots of tiny things (like Netflix DVD rentals) that don't. Two of the main sources of plastic waste are the packaging and textile industries. If you have a fast fashion habit it's pretty easy (and, at often single-digit $ prices per item, widely affordable) to rack up a few kg of plastic waste per year (a non-trivial fraction as micro-plastics). Now how much plastic waste do you estimate a Netflix DVD habit creates in comparison?

The best case scenario of the innumerate and self-righteous setting environmental agendas is that rather than addressing the big problems, attention gets frittered away on non-problems.

Often, of course what happens is that you end up with something that's much worse than doing nothing. Like for example the bogus plastic recycling policies enthusiastically enacted in much of the Western world, which saw to it that a lot of stuff which would have ended up harmlessly in landfills was loving hand-cleaned and shipped around half the world to Asia to be then dumped into the Oceans. Or “Green” politicians building brown coal plants like crazy.

[Sankozi]

You added "equally" to misrepresent my argument -> straw man.

You are comparing single DVD rental company with whole textile industry -> fallacy of relative privation.

Some of us just see a positive that less trash will be produced, less stuff will be moved around and you start mentioning "setting environmental agendas". How are those thing related? We cannot be happy until in single stroke we fix over 50% of a global problem? That will never happen.

You mention plastic recycling - I agree it is either pointless or harmful, depending how you look at. it. Do you really consider that not producing trash is also a failed policy? If not why are you doing this comparison?