[samrus]

These days, you never hear about reduce, reuse, recycle, and how its supposed to be in that priority order. When i was a kid thats what we were taught. Now its just recycle, recycle, recycle

My conspiracy theory is corporate propaganda changed it because reduce and reuse decreases demand, while recycle potentially only lowers production cost

[fiatpandas]

I highly recommend the documentary Plastic Wars (Frontline). It’s about how the plastics industry made a major marketing push for recycling starting in the 80s, in order to avoid plastic bans and ensure production continued to increase. It shifted the burden of plastic waste from producers to consumers, and we are essentially still in that conceptual space (at least in the US).

[adastra22]

For sure. Plastic packaging keeps the product fresh and hermetically sealed from the clean factory / production depot to your store and eventual home. Get rid of plastic and there will be a LOT more spoilage.

Maybe that's an acceptable tradeoff, but most people don't even realize there is a tradeoff being made...

[timeon]

The goal of green-washing is to keep 'unlimited' growth.