this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Because everything is on fire and while using less soap and laundry detergent bottles is certainly a good goal to aim for, it is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic and worse it is rearranging deck chairs according to the directions of a captain who is trying to distract everyone from dealing with the fact that the ship is sinking.
Recycling by and large doesn’t work but corporations really don’t care because recycling is a great way to sell consumers the experience of being environmental when consuming and it provides way to shift blame and get people focused on recycling rather than the actions of big corporations.
As recycling implodes as a cultural ritual of “doing your part” to save the environment there has been a rise in advertisements from companies selling smaller detergent and soap bottles and I think they are trying to fulfill the same emotional need and story .
Which isn’t to say these soap bottles aren’t a good thing, but if the left leaning people you interact with aren’t focused on this… I don’t think that is indicative of anything but the high number of existential environmental problems we face and the general refusal of neoliberal and rightwing governments to tackle them.
Basically this.
Going green is good, but the reality is it's out of the control of the average individual. Corporations sold us the blame, made us feel like we could do something so they could pass it off as our responsibility.
Even if every single low to middle income family took charge and did everything they could at their own inconvenience, the progress would still be far less in comparison to what the wealthy could achieve. Sadly, we barely ever think about this and even modern climate activists like that young Swedish girl have come to perpetuate the lie that the wealthy have sold us.
Not all recycling is useless. Aluminium and glass are two things that benefit greatly from recycling. Recycling aluminum takes 95% less energy than smelting it from ore, simply because it's such a complex process. And recycling glass is just a matter of re-melting it.
Not debating that certain types of recycling work, but if we don't disconnect the word "recycling" from "wholesome and good!" we are going to keep hallucinating that we are in a far different problem than we are. so I am hesitant to start immediately listing all the types of recycling that do work when having a conversation about how recycling doesn't work because that just reframes the conversation under terms of a status quo "recycling just needs to be reformed to work for more things!" fashion in the same way that "clean coal" is a purposeful dead end taken to postpone an upheaval of the status quo.
It all comes down to the same basic premise: we aren't going to consume our way out of the climate catastrophe. I don't blame people for thinking this, though. If you've lived your whole life under an economy and social order who's keystone and ultimate guiding force is consumption, it's easy to see consumption as your only recourse. Something something, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like nails. Our only option is to completely dismantle the systems that catalyzed the climate crisis: embracing anti-capitalism, crushing special interests, and ultimately empowering working class people.
I don’t blame people either, I was raised in the same frame of reference that we have to consume our way out of this crisis and that the environmental crisis is fundamentally a story of our collective moral failings to be personally responsible.
People want to fix things, and I will be the last person to say that helping out a little bit doesn’t go a long way. It’s just, we need to evolve our understanding past framing the climate crisis as a story of our average people not having any personal responsibility to a frame of reference where we understand the class politics, the power of corporations to undermine environmentalism and the general collective solidarity between workers globally that will actually have the power to halt the climate crisis.
How does empowering working class people solve the consumption issue though?
I didn't mention recycling, but then, I didn't mention much about the topic.
It's not recycling that's the issue. It's the fact that millions of people are paying to move mostly water around, which has - in aggregate - a huge impact in terms of fuel consumption. Each bottle of hand soap is not expensive to transport, and cleans far less, than a single bar of solid soap. And this isn't the only environmental impact; recycling or no, bar soap requires far less packaging, and that packaging is often renewable resources that are bio-degradable, whereas liquid soap nearly uniformly requires quite a lot of plastic packaging.
These weren't the only points in ecological favor of bar soap; I didn't memorize the list, but the arguments were substantial, unequivocal, and not debatable. And easily discoverable online.