I never had any issues with paper straws. Is it a skill issue?
I’ve definitely noticed paper straws come in different qualities, and are affected differently depending on what you’re drinking. But the ones that turn mushy were largely phased out of use because I’m sure a lot of people complained. I haven’t had a mushy straw in years.
I haven’t had a mushy straw in years.
Same and the great irony is that people use paper straws as an example of a minor change to stop climate change when billionaires fly around on jets outputting a ton of co2… but paper straws have nothing to do with co2 output or climate change… they are to reduce single use plastics polluting the environment…
Same.
The people I’ve noticed complain seem to buy giant drinks and let them sit around for a while.
Never been a fan of flat warm soft drinks myself.
I gotta be honest, I would personally insert a straw into the nose of every baby seal on earth for a flying cruise ship.
I don’t know, there’s a lot of baby seals
That’s sad as hell tbh
Baby seals know what they’ve done
Eco-friendly straws don’t have to be mushy paper.
There are several other “vegetable plastics” that last long enough to serve as a fully functional straw, but months later degrade naturally. The reason you don’t see them being used is because McDonald’s doesn’t want to spend an extra $0.10 on every order, because that would totally bankrupt the billionaire company you know.
In the last week I had the opportunity to use metal straws and bamboo straws. Much better than paper straws.
I carry metal straws for this reason. I also bring my own cup, and most places I visit let me use both.
I visited a Chinese monastery in 2018 and spent 4 months learning the discipline and art of tipfu -the study of tipping a cup at the right angle to sip liquid without the use of a straw. I’m currently yellow belt.
Flex!!
Man, I’m lucky if I remember to bring my bags to the grocery store…
I still propose that we just stop with the single use straws and if people want straws for their drinks that badly they can bring their own reusable one, and if it isn’t takeout the restaurant can provide a reusable one.
Like seriously why does everything need a straw?
The best I’ve found is sugarcane straws. They cost 15cad for a 100 pack compared to 10dollars for 100 plastic straws, which is small enough to not matter to me.
I know for a fact they dissolve as I throw them into my own compost, and also they dissolve to nothing if added to hot water (side note, you should never drink hot drinks out of straws).
Yep, sugarcane polymers are amazing. They can be made to dissolve quickly or last a little longer, depending on your needs. Technically they could be used as full packaging for chips and bread and similar foods.
There is a hollow grass based solution used in asia which requires zero processing beyond cutting, drying and packaging. But I’ll keep the paper straws if the billionaires have to travel in paper planes and boats.
I’m curious as to why you’re using a straw at all.
is it that because you’re at a restaurant?
You should know that by giving most restaurants your patronage, you are contributing to a lifestyle that we all cannot participate in.
What does this even mean?
It means that anyone who does anything totally sucks.
Oh totally. billionaires carbon footprint is many orders of magnitude larger than multiple lifetimes and generations of us normies. Abolish billionaires. Redistribute that wealth. The environmental future we want - NOW.
And yet, there aren’t very many of them but there are billions of us.
Even if their lifestyles result in 1000x as much pollution, they only represent 0.00004% of the worldwide population, which is not enough to move the needle.
To put that in perspective, metro Tokyo has a population of approximately 38 million. If the fraction of billionaires in Tokyo matches the global ratio, there would be about 15 billionaires in Tokyo. Anything 15 people do in Tokyo will be just noise compared to what the other 37,999,985 people do.
Let’s just pretend that all 3000 of the world’s billionaires lived in the USA. They’d still only make up 0.001% of the entire US population. Even if they were flying around in personal jets, being followed by Airbus Beluga jets carrying their yachts, it would still pale in comparison to the sheer number of people currently suffering in economy class right now.
I still think billionaires should be squashed by a hydraulic press, but I’m not kidding myself into thinking that doing that will have any impact on the environment at all. I support it more because they’re greedy assholes who are taking far more than their share, and who are using their immense wealth to distort the well functioning governing of the world.
They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change, so we’re busting our ass off to reduce and they don’t even pretend to care. In truth we could do more for the environment with guillotines than paper straws
They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change
They tricked us into believing metric fucktons of single use plastics would keep us safe and healthy.
But we never had any direct control over climate policy, because we never had any direct control over the capital itself.
All we could do was blame ourselves.
I’m so confused by you guys, how is reducing the amount of single use plastics in the environment a bad thing?
Individuals opting out of use doesn’t shape production or wholesale, because they’re so damned cheap to produce and the expense to dispose of them is on the public side.
Single use plastics are a classic case of Negative Externality. You can only curb them with public policies and bulk production level decisions.
The notion that “I’m doing my part” by not partaking in the fountain of free-at-point-of-service goods is predicated on an engineered misunderstanding of the plastics supply chain.
Canada has banned a bunch of single use plastics (including straws, cutlery, styrofoam containers, stir sticks and bags) as a direct result of public conversation that started with the straw in that turtles nose.
Did they?
I can’t recall anyone ever being anything but nonplussed and skeptical about paper straws. From what I can tell, it was a product of a think tank that pushed into the news, which then caused businesses to treat that as though it were public demand and pushed it out to everyone, and most people shrugged, used the obviously inferior product (because it was free and the alternatives require attention), and then people got on with their day.
On the wider scale this was pitched as ‘the only thing you can personally do to combat climate change’ - but I suspect it is the literal strawman of a figurative progressive position, purposely pushing a manufactured defective solution as a means to distract and suppress more substantive change and organization thereof.
paper straws were about trash, not C02.
they used to make them with a wax coating so they would not get mushy.
Those ships are powered by baby chickens.
First they load up the tanks full of baby chickens. The chicks travel into a conveyor belt where a long row of old women pick up the chicks to if they are male or female. The females are grown to make more eggs. The males are tossed into the intake. The males are then mixed with air and tar and then injected into the piston at high pressure. Once top dead center is reached, a spark drivers the pressures to hundreds of PSI and as much as 800 C. The chicks have been known to survive up to that moment.
If they can perfect chick injection they will try more compact fuels like puppies, crocks, whales, baby elephants, the homeless and or orphans. They might end up stuck with birds so they might try just eagles. There are enough of each eagle to push the boats a good two or three miles!
Someone has just watched Baraka. Good choice of movie my friend!
you must have some really good weed
We are jealous.
Always remember that coke and pepsi do not use recycled plastic in their coke or pepsi packaging, yet they are outwardly huge proponents of recycling the waste they create
Me switching to European cans of cola :3
Do they not elsewhere? Is it just Australia?
We want our packaging to have more than one life. In Australia, all our bottles and cans can be recycled and all our soft drink and water bottles under 1L are made from 100% recycled plastic*.
*Excl. cap and label
https://www.coca-cola.com/au/en/offerings/thank-you-for-recycling
Fuck the billionaires that do that, but that doesn’t mean that me using a straw isnt still making the shit worse. At least I can sleep at night knowing I am not making the situation worse, and I will still try to vote for politicians that are fighting against the billionaires
Sorry, but I am confiscating your moral license if the straw you use is justification.
The straw you use does nothing but make you feel better, which I would argue is harmful. You shouldn’t feel better for doing nothing when such large problems exist.
Your use of the right straw is akin to you killing a single invasive ant in a rain forest, and saying you did your part to remove the invasive colony. You then spend every opportunity talking about how you killed that single ant, all while the ants have already multiplied and utterly nullified your non-effort contribution.
Shipping barges, data centers, meat production, gas and coal burning are all many orders of magnitudes greater problems than what straw you use. Gas, coal, and fossil fuel use is over 70% of all emissions, so that should be the primary conversation. In addition, these are all growing in use. Talk about that. Put your attention and action towards that.
The straw is a metaphor for doing what you can in your own world no matter how small, not the absolute culmination of all the good that we’ve done.
We can all do much more than straws.
Do you know what a metaphor is?
It’s replacing real action in place of a good feeling. It’s THE plan to not do anything effective.
The non mushy straws aren’t terrible, but all rubberized tires are, whether on cars or bikes. The car ones are much worse.
And air travel is even worse still
But not close to industrial pollution which is exponentially greater.
The billionaires could care more and put some R&D into it. They just dont.
The normalization of needless single use products, like straws, by making them non plastic DOES make things worse. It delays real action, like removing straws altogether.
It’s greenwashing inherently unsustainable practices, just like introducing carbon capture technology on oil rigs or hyping electric cars as a way to keep the auto industry going (while suppressing more efficient means of transportation).
If we’re not going to fix shit, then why the fuck bother with mushy straws.
Agree with this take. It’s like yeah electric cars are technically better, but any advantage they have over combustion engines is blown away by things like public transportation, or designing walkable/cyclable cities.
Our solutions can’t just rely on swapping out for “greener” tech. We need radical changes to how we are currently living in order to ensure a livable future.
There is no future that is not radical. This gradualist, neolib (let’s make sure all the investors get a chance to divest from dirty tech before switching!) fantasy will fuck us. It’s been fucking us for a hundred years. It’s time to try literally anything else.
Our (Germany) cities are pretty much “walkable”, yet the public transportation sucks big sweaty monkey balls. Wherever you wanna go, plan a lot of additional time. And then it’s either
A) pay first class and enjoy SOME comfort (while still have to get TO the train in a horrible way)
Or
B) use the “normal” way and stay the whole time pressed against stinky other humans that breathe in your neck.
One way is far too expensive and the other even more.
And There’s not much to do about (except prices). How many trams, busses and trains and their tracks can you build. Yet our population gets bigger and bigger.
So fuck public transportation and fuck walkable. I wanna get to places quickly and comfortably. And that is a car. But at least we only have one, as we don’t need to work.
With adequate public transportation, it becomes much more comfortable and convenient.
My city installed a few additional bike paths, and added some more buses, and the difference is huge.
I don’t even need a car except when traveling longer distances.
But there is no adequate transportation. And we just have no space for more tracks and more trams and busses. Quite the contrary, we even canceled many routes. Public transport is a nightmare here and I wouldn’t use it if I’d be paid to do it. Well and bike-paths is the same problem. No space. Biking is bad here, the absolute opposite to our neighbors the dutch. But I wouldn’t wanna use a bike anyway. I wanna get to point B quickly.
You’ve got to invest in it before it gets good. You’ve got decades of car centric infrastructure inertia making cars the more convenient choice. All you’ve got to do is invest just enough to make alternatives actually possible.
I don’t know the challenges of your specific infrastructure, but there are certainly improvements that could be made
Sure you could tweak here and there, but you’d need to turn it completely around to make it attractive to me. And then, a car is still more appealing to me. But as said, we have limited space and growing numbers of people. It’s room to live or more trains. And trains are only used by the lower classes, so nobody actually cares…
Be the change you want to see in the world.
throws a Molotov at the next flying cruiser
BORTLES!
Bruh if you so much as spit on said cruiser you’ll be wanted by the police for terrorism, despite the definition of terrorism being to threaten harm to civilians…
Before I submit, I want to clarify that I have read the UK Government’s definition of terrorism, and as it’s a stupid ass definition, I elected to ignore it.
“…as the use or threat of… …serious damage to property… …designed to influence the government… …for the purpose of advancing [an]… …ideological cause.”
As we know, damaging property belonging to anyone else, regardless of how many people will be saved, is against the legal law and punishable. HOWEVER, going back to their own law…
“…as the use or threat of… …serious violence against a person [OR] endangering a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the action) [OR] creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public… …which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism regardless of whether or not the action is designed to… …intimidate the public… …for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause… …Action includes action outside the United Kingdom.”
By their own law, any organisation intending to assist in the wilful and unprovoked violence against people, with explosives or firearms, is by their definition a terrorist. This defines the UK government and many companies as terrorists, coconspirators of Israel.
The disclaimer “other than that of the person committing the action” absolves anyone of the definition if they are doing so to stop the attacker. This defines Palestine Action as innocent as they were acting to stop the attacking arms company.But the only reason these interpretations are not the case in reality is because the government a) choose which laws to uphold and when, and b) defend their decision by lying that the Palestinian people were the instigators of their own eradication by the various countries of the world.
Sorry, I know this is just a meme
if we reduced wealth inequality to the point noone could afford that kind of shit i bet we could ride the plastic straw wave for a few centuries before it really came back to bite us.
We need the international court to set hard caps that will result in prison time.
International? We need the Intergalactic Court!
i guess that means since billionaires fly on planes everyone else is free to: /s
Would you recommend a better solution? A high speed railway over the Bering Strait, perhaps?
By far most planes in that screenshot are over land. You’re right, when you have to cross an ocean to get somewhere there isn’t really any alternative, but for all those over land they could’ve constructed and rode high speed railways instead. Countries like China and Japan show they can be proper alternatives, and there is no reason to use anything else for those distances.
Yeah, I know. I was hoping for an actual answer, looks like I got a few. I’d like more efficient travel, but the megacorporations that be have purposefully decided not to build it. Wonder why.
Most of the planes in that screenshot were over land.
I mean usually airports aren’t on top of land, not to mention how much more difficult airtravel would be if you had to reach the airport or plane by boat first hah
And if the infrastructure existed, we’d be golden!
Man, it sure is lucky highways and airports existed before we got here since we’re clearly incapable of building infrastructure.
Apply a worldwide carbon tax to all emissions, which gradually increases year by year. Knowing that flying will become a less and less viable business model over time, governments and investors will begin on alternative investments in infrastructure and novel technologies.
For overland travel: trains.
For across oceans: probably also trains, possibly in tunnels.
Benefits to this approach:
- Actually reduces carbon emissions instead of moving them around.
- Doesn’t tell the individual to stop flying or eating steak. Leaves it up to them to decide which carbon emissions they value most.
- Doesn’t pretend to be omniscient and perscribe solutions. Instead lets everyone in the world solve the problem creatively.
- Creates a market incentive to accellerate the production of alternative technologies.
Most likely what would happen is that high speed rail would see a big boom immediately as governments looked for ways to reduce intra-country transit costs. Overseas flights, which are quite a bit rarer, would probably stay stable for several years (though with a fair amount of griping about the increased cost of flying). However, as time went on we would also expect to see overseas flights drop significantly. Businesses would prefer teleconferencing to sending delegates overseas for small matters. People would vacation overseas less frequently, instead staying on their own continents. Possibly there is a new industry - high speed sailing cruise ships - which would transport people across oceans at slower speeds for their vacations. Someone might invent better forms of carbon-neutral energy storage to make air travel more feasible again. Otherwise, nations start building undersea tunnels to connect rail lines across oceans.
I’m pretty sure most flights are regional, not long distance, unless that’s only the us where we don’t believe in trains. There was an article a year or so back, where France started to actually ban regional flights for a few routes with good rail service. That’s where we need to be going.
Between high speed rail, and Zoom, we ought to be able to cut the number of flights in half while making travel better, and we can cut the least efficient flights since they spend proportionally more time climbing to altitude vs cruising
Even in the US, we have Acela and it’s arguably the best way to travel a few routes like BOS—>NYC, for the last two decades. Aside from connections, why do we still have hourly shuttles flying that route? Looking at the entire Acela service area, you probably have hundreds of daily regional flights. Most of those need to go
Edit: and this is part of my argument that California High Speed Rail is worth much higher funding to complete at pretty much any cost
the bering strait is no where near the oberpopulated east coast
Here’s a short version:
I’m pretty sure most flights are regional, not long distance ….ban regional flights ….we ought to be able to cut the number of flights in half
Imagine if there were half the number of flights, so the remaining ones weren’t as hard on our environment. Instead of going to fantasies like railroad over the Bering strait, let’s just only use flying for long distance routes.
how is anyone on the baring strait thats not in a major city supposed to get fresh food without regional flights? and I thought most flights were on 737 and bigger aircraft anyways?
Regional flights are not the same as like bush pilots, and obviously there will always be edge cases. Leave the Bering Strait alone: there’s not enough population or cities for modern trains to help, it’s mostly boats. There is the Siberian railroad, but it will never be fast or modern. Is there even regularly scheduled flights? Even if you look at Alaska, most of the population is along the coast but even a simple highway is tough. Sometimes there are disadvantages to living in more challenging parts of the world
Let’s focus on the 75% of the worlds population living in more hospitable regions
The rule of thumb used to be 500 miles. Any time you have two cities within 500 miles of each other, high speed rail is potentially the most convenient, efficient, useful way to travel. If we built it. Farther than that, flying has a strong advantage. That’s what’s generally meant by regional travel.
“You have fuel efficiency improvements on the order of 1% per year, and flights are increasing 6%,” says Rutherford, “It’s not even close.”
straight up we need to fly less overall, so think of all the things that help reduce people flying and we need to do that
but you’re right, i need to head back to see the family at christmas, look at my options
If the train was the cheapest option then that might be a relaxing travel. But it also uses holiday days you could be using for something else
yep I’m only staying for 3 days so the train ride would 4-5 days and my stay would be 3 days :|
i do want to take the train up to cairns though, that seems nice
Real hyperloop, not the Musk bullshit. Scaled up pneumatic tube systems operating at orbital speeds (7 km/s).
While this scum is allowed allocate all of the world’s resources; every drop of water you conserve goes to their data centers and pleasure fleets.
There is no conservation until they’re gone. It simply cannot be done.
Companies 3 years ago: helping the environment is part of our core values
The same companies one day later: start to heavily use and train AI
Amazon bought an entire arena and named it “climate pledge arena”. You can’t make this shit up
That was always just green washing bullshit.
you are being generous. They are more like
“Under enlightened Trump’s benevolent leadership we have realized that environmental concerns, inclusivity, modern medicine and preventing political misinformation are all woke scams. Therefore effective immediately we are ditching all our efforts in these directions.”
helping the environment is part of our core values
By the way, back to commuting to/from the office, people!
While this scum is allowed allocate all of the world’s resources; every drop of water you conserve goes to their data centers and pleasure fleets.
Does it? If everyone in America reduced the amount of water they used would data centres and yachts use it all up? Do you believe this?
No
The Houston Advanced Research Center, an independent nonprofit research organization focusing on sustainability solutions, estimates that existing data centers in Texas will consume approximately 25 billion gallons of water, or 0.4% of the state’s total water use in 2025.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/25/texas-data-center-water-use/
He didn’t mean water literally (yet, as we are running out of non-salt water…)
But we have (and likely will) if it were to come to rationing their pools would be prioritized our bath or even drinking water
He didn’t mean water literally
It’s still nonsensical, this idea that any savings at all are pointless particularly when you’re talking about small impact spread across 350 million americans and 400 million europeans, it adds up to far more than any data centre could ever hope
Take solar panels for example and the impact they have had:
We’re now emitting 5-8 million LESS tons of co2 per month and regularly have oversupply because there’s too much renewables in the grid:
We now have a booming battery rebate because we need far more storage than solar:
Since the launch of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program on July 1, roughly 161MW of home battery power has been added to the grid per month. At the current pace, the amount added in about 18 months will match the output of Eraring power station – Australia’s biggest coal-fired power plant
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/battery-rebate-to-deliver-a-coal-plant-of-power-in-18-months/
This is just from regular people like you or I making a small contribution that benefits themselves and the environment
Same with mushy straws but tbh we don’t even really do that anymore do you guys not have something like
The Planet Straw eco-friendly, Biodegradable, Compostable, and Recyclable, Planet-based PHA straws
They’re basically a drop in for plastic straws you wouldn’t know the difference
And still globally the fraction of renewables in electricity gen, and even primary energy consumption (counting renewable elec gen as “primary”), remains pretty steadfast at the levels of the 1990s. The basic reason is that they’re subsidising electricity, making it cheaper and people ( and I count both final consumers and intermediate producers as “people”) are using more of it. The only meaningful hiatuses in the growth of demand was the major recessions in 2008 and 2020, but consumption largely bounced back after those.
Savings are not totally pointless, but reducing prices of something does tend to increase consumption, and erode a notable amount (but granted probably not all) of savings. The earth’s human economy is largely set up to extract and use resources, give it more resources and it grows and extracts and uses more. We’re not going to let large amounts of cheap (or subsidised) resources sit there and go unexploited.
Adding new generation capacity has some similarity to adding a new lane to a busy highway. Induced demand.
From a Europe/EEC point of view It has been major restriction on coal generation (LCPD, IED, and to a minimal extent the EU-ETS) - that has reduced coal use in generation. Renewables doesn’t directly drive out fossil fuel gen , I think it has to be regulated out. Same will be with transport, if you don’t ban petrol, and just subsidise electric transport, there’ll be more trips you wont reduce petrol consumption. And even if you could ban petrol in cars, someone somewhere will start finding a way to use all that cheap fuel for something. The only saving grace for transport is that electric mass transit is way more efficient , than personal transport, and at least China knows what its doing on that front. But I’d be very worried for the planet as more and more people in India continue to start getting cars - I think they’ll easily become a market for any petrol saved by EVs elsewhere…
And still globally the fraction of renewables in electricity gen, and even primary energy consumption (counting renewable elec gen as “primary”), remains pretty steadfast at the levels of the 1990s
I think this might be out of date info, renewables (thanks mainly to china tbh) are now the cheapest form of power and surging with installations:
World surpasses 40% clean power as renewables see record rise
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2025/#executive-summary
Savings are not totally pointless, but reducing prices of something does tend to increase consumption
Good old Jevons
Adding new generation capacity has some similarity to adding a new lane to a busy highway. Induced demand.
I don’t agree with this, yes there is an increase in energy usage, I am technically using more electricity than ever from thanks to cheap solar because I fill up my car with 40kw worth of electricity every few weeks, but at the same time I now use 0L of petrol and no gas at all so it’s not exactly adding a lane to the highway if I’ve reduced my energy use elsewhere and added it on to renewables, it’s the same number of lanes but now I’m 100% renewable
We also have visible signs it’s eating into fossil fuels:
Closure of Spain’s biggest coal plant makes way for massive wind power development
UK to finish with coal power after 142 years
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o
The Australian Energy Market Operator is predicting that the country’s remaining coal fired generators are likely to close much quicker than expected, saying they are becoming less reliable, more difficult to maintain and less able to compete with the growing share of renewables.
AEMO’s draft 2024 Integrated System Plan, the latest version of its 30-year planning blueprint, suggests coal fired generation will be gone from Queensland and Victoria within a decade – by 2033/34 – and that the last coal unit will close in NSW by 2038.
Same will be with transport, if you don’t ban petrol, and just subsidise electric transport, there’ll be more trips you wont reduce petrol consumption
This doesn’t make sense to me, if you were talking about cheaper petrol then sure, but if I replace my petrol car with an EV, even if I do more trips it’s still electricity, petrol usage has dropped to 0 despite an increase in trips
And we’re still in the very early years with EV’s, we have only just started pushing out electric trucks and buses, speaking of: Brisbane just got our first electric buses earlier in the year!
Onboard the new Brisbane Metro (now with added Chilli)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oWDE4zh2FA
They are so quiet it’s crazy!
tldr: I think your premise is that electricity usage is increasing and renewables are supplying it but not eating into fossil fuels and I don’t think this is true, the last few years solar, EV and battery innovation has been leaps and bounds
As an example I bought this in Jan 2023 for 14k: https://sonnen.com.au/sonnenbatterie-evo/
10kw
Today for 5.5k I can get 40kw:
OK, I’ll wait til the 2024 and 2025 data are out and see the radical change - but the past 30 years pretty much support my “outdated” view. I don’t accept that you putting no petrol in your car means petrol consumption is lower - someone else can (and almost certainly will) still use it somewhere somehow in some vehicle or other. Unless you’re still buying it and burying in the ground somewhere no one can find it.
In short - top line goes up faster than the renewables wedge grows —> global warming increases. In fact the fossil fuel wedges also grow as much or more than renewables. Maybe this will become more than a blip - maybe. But realistically I look at the graph above and 2008, 2020 are the things that stand out as a lesson.
People need fewer datacentres not more, wherever they’re located. I think people just need to take a long hard look at themselves and see whether they can survive by jerking off to 360p or 720p porn - it is just about exactly as hollow and unfulfilling as jerking off to 4K AI generated porn.
it is just about exactly as hollow and unfulfilling as jerking off to 4K AI generated porn.
gasp I can’t believe you said that in front of my 4k ai girlfriend!
top line goes up faster than the renewables wedge grows —> global warming
Yeah but there’s two parts here, one is that it’s not us or the data centres:
In contrast, India recorded the highest absolute increase in emissions, adding 164.8 Mt CO2eq compared to 2023, a 3.9% rise. Indonesia saw the most significant relative increase at 5%, followed by Russia (+2.4%) and China (+0.8%). The US and Brazil had relatively stable emissions with minor increases.
India adding 164 million tons of co2 more than it did the year before, that’s a shitload of data centres
The EU and US and Australia/NZ/UK all have emissions trending down, we’re playing our part, this place beats itself up a lot when if the rest of the world was like us we’d be well on our way down
I wouldn’t use datacenters if I could get a static ip address, or even just ipv6, but those are more expensive than just renting a vm in a far away place
Non-comparable! In say California there is severe water restrictions even limits shower lengths at times yet pools can still be filled… If the rich weren’t allowed to take up inorbitant amounts of resources say for bezos private airspace tourism or megajacts then there would be a lot more left to us…
But lets talk about personal impact too! Imagine if instead of leaving it to up you to maybe change something the country made the investment? Like it could from the subsidies provided for the solar panels in most countries ( know for a fact thats the case in the us, Germany and Hungary)! And then then the change wouldn’t be a few percentage points, it would actually be considerable!
They waste so much more on data centers. They literally send used water to sewer; cheaper than cooling it for recirculation. This is standard.
Yes. Oh my god they have said they want this. They didn’t have to say, but they have.
I mean yes, but it’s not like they use an extra drop for every drop conserved, it’s still okay to not be wasteful.
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Fuck that and you for suggesting it
So unnecessary. Rule 1.
why is your local council providing 2 bins but sending everything to the one place?
when you bought it up what did they say?
Recycling centers try and then often give up and just landfill plastic. And then you’re dealing with the extra transportation to have it make a stop at the recycling plant on the way to the landfill.
There is a lot of “shift the blame off corporations to the consumer and act like they can do something” happening when in reality the consumer can’t do much, and what we can do isnt 100% effective anyway.
That’s funny because over here in Australia it looks to be progressing well?
For us it’s a yellow bin for recycling
Visy – what happens to your household recycling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXSmINKUOxg
Most Australian states have a 10c refund when you return a can or bottle:
Do you have this?
You can even then directly donate it to a charity of your choice: https://www.containersforchange.com.au/qld/donate-your-refund
On top of this if you use https://oceanhero.today/ for searching the money they make from ads goes towards paying people in poor countries to collect plastic
Australia wide we’re slowly phasing out single use plastics:
https://www.marineconservation.org.au/which-australian-states-are-banning-single-use-plastics/
That’s already reducing the amount of plastic by millions of tons
There’s also smaller things like:
Our new cards are made from 100% recycled plastic*, with 64% collected from coastal communities by Parley for the Oceans™.
https://www.bankaust.com.au/card
Recycling centers try and then often give up and just landfill plastic
Sounds like defeatist mentality to me, your councils/states should be doing better
Canada’s west coast is the same. Despite some reports implying the contrary, properly sorted flexible plastic waste does get diverted away from landfills and oceans and remade into product, in BC. And we also have bottle and can deposits, like most Canadian provinces (called consigne/consignment in Québec).
Apparently bottle deposits are only a thing in 10 of 50 US states.
Bread tags? What do they do instead? The only choices Ive seen are a stupid plastic tile or a wire, and I can’t imagine single use wire is better than a stupid single use plastic tile
cardboard :D
https://playandgo.com.au/australias-first-100-recycled-recyclable-cardboard-bread-tags-tip-top/
The new bread tags will launch on South Australian shelves first, removing 11 million plastic bread tags from South Australian waste streams by the end of 2021 and divert over 400 million plastic bread tags from landfill each year as they roll out nationally. By 2025, all Tip Top’s packaging will be 100 per cent recyclable, reusable or compostable to help close-the-loop
afaik they’re all cardboard now even other brands, I don’t think I’ve seen a plastic one in a while
It’s more than just plastic. In most places most things are not recycled. More accurate to say: in vanishingly few places is even a single kind of thing recycled. Then every scrap we save goes not to sustainability, but golf courses pleasure yachts and data centers to sloppify the world.
So saving is not conservation. You literally cannot make a positive impact environmentally unless you’re good at violence.
That’s needlessly pessimistic, but I’ll believe general consumer recycling programs are not very effective.
- I know my composting program does something because I can give them food waste and get back compost
- I know can recycling works because there is an entire industry supporting it, plus aluminum is energy intensive and I’ve repeatedly read it is the most recycled material
- I know electronics recycling works because it’s expensive
- I believe industrial recycling works because they have bulk quantities of pure material and there’s generally profit somewhere.
Most of all I believe my city’s consumer recycling is fairly effective because of the number of things they have specific steps/actions/destinations for. More importantly we don’t have a landfill and the one we use is very expensive, so there’s a profit motive for minimizing what we dispose of
I’m not saying it can’t work or we lack the technology.
I’m saying it doesnt because its cheaper to just toss it all in the dump.
Not big enough. Fail.
