The fact that it’s the consumer’s responsibility to sort their waste and to try and minimise its impact on the environment in the first place is completely wrong to me.
Most people in urban areas rely on stores for basic survival, and the vast majority of products we buy there come with unnecessary waste. It doesn’t make any sense to then tell these people “by the way, you’d better clean up that mess when you’re done because it’s bad for the environment”. If governments were truly concerned or willing to act, this waste wouldn’t make it into our homes in the first place.
If a company wants to sell a product, they should be held accountable for the waste that comes along with it. They should have to prove that they can reuse the waste and be incentivised to reduce it. If they can’t, they can’t operate.
Ecocide laws need to become commonplace, and the consumer should not be responsible for their waste if they haven’t got legitimate alternative options. I understand this community is more willing to do their part in this regard, but I don’t think it’ll ever be feasible to expect this from the wider population. We need to stem the flow, not just handle the mess.
Safe food packaging existed before non-biodegradable plastics.
I doubt hardly anyone remembers the Tylenol Murders, but that was a monster change in our mental consumer safety map. I was a child and watched grocery store packaging change overnight. Freaked me out as a kid to see such change vs. what had been normal before.
Suddenly everything was tamper resistant. If people stepped into a 1980 grocery store they would freak out, think it was sooo unsafe.
And while we’re at it, that was around the time idiots were protesting paper grocery sacks, as if the evil corporations were chopping down old-growth forests. So they won and we got plastic.
Who brought up plastics?
I think you misunderstood my point. Wasteful non-biodegradable, non-recyclable packaging is a relatively recent thing. Before plastics came along, food was packaged safely in variants of paper, glass, steel, and aluminum. There’s no reason we couldn’t go back to the pre-plastics way of doing things other than convenience and maximizing profit.
Also biodegradable plastics exist, but they aren’t used as much because they cost slightly more than the non-biodegradable ones and companies don’t want to lose those pennies with every sale. If there was a tax on non-biodegradable plastic for any use outside the medical field, it would probably fix this.