The world is on the brink of climate calamity: IPCC

[gardengal]

Mar 24, 2023 8:52:25 GMT -5 audette said:

Mar 23, 2023 22:13:03 GMT -5 chickadee77 said:

I apologize if I drove it in that direction; it was not my intent, and is not helpful. I was simply trying to point out that I do think, unfortunately, legislation needs to be a driving force to change. People can make demands, "speak with their wallets," and such, but until businesses are forced into it, I think capitalism is going to win in this country. I hope I'm wrong. If it's not profitable, it's not going to happen, and we're all up Shit Creek.

And, legislation can work.  People will gripe about it when it's enacted, but, generally, after it's in place, they get along with things like plastic bag bans, and so forth.

I think the biggest encourager of recycling I've seen, as I've moved from place to place - charging for trash by the bag.  You literally had to purchase trash bags, and the cost wasn't the cost of the bag, it was the cost of trash collection for the bag, once full.  Larger bags cost disproportionately more than smaller, because they took up more space.  Paired with stiff penalties for littering, and free recycling, compost, and cloth/rag pickup, it worked pretty well, as far as I could tell.  (I think there was another 2-3 categories of sorting, but I can't remember them all anymore.)

I am guessing that some of this system depended on underpaid waste handlers somewhere, because even having to purchase trash bags, it was not horribly expensive to buy them.  But, we were expats in Korea being paid US incomes, so our gauge for costs might not be ideal.

This is also the case in Switzerland. You buy special bags for trash.

And there’s also special twine to use to hold together newspapers or cardboard for recycling. There’s literally a separate place for plastic bottles you drink out of, cartons like for yogurt, & bottles/cartons with cleaning or laundry supplies. It is so granular. And, at least where we were, you carried your recycling with you to the grocery or train station or bin on the street for each specific category of recyclable. No one place accepted all the things. 

A fellow American my H was working with would say “the best way to strike up a conversation with a Swiss person is to try to put the wrong plastic in a bin.”

so true. Was recycling an absolute pain in the ass? YES! Did the waste also actually get recycled & did I reconsider buying something bc I knew the packaging would be difficult or confusing to recycle? Also YES. 

[audette]

Mar 24, 2023 9:24:14 GMT -5 gardengal said:

Mar 24, 2023 8:52:25 GMT -5 audette said:

And, legislation can work.  People will gripe about it when it's enacted, but, generally, after it's in place, they get along with things like plastic bag bans, and so forth.

I think the biggest encourager of recycling I've seen, as I've moved from place to place - charging for trash by the bag.  You literally had to purchase trash bags, and the cost wasn't the cost of the bag, it was the cost of trash collection for the bag, once full.  Larger bags cost disproportionately more than smaller, because they took up more space.  Paired with stiff penalties for littering, and free recycling, compost, and cloth/rag pickup, it worked pretty well, as far as I could tell.  (I think there was another 2-3 categories of sorting, but I can't remember them all anymore.)

I am guessing that some of this system depended on underpaid waste handlers somewhere, because even having to purchase trash bags, it was not horribly expensive to buy them.  But, we were expats in Korea being paid US incomes, so our gauge for costs might not be ideal.

This is also the case in Switzerland. You buy special bags for trash.

And there’s also special twine to use to hold together newspapers or cardboard for recycling. There’s literally a separate place for plastic bottles you drink out of, cartons like for yogurt, & bottles/cartons with cleaning or laundry supplies. It is so granular. And, at least where we were, you carried your recycling with you to the grocery or train station or bin on the street for each specific category of recyclable. No one place accepted all the things. 

A fellow American my H was working with would say “the best way to strike up a conversation with a Swiss person is to try to put the wrong plastic in a bin.”

so true. Was recycling an absolute pain in the ass? YES! Did the waste also actually get recycled & did I reconsider buying something bc I knew the packaging would be difficult or confusing to recycle? Also YES. 

In Korea, it was all in a centralized location for our building (high rise apartment complex, each building shared a collection spot with their neighbouring building in the complex)  The explanations of what went where were not great in English, but at least it was all located in one area for us!  (other than buying garbage bags at the store, but _every_ store carried them)  So you could take a big basket or whatever down with you and literally sort everything into the bin it was supposed to be placed into - they were all within a few steps of each other.  I used an old, large, lidding bucket for my compost, and took that down about every other day, and would usually take whatever else was ready for disposal at the same time.  Our apartment sink even had this funky spinner thing in the drain to spin dry any food remnants that could be composted, instead of a disposal in the sink.

[msmerymac]

Mar 24, 2023 8:46:22 GMT -5 scm1011 said:

Mar 23, 2023 18:55:02 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Y'all, she said "intentionally" meaning she chose a place in her budget that fit those criteria. Its not a judgement on where you live. Jeebus.

ETA: I was actually wondering when we'd get to the "but this couldn't possibly work for me" portion of the thread.

I didn't take it that way at all. I live in a nearly identical place for similar reasons (urban, walkable, plenty of public transit options and bike lanes, eco-conscious mentality), but I also paid a huge premium for that privilege. I have plenty of friends/neighbors who are dying to stay here but can't afford $3500 monthly rent or a $1M condo to make it happen and are being pushed out to suburbs that don't have the infrastructure my city has to support that lifestyle.

I am in the suburbs! I think living in the suburbs it's very easy to default to a house with 1/2 an acre on a dead end street, or something without sidewalks, of course. So that's what I meant by intentionally. We were limited to certain boroughs - those with SEPTA stations (though honestly, many boroughs grew up around their train stations, so an appreciation of older homes also came in handy here). My borough HAS become pricier, mostly due to the train station access, theater, restaurants, etc, but I'd like to think that's because there are more millennials who are thinking the way I did when they chose where to live. Not saying I wasn't privileged to be able to buy a house at all, but when I did, it was very affordable for us. It wasn't the absolute trendiest area then (but it's getting there), it just had benefits that would reduce our environmental impact, mainly by giving us non-driving options, limiting the size of our home to something comfortable but not opulent, and allowing us to compost and grow a small garden.

[scm1011]

Mar 24, 2023 12:43:12 GMT -5 msmerymac said:

Mar 24, 2023 8:46:22 GMT -5 scm1011 said:

I didn't take it that way at all. I live in a nearly identical place for similar reasons (urban, walkable, plenty of public transit options and bike lanes, eco-conscious mentality), but I also paid a huge premium for that privilege. I have plenty of friends/neighbors who are dying to stay here but can't afford $3500 monthly rent or a $1M condo to make it happen and are being pushed out to suburbs that don't have the infrastructure my city has to support that lifestyle.

I am in the suburbs! I think living in the suburbs it's very easy to default to a house with 1/2 an acre on a dead end street, or something without sidewalks, of course. So that's what I meant by intentionally. We were limited to certain boroughs - those with SEPTA stations (though honestly, many boroughs grew up around their train stations, so an appreciation of older homes also came in handy here). My borough HAS become pricier, mostly due to the train station access, theater, restaurants, etc, but I'd like to think that's because there are more millennials who are thinking the way I did when they chose where to live. Not saying I wasn't privileged to be able to buy a house at all, but when I did, it was very affordable for us. It wasn't the absolute trendiest area then (but it's getting there), it just had benefits that would reduce our environmental impact, mainly by giving us non-driving options, limiting the size of our home to something comfortable but not opulent, and allowing us to compost and grow a small garden.

That makes sense and I agree people should think more intentionally about these things. My point was more that those characteristics come with an increased price tag, at least around here (largely because you're right, more millennials and younger are putting value in these attributes). We moved here 15 years ago when the neighborhood was still transitioning from its prior sketchy reputation but we would never be able to get in now. 

[nothingcontroversial]

Mar 21, 2023 19:34:33 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Mar 21, 2023 19:22:28 GMT -5 wanderingback said:

Also, I wonder how much the small things add up.
For example, when I lived overseas, going to the grocery store the selection of items available was much smaller. For some reason I’ve been paying attention to how obsessed our culture seems to be with clothes smelling like flowers after washing them. There are so many scent boosters and scent beads and all this other random crap for laundry. So I presume some people buy detergent, plus scent boosters plus fabric softener plus who knows what else. Not only is it wasteful at the individual consumer level to have 4 different items to wash your clothes, what is the environmental impact on making all those products, shipping them, marketing them, etc. Why can’t we just have unscented detergent and call it a day?! Capitalism I guess!

I posted an article a while ago that scented products (which includes "unscented" products) contribute more to air pollution than cars right now.

pandce.proboards.com/thread/628206/ozone-pollution-coming-oil-inside?page=1

Someone referenced Bath and Body Works in that link.


@@@ Just a reminder that the founder and chairman emeritus of Bath & Body Works, Les Wexner, allowed Jeffrey Epstein to run his business out of a house that he owned and resided in whilst CEO of Victoria's Secret. 

[wawa]

Mar 24, 2023 12:51:01 GMT -5 scm1011 said:

Mar 24, 2023 12:43:12 GMT -5 msmerymac said:

I am in the suburbs! I think living in the suburbs it's very easy to default to a house with 1/2 an acre on a dead end street, or something without sidewalks, of course. So that's what I meant by intentionally. We were limited to certain boroughs - those with SEPTA stations (though honestly, many boroughs grew up around their train stations, so an appreciation of older homes also came in handy here). My borough HAS become pricier, mostly due to the train station access, theater, restaurants, etc, but I'd like to think that's because there are more millennials who are thinking the way I did when they chose where to live. Not saying I wasn't privileged to be able to buy a house at all, but when I did, it was very affordable for us. It wasn't the absolute trendiest area then (but it's getting there), it just had benefits that would reduce our environmental impact, mainly by giving us non-driving options, limiting the size of our home to something comfortable but not opulent, and allowing us to compost and grow a small garden.

That makes sense and I agree people should think more intentionally about these things. My point was more that those characteristics come with an increased price tag, at least around here (largely because you're right, more millennials and younger are putting value in these attributes). We moved here 15 years ago when the neighborhood was still transitioning from its prior sketchy reputation but we would never be able to get in now. 

This is unquestionably true on the macro scale. The cost of housing has become astronomical, and the cost of housing in transit accessible, walkable places with nearby services is insane in many places because it's too scarce of a resource thanks to a whole combo of reasons (urban disinvestment, nimbyism, highways destroying cities, suburbanization of the whole country, car culture, etc etc etc)


I'm not disagreeing at all...but some additional thoughts: I do often feel like the cheese who stands alone in terms of valuing walkability and transit access and energy efficiency off this board among "my demographic" (i.e. the D voting minivan crowd) because it's such an afterthought for so many people, and for those who do think about it they're so hyperfocused on their commute that they don't consider the rest of their lives. I live very much in the suburbs, and I've resisted moving to another very similar nearby suburb closer to family in large part because here we can walk to a park, and a corner store, a few restaurants, school and bike to the grocery store and the library. I can't walk or bike to work; I have to drive to a park and ride to get my bus to work - but every OTHER trip we take has potential to be low impact. And people really underestimate that - our home-work trips are a fraction of our overall vehicle miles traveled (nationwide it was under 20% in 2017), and that fraction has dropped even lower post covid based on preliminary data. 


There are other factors, and sure, it's not a choice that EVERYBODY can make, but it's a factor everybody should be considering if you profess to give a fuck. People who live in an area with literally zero transit - ok, fine, but can you walk or bike to SOMETHING? Why not? is there somewhere you could have lived that has that as an option? What's the trade-off?  Even in the middest of mid-west developers are building some town center style developments in the burbs with some integrated retail and community amenities. Small towns otherwise in the middle of nowhere are often SUPER walkable if you're willing to give up some yard space or number of bathrooms and no bonus rooms with an older home.

[hannahgruen]

I just scanned the article, so if this has been covered, I apologize. I think recycling is good, we do it.  But it's not going to save the world. The real culprits are the gas/oil and manufacturing companies. They have huge lobbies, and all they care about is making more and more money. We live by oil refineries and they flare fairly often. There's not supposed to be anything harmful about this, but who really knows?

As for living near mass housing with nearby transportation, we live in the suburbs, not close to public transportation. We couldn't afford to live by it, plus we wanted land. As for public transportation, a 20 minute car ride takes 3 hours on the bus because of all the stops they make.

[pixy0stix]

Mar 30, 2023 16:10:49 GMT -5 hannahgruen said:

I just scanned the article, so if this has been covered, I apologize. I think recycling is good, we do it.  But it's not going to save the world. The real culprits are the gas/oil and manufacturing companies. They have huge lobbies, and all they care about is making more and more money. We live by oil refineries and they flare fairly often. There's not supposed to be anything harmful about this, but who really knows?

As for living near mass housing with nearby transportation, we live in the suburbs, not close to public transportation. We couldn't afford to live by it, plus we wanted land. As for public transportation, a 20 minute car ride takes 3 hours on the bus because of all the stops they make.

So not only did you not read the article, you didn't read the thread. Cool. Cool cool cool.

[wawa]

Mar 30, 2023 16:10:49 GMT -5 hannahgruen said:

I just scanned the article, so if this has been covered, I apologize. I think recycling is good, we do it.  But it's not going to save the world. The real culprits are the gas/oil and manufacturing companies. They have huge lobbies, and all they care about is making more and more money. We live by oil refineries and they flare fairly often. There's not supposed to be anything harmful about this, but who really knows?

As for living near mass housing with nearby transportation, we live in the suburbs, not close to public transportation. We couldn't afford to live by it, plus we wanted land. As for public transportation, a 20 minute car ride takes 3 hours on the bus because of all the stops they make.

thanks for sharing.