I'm doing my part!

The thing is just that its not that one woman, but hundreds of millions if not billions of people that follow trash separation rules.
This would actually have a pretty large effect, however sadly the recycling system is broken and often just a complete lie in many places in the world.

This is why I recycle.
But it still sucks to see so much work undone by a few greedy fucks.
- I appreciate your recycling efforts. I'm in Chicago where recycling rates are horrible. I'm building a plan to improve recycling rates for next year, but I still have a lot of work to do in terms of the system regarding transparency and user-friendliness.
the recycling system is broken and often just a complete lie in many places in the world.
In many places in the world, or mainly the US? I keep seeing this claim repeated but usually any proof is just about the US
- Germany is doing okayish:
  Source (PDF)
- I've ranted in various places over the years but it's 100% true in my city in Canada.
  Decades ago we built a massive publicly-funded recycling system because the City could actually draw profit from the collection and sale of materials.
  But about 15 years ago China stopped buying the waste, and it became a new shell-game of collecting the material but literally unable to do anything with it or sell it, so any that does get sold mostly ends up in the down-stream recycling economy, where the bulk of it ends up being burned. The rest goes into the regular old landfill. Even waste cardboard has no value anymore.
  People who separate recycling in our city now, are just pre-sorting it for the waste management company and keeping it out of their regular waste (profit) stream.
  We do have our ewaste centers but knowing people that work there, I can say anecdotally I've been informed that the metal and rare metal waste is collected and sent for processing in Ontario, the rest of the bits (all the plastic which is 90% of eWaste) goes into the regular waste stream where it's buried or burned, but never recycled.
  Notice how Pepsi and Coke don't use recycled plastic? If that doesn't condemn the whole recycling "meme" as a sham, I don't know what would.
- I think a lot of first world countries like do it (e.g. the UK sends around 60% away), because recycling elsewhere is cheaper than doing it at home.
  And it's cheaper still if you don't bother to check that it hasn't just ended up in a landfill in Bangladesh or something.
  I think also part of the issue is that plastic can be recycled, but not in the same way as metals or glass. That plastic bottle might get shredded and used in road surfacing (where it will doubtless leak micro plastics everywhere), which is probably not what most people envisage when they clean it up and separate it nicely.
Recycling (edit: besides metal) does literally nothing, like it's actually 0% helpful, as long as we're producing more plastic than ever before every single year. We're closing in on 500 million tonnes of plastic produced—not total, produced—annually. Every single person can put every single piece of plastic in the recycling bin, and we'll still have more plastic than existed 50 years ago. There are many things that individual action can accomplish, and this is not one of them. We need legislation for this.
- IIRC plastic recycling is basically bullshit (except maybe PET bottles?) but aluminum is actually effective. Makes you wonder why we don't use more aluminum packaging in general.
- Plastic isnt the only material that you can recycle...
Isn't it somewhere like only 1% of the recycling stuff actually getting recycled? The rest goes to some kind of landfill to a poor country that decides to take it. I saw this in some documentary
- For plastics, pretty much. The thing about plastic recycling is that it's more expensive that making new plastic, and the recycled stuff is lower quality and unsuitable for many uses.
  Metal.recycling, especially aluminum, makes economic sense and does better.
- about 21% of recyclables across the us: https://recyclingpartnership.org/residential-recycling-report/
  as low as 9% in some states and as high as 34% in one of them
- Like it’s been said that differs vastly by location. Afaik here in Germany it works quite okay … and European countries tend to have a higher incineration rate than the US. Burning the trash certainly isn’t the best solution, but at least it converts them into energy instead of just burying it somewhere.
  But that aside, I like these "new" cups. It replaces part of the plastic with cardboard. That allows the plastic to be thinner, focusing on sealing it up and the cardboard handle the stability or even light protection. Though it can definitely be that there are some which are still as thick as they were, but that wouldn’t make sense for the producer. Here in Germany the plastic is often see-through and the cardboard printed on both sides. That’s usually used as advertising space, infos for waste disposal, but I’ve even seen it being used for cup noodles to mark the fill level.
  Afaik paper is the thing where reycling works best currently, so it should be a win to replace plastic with paper.
  The recycling rate increased in 2023. 79.3% of all paper and board consumed in Europe was recycled
  https://austropapier.at/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/23-00-EPRC-Recycling-Report.pdf
The latter half of your comment is why I dont even bother. The "recycling" here is picked up and dumped into the same truck, there is no separation facility, just a landfill/incinerator.
Im not paying extra to lie to myself.
- i lost faith in recycling the more I read about it.
  especially when most recycling is sent to poor countries to be burned, and if it is actually recycled it is then shipped back again as a single use spoon, then sent back... all the way to less quality materials, and some uses are for fleece that produces a shit ton of microplastics.
  real solutions is to ban single use plastics (maybe exceptions for medical uses).
  now I'm in the States and I have no idea how to recycle where I am anyways.
- We have separate trucks here, but I was behind the recycling truck one day and watched it pull into the landfill.

It's a fair observation and very agreeable when the intent is to focus deserved ire on the primary element responsible for the wretched state of the world. But this could also be used to absolve oneself of inaction, deny any personal responsibility, to justify exhibiting similar selfish behavior oneself, or to feel smug about demoralizing or shitting on people who seek to improve society somewhat.

As the meme itself implies, the exploitation class is the problem that needs to be addressed. No need for anyone else to catch strays.

I don't see it as a way to justify inaction. I see it as a way to be forgiving of myself if I mess up sometimes.
Example: in the worst of my grief, I threw away some recyclables because I just couldn't wash them out properly. It took everything just to eat.
I didn't pile guilt on myself over it. I recycle 99% of the time, I never litter. I have to check my pockets for random trash before doing laundry.
Utility companies, corporations, and rich people are not cleaning up after themselves and their inaction almost negates everything me and everyone I personally know can possibly do.
Knowing they are dumping faster than I can shovel doesn't mean I stop shoveling. I still want and actively work to leave this place better than I found it.
Those 91 jets just mean I don't feel overwhelming guilt when I fail. I just try to do better next time.
- Do you think they feel “overwhelming guilt” about those jets?
  The idea is to blame you for all the plastic shit they have forced you to buy because you need to eat and wipe your ass and clean your floor.
  They don’t care what bin you put that shit in. It all goes to the same place anyway since they have admitted recycling is a scam and has been for the last 40 years.
  It’s like conserving water. In the 80s, when there were “droughts” in California, they told people not to flush their toilets. 98% of water is used by commercial agriculture. THEY should be more efficient about their water use. We are subsidizing them. And they export a ton of this shit. Like almonds. Which take a ton of water to grow. (Spoiler alert on where they export that to…)
  You ever see those public trash cans with like different holes for landfill and recycle, and then see underneath that it all goes into the same bag?
- Utility companies, corporations, and rich people are not cleaning up after themselves and their inaction ~~almost~~ negates everything me and everyone I personally know can possibly do.
  There's no almost about it. On an individual level, anything you and I do to recycle is dwarfed by the callous usage of resources by corporations.
  You and I are out here doing our best to recycle the vast majority of our plastic waste when one of the local factories throws away more than a month's worth of your plastic refuse every shift when they throw away the plastic wrapping on just supply pallets. They may recycle the cardboard, but so much pallet shrink wrap would get thrown away at receiving and a shit ton more applied at shipping.
  I fucking hated working for one of the local places and just watched all the plastic waste build up every shift. I still recycle because something is better than nothing, but it's still infuriating to have corpos guilt us about this shit while they do fuck all about it themselves.
Well put. Don't insult the person doing what they can.
- instead, redirect them to better use their limited energy
It's not attacking the girl or suggesting she should stop. She's doing the right thing. It's attacking the rich psychopaths ruining the environment in ways that are orders or magnitude greater than my life will ever do.
- The problem is interpretation. You read it one way because of your life context and frame of mind. Many others will have a different interpretation.
It really just highlights the growing injustice in the world and that our problems are growing too severe to solve them with personal responsibility. We need to make billionaires illegal or things with keep spiraling downwards.
We need collectively to be pinching pennies ecologically, but doing so on drinks at the roulette table is not really responsibility; it's delusional cope.
Until we pry ourselves away from that civilizational casino, possibly with guillotines, nothing else really matters.
I think most of us understand that, and you're just being obnoxious for pointing it out.

Slightly off topic, but I find it goddamn funny that someone like MrBeast made a bootleg copy of squid game on his YouTube channel, considering the entire point of the programme was to show that billionaires will do whatever evil they please and get away without any single negative consequence. Not that the premise was too subtle, considering that the villains use humans as literal footrests. How someone can be this tone deaf or uncaring is beyond my understanding.

Edit: I just remembered it's the guy selling kids highly processed food with rotten cheese on top. So, considering that, I'm not too surprised. Just slightly.

He wasn't allowed to kill them, though, so he's not quite on that level yet.
the irony is lost in them. but at the same time, reinforces the point of the show

Eat the rich, but not with plastic cutlery!

Even better: compost the rich!
- Shit the rich
- Eating them creates compost in the long run anyway, but with the added benefits of also providing protein to hungry poor people without the damage from factory farming livestock.
- Burn the rich so we don't introduce prion diseases to the soil!
- How much plastic and silicone will go to the plants?
please don't eat apex predators, they're high in lead content and other toxins

Benefits of trying to go zero plastic is: you can eat healthier. No highly processed food, sodas and all this industrial shit. It's mostly fresh fruits, veggies, cereals, and once in a while, a bit of meat straight from the butcher or local market. And ok, you can't be sure it wasn't wrapped in plastic until it arrived in your kitchen, but at least, you have less garbage to throw out.

Not to mention avoiding plastic leeching.

Being ecologically friendly is its own reward.

If your neighbor's house and lawn is cluttered with garbage and rotting food, do you also let your house gather the same?

Or do you wish they did a better job and kept your house clean all the same?

What if you had 95 neighbors all full of garbage and rotted food? Is there any number that would make you do the same?

Not quite a compare - you can move house, you can't move planet. It's not that I would stop looking after my own garden if my neighbours weren't looking after theirs. It just feels pointless. Using your analogy, if all surrounding neighbours had rotten rubbish in their garden, no matter what you would do, it would still stink in your garden.
- I hear this argument over and over again: "Why should I bother recycling? China is poisoning the planet." It's like reverse-whataboutism. I find it really lazy and a pointless attitude. The argument generalizes to: "Why do anything good when bad exists in the world?"
  Cleanliness is its own reward. I can tell you if I lived in stink-town where 100% of everyone else's house was a festering mess, I would keep mine clean.
- If you had 95 messy roommates would you not clean the kitchen sink?

I get the feeling this is somehow also criticizing this particular woman. Someone did a small good thing, while others do bad things on a very large scale. What a naive idiot! Not a very helpful sentiment. One needs to look up for moral guidance, not down.

It's not the woman that's being criticized, it's the people claiming that the ones not doing that bear all the blame for damaging the environment.
- except it reads as if its all useless and dumb. I don't understand how people don't see this as that?
  It's not created to get people to be more on board with climate change policy. It's meant to point out that we just shouldn't do any of it.
I think it's more like a response to the way one of these things is given a disproportionate amount of time and attention. We're all expected to micromanage every aspect of our lives to diminish our comparatively miniscule impact of personal choice while the state and the ruling class just do whatever the fuck they want actively slaughtering the environment for fun.
You know what would help me minimize my carbon footprint a lot? Public transportation. A renewable energy grid. Affordable food created along sustainable and environmentally conscious supply chains. Electronics and clothing that is manufactured with long term use, maintenance, and recyclability in mind.
Those things are all out of my reach to implement. Me properly sorting my recyclables (which i do) is such a minor impact compared with those other things. Any offsetting done by proper recycling is immediately undone the moment i step into a grocery store, having driven there in my car for lack of public transportation, and buy food that was wastefully produced and transported to my grocery store via fossil fuel based energy.
The majority of our time and energy should be going into fighting back against the state and the ruling class who refuse to structure society around environmental impact, not on almost the almost irrelevant impact of individual workers. We can and should promote recycling, but we can hammer home that point when our whole society isn't top down engineered with total indifference to the environment.
I think it's more of a comment on futility than her being naive if you're looking at what her role is in this meme.
I feel this is cooked up by energy company's in the same way that "snowballs in july" was but I'm not sure how.

Wait till you hear how much pollution the army creates when they decide to mobilize an entire camp for no reason

Wow, I'm starting to think the military might be a net negative on this earth.
- Navy just dumping jets in the ocean, like fuck it.
- Just the army
It may have changed now but when I was in the Navy in the late 80s we just tossed all our trash into the ocean twice a day. Everything: paint cans, medical waste, regular trash. It was disgusting

This is exactly why I don't beat myself up over any of this shit... I will do what I can within my own power, but I don't go out of my way to stop using plastic forks or anything like that. It's pointless.

It feels pointless until a corporate drone tells you that you are a part of the problem and about a new law designed to punish you for taking "shortcuts" in life. Like I have to pay an additional tax in my area to help salmon streams but a few miles away is an oil refinery that gets tax breaks yet the water surrounding them is devoid of life... somehow I'm a part of the problem and I have to pay for it.

What’s the point here? Shitting on a good deed because someone else has done something bad? Arguing that small contributions don’t matter because others cancel that out? Great, now everbody feels entitled to shitty behaviour because they’re not the most rotten apple in the barrel. I’m sure many good things will come from that line of thought.

The rule is “Don’t be a jerk”, not “Don’t be a jerk if you’re the only one”

The post is not an indictment of recycling per se. Rather, it points to the absurdity of promoting individual contributions while ignoring the carbon footprint of corporations and the obscenely wealthy.
More like, we have to be perfect but billionaires get to be unethical.
Even if most every day people would lower their carbon footprint as much as possible, corporations would simply say "Neat, we can pollute more, we're within target emissions", and they would
- Bingo! Well said.
- Microsoft is literally buying and pumping shit in the ground to offset carbon produced by their useless AI. It's ridiculous
- They do say that already, since that is how carbon credits work.
So, this 'personal responsibility' recycling thing was pushed by corporations to excuse their wasteful bullshit.
Except the situation really is bad enough we need to be pinching fucking pennies ecologically. So we should be doing stuff like this (and actually recycling things rather than just dumping them, as happens now)
But none of that matters while billionaires are fucking around; you're just ordering cheap drinks at the craps table so maybe you can play a few more rounds. Your gains will be harvested to fuel the degenerate tendencies of the wealthy. They would matter in another world, be necessary in another world, but don't in this one, where they are necessary but wasted.
if I told you jumping jacks would save the world would you do it? if what she's doing is exactly as effective as jumping jacks, should she be wasting her time, or finding a method that is effective?
- Really … separating that stuff takes like 5 seconds extra.
the point of these memes is to normalize that line of thought, i would not be the least surprised if they originate from the fossil fuel industry.

so what's the verdict on hot sauce and yogurt

edit i think i meant that for elsewhere but fuck this, that's a good headline in the image, and fuck this again

Seth Meyers just had one of his podcast eps where Ike Barinholtz talked about getting a sunburn and trying to do a gig the same night and because he looked so rough between sets a waitress at the club suggested he use yogurt to cool down his thighs. He ended up smearing it around with his pants down when some random woman walked into his dressing room thinking it was the bathroom.
Story's toward the end of the clip:
https://player.fm/series/family-trips-with-the-meyers-brothers/family-trips-live-from-amsterdam

how hard is it to recycle, seriously? the way people complain about it you'd think it causes rashes..

In the US it's nearly impossible since the pandemic. Most waste collection firms are dumping both cans in the same truck and not recycling anything. Plastic recycling in particular turned out to be much more expensive than waste management was prepared to keep doing so they stopped.
- Got a source on that “most”? The ones around here DEFINITELY don’t do that.
- Surely that can't be legal?
- notice how you're immediately moving the goalposts: you're not talking about an individual separating packaging, you're talking about the industrial process.

You know what's also shitty about recycling? The companies that pick that up bin in some areas throw it in another bin which gets shipped to an "out of country" recycling company to make it someone else's problem. In the shipping process, that plastic falls off into the ocean making a worse problem now than just throwing it into regular waste management. Also, the process to recycle is more toxic than just throwing it away because the companies use really old processes; like paper for example. I gave up recycling except for metals.

edit: I guess i forgot to add "In the US" for the Europeans. Yeah, it's a US problem and nowhere else does this happen I guess.

In the US the majority of recycling isn't.
- Yeah this is largely a US problem. Not that some of this doesnt happen in other countries but at least in my part of Canada most of the recycling is sold to in-province companies. A few get exported to the states. A very small amount goes to Europe or Asia.
Glass is good too AFAIK

Can I have a fucking plastic bendy straw now?

Honestly I don't give one shit about the paper straws. I wonder if the people who don't like them let their drinks sit for hours and chew on the straw till they're soggy. Every paper straw I've had has lasted the length of time it takes me to drink the drink.
Still banning those things but not fucking everything else in the supermarket that is packaged in plastic is such a massive and stupid waste of everyone's time and effort. Such an imperceptible inch forward they almost deserve no praise at all.
- It was a surprisingly fast change, to the extent that I wonder if they weren't planning something along those lines as an industry wide PR stunt or lobbied industry takeover already. Or maybe paper straw machines are just really easy to setup.
  It does show that widespread lasting change is possible. Even if it's just a single step, we won't get anywhere if we stop taking them.
- I wonder if the people who don't like them let their drinks sit for hours
  Yes
  and chew on the straw till they're soggy
  No
- It is always "Look, we are actually trying to help the climate" types of government. Helping to build sustainable shit? Put money towards developing open, essy to implement, and easy to service standards? Nah, we will pay a billion dollars towards some bullshit that will be forgotten in a year and 80% (if not more) of the cash will be pocketed by billionaires (to use towards lobbying either against shit that will lose em money or shit that will make em money) because the contract was overpriced.
  Fuck humanity, seriously. I just wish we will get a revolution before we burn to a crisp.
I'd rather have a regular one, no idea why you want a bendy straw that fucks.

9,769km from California to Venice one way which equates to 976.9kg of carbon per person (6,070 miles and 2153.7 pounds in Harley Davidson units)

Welcome to dystopia. Time to choom it up or die trying.

Surely it's fraud. They say they're going to recycle (presumably charge whoever they charge based on that too) then just dump it.