this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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I agree with all of your points, but the original picture was showing plastic pollution and you went on to compare it with carbon emissions. So when you use a phrase like "total footprint" it's difficult to interpret that any other way than we must make one problem worse to solve the other.
I don't see why we can't have solutions that are low/zero carbon AND don't result in plastic being dumped in the ocean.
Is the goal to reduce plastic, or is the goal to live as long and sustainably as possible on the only known rock that can support human life?
But I see it as two sides of the same coin. Plastic or glass, we're not getting at the core problem, which is long distance, packaging intensive transportation of goods. Plastic is bad because it becomes trash, and eventually a pollutant. Glass may have less pollution in the product, but more pollution in the distribution.
Again, I agree. Rather than blindly reducing energy usage and/or reducing plastic pollution we should be looking towards any solution that works towards holistic sustainable living across the planet.
The only statement that I would debate is: "Glass may have less pollution in the product, but more pollution in the distribution."
The pollution in the distribution is currently carbon based output from fossil fuels, but it doesn't have to be. Also, the glass can be efficiently re-used in some cases. In the UK we used to have milk distributed in glass bottles, delivered by people on electric "milk floats", who collected the empties as they delivered the full ones every day. The bottles didn't get melted down, just washed and refilled. It seems possible to me that we could get that process to almost zero carbon whilst also using zero plastic.
That's one example, but a single holistic solution to both carbon output and low waste is probably not possible. To achieve the global sustainability that we all want will take different and innovative solutions in each use case.
I guess the OP's meme makes sense in some cases and not others, depending on perspective.