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lalitrus:
Reminder that the aesthetics of green living aren’t the same as actually making good ethical decisions about the resources you have access to.
jenniferrpovey:
Also, durable plastic is not nearly as much of a problem as single use plastic.
Many people can’t afford a wood and bristle hair brush anyway…they’re like six times more expensive.
lets-close-the-loop:
Why do I have a plastic hairbrush?
My friend was visiting me the other day and as she sat in my living room she noticed my plastic hairbrush on the table.
“Why do you have a plastic hairbrush I thought you care about nature and you try to avoid plastic!”
Why? Because I can still use it. I have had this brush for cca 12 years. It is not broken. It’s fine. And I will have it for as long as it works and then buy a good alternative. We don’t throw away things that work perfectly fine just to prove to other people, that we care. We use the things we have FIRST!
There is no need for buying a stainless steel lunch box if you can still use an old plastic one. It’s fine.
USE WHAT YOU HAVE FIRST and when it no longer works like it should, dispose of it responsibly and then get a good alternative. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.
Love
K.
This is a thing that makes me grit my teeth a bunch at Instagram advertisements. I even saw a WhateverBox-style subscription service whose entire premise was that it’d send you a random box of Green Lifestyle Implements every month. More stuff, shipped to you through the mail, whether you needed it or not, to give you that Green Lifestyle. There was another one too, that was for secondhand clothing, they’d just mail you a box of new-to-you clothes every month or whatever, so that you could have new things but it’s green because they’re secondhand.
The greenest thing you can fucking do is not buy anything. There’s no money in that, though, so they’re not going to be selling you that– but. oh my god.
I actually do have a friend on Instagram who was talking about that; she had a picture of a bunch of plastic quart bags and was like “I’ve decided to cut out my plastic use and I’m excited for that but first I have to use all these plastic bags until they fall apart because otherwise I’m just generating a mound of trash for the aesthetics of a plastic-free kitchen, so, here I’m labeling them with Sharpie so that I won’t cross-contaminate when I reuse them, and in four to six months I’ll have used them up and I’ll be using glass instead.” Like, you go girl, that actually means something, and the post wasn’t just performative it was actually informative. I do that too now, it was useful.
lalitrus:
Reminder that the aesthetics of green living aren’t the same as actually making good ethical decisions about the resources you have access to.
jenniferrpovey:
Also, durable plastic is not nearly as much of a problem as single use plastic.
Many people can’t afford a wood and bristle hair brush anyway…they’re like six times more expensive.
lets-close-the-loop:
Why do I have a plastic hairbrush?
My friend was visiting me the other day and as she sat in my living room she noticed my plastic hairbrush on the table.
“Why do you have a plastic hairbrush I thought you care about nature and you try to avoid plastic!”
Why? Because I can still use it. I have had this brush for cca 12 years. It is not broken. It’s fine. And I will have it for as long as it works and then buy a good alternative. We don’t throw away things that work perfectly fine just to prove to other people, that we care. We use the things we have FIRST!
There is no need for buying a stainless steel lunch box if you can still use an old plastic one. It’s fine.
USE WHAT YOU HAVE FIRST and when it no longer works like it should, dispose of it responsibly and then get a good alternative. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.
Love
K.
This is a thing that makes me grit my teeth a bunch at Instagram advertisements. I even saw a WhateverBox-style subscription service whose entire premise was that it’d send you a random box of Green Lifestyle Implements every month. More stuff, shipped to you through the mail, whether you needed it or not, to give you that Green Lifestyle. There was another one too, that was for secondhand clothing, they’d just mail you a box of new-to-you clothes every month or whatever, so that you could have new things but it’s green because they’re secondhand.
The greenest thing you can fucking do is not buy anything. There’s no money in that, though, so they’re not going to be selling you that– but. oh my god.
I actually do have a friend on Instagram who was talking about that; she had a picture of a bunch of plastic quart bags and was like “I’ve decided to cut out my plastic use and I’m excited for that but first I have to use all these plastic bags until they fall apart because otherwise I’m just generating a mound of trash for the aesthetics of a plastic-free kitchen, so, here I’m labeling them with Sharpie so that I won’t cross-contaminate when I reuse them, and in four to six months I’ll have used them up and I’ll be using glass instead.” Like, you go girl, that actually means something, and the post wasn’t just performative it was actually informative. I do that too now, it was useful.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 01:57 pm (UTC)I have all kinds of leather stuff from my pre-vegan days, and it's lower impact than the equivalent "vegan" leather. I'm positive that my reusable plastic lunch containers are lower impact than bringing a paper bag every day. Etc.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 02:30 pm (UTC)[and all of this will vary by one's local area, naturally, and even though you and I live near one another there's an international border in the way which certainly has a huge effect. being in a large city, you'd have to eat imported food anyway, so all of your calculations are going to start in an entirely different place-- and i've driven past the fields of greenhouses; Toronto's foodshed is very, very different from Buffalo's, and from the area around my sister's farm where I spend so much time.]
[for REAL, you can see eight vacant McMansions from my sister's highest pasture, all of them bank foreclosures, and instead of selling those, the developers are looking for new plots of land to build new ones. A new one just went up right next to their lowest field, BIL had to go over and gently remove the new owners from his land where they were busily making a driveway. Not yours, guys, I need that access for my tractor, you live over there. Thanks. Great. Oh your house is gonna be one of those with the double garage as the whole facade, that's classy, I dig it. Enjoy that. Guess I won't pasture my chickens directly next to you, like I did last year, you'd probably get upset.]
But absolutely primary, obviously, is not buying new shit, and we're so conditioned by literal generations of consumer culture and advertising that the automatic assumption for anything in the entire world that we want to happen is to buy something to do it with. It's insane!
And yeah-- even if you can compost a paper bag, how much water did the mill pollute to make that paper bag?? you already *have* the plastic, that is a carbon footprint of zero.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 02:56 pm (UTC)every article is like a one-size-fits-all:
Go Vegan, and Buy All New Shit
and just once I'd like to see the math behind that, what qualifies it as anything other than yet another Hot Take which seems to be most of what our public discourse is nowadays??
Go Vegan, no matter where you live or what your local foodshed looks like, and Buy All New Shit, because consuming is the way that we must live and we're only pretending to question that.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 02:59 pm (UTC)