As a former garbageman, I love stories like this. “Everything you’re doing to cut down on waste is wrong.”
OK. So what SHOULD we do?
“There’s NOTHING you can do.”
Shut up.
Derf is right. You should listen to Derf.
It drives me kind of crazy when smug assholes try to shame people about individual changes they make in their own lives and households to try to make the world a better place.
Yes, I am aware that we cannot save the world solely by individual solutions, and I am aware that the amount of water I save by turning off the faucet while brushing my teeth is literally a drop in the bucket (much less, actually) compared to the water wasted by industrial agriculture and manufacturing. I know that the recycling I carefully clean, separate, and take to the curb every Wednesday night probably all ends up getting mixed back together and dumped in a landfill wherever it eventually gets hauled off to.
But the thing is, the people making arguments about how these sorts of individual efforts have little actual effect are almost never doing so in good faith. It’s either some journalist cranking out an easy contrarian take, or it’s a cynical attempt to convince us that what we do doesn’t matter and we shouldn’t be bothered to care.