Materials and Waste 📍

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said something similar during CNN's climate town hall, pointing out that minor tweaks to our lifestyles often obscure larger global pollution issues.

"Understand — this is exactly what the fossil-fuel industry hopes we're all talking about," Warren said. "They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, around your straws, and around your cheeseburgers, when 70% of the pollution — of the carbon that we're throwing into the air — comes from three industries."

Those three industries she's referring to are better thought of as "activities," as PolitiFact said after the debate, and they are transportation, electricity, and industry.

Three arrows chasing each other in a triangular loop: For decades, the consuming public has recognized this symbol as a promise that “this package can and will be recycled.” However, the perceived promise of those interlocking arrows is a hollow one, as most plastic products – save for those with the numbers one and two on the bottom – are not recycled in any significant amount.

The arrows with numbers that you find on your soda bottle (usually a No. 1 plastic made with PET, or polyethylene terephthalate), your yogurt tub (often a No. 5 made with polypropylene), and other everyday products are part of the Resin Identification Code (RIC) system that was created by and for the plastics industry in 1988. Each number signifies a different category of plastics – of which there are seven in total – and this system was designed to tell recycling facilities what type of resin can be found in any given object. As it turns out, they were never a guarantee that the item in question would be recycled.

Many of the goods and services we all rely on are created with the specific intent to lose value over time so that the consumer is stuck in an enforced consumption service cycle, which increases value for the producer, but not for the customer nor the planet. And the cost of dealing with all of this reduced value stuff is placed on the customer and local governments in the form of funding local waste management services.