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Comment by ctrl-j | Hacker News Reader

I worked in a grocery store for 5 years in the produce department and we sold a loooot of unpackaged food to customers that came to us in a lot of packaging. From stabilizers to keep produce from jostling and bruising - all the way to the shrinkwrap the pallets came in with...

I dumped a lot of plastic into the trash compactor. I dumped a ton of styrofoam into the trash compactor.

Sure, it might show a desire to the producers of food if we shop better - but I doubt your food is as plastic-free as you imagine. And I tossed more plastic daily than the average household did in months.

The supply chain needs to be plastic free before we stop having a problem.

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This is a very important point.

It makes me think of a smaller scale example I witnessed as a cashier. I saw cashiers throwing away plastic bags by the hundred regularly, because they failed to load them onto the holding racks (you've seen them, but probably paid little attention to them) properly and it was simply easier to toss dozens of bags in the trash and load a full package of bags.

Meanwhile, at home my mom rebuked me for throwing one used and damaged bag in the trash instead of recycling.

I feel like we all can help with rising sea levels by filling a jar with sea water and keeping it in our house. That's a little less water in the seas. I'm helping.

Instead of hoping 7 billion people change their habits, we should change the habits of a few hundred companies. Everyone will pay the price somehow, but companies are vehicles of large scale change, and our markets can efficiently make the changes if we shape them correctly.

Kevin Anderson often stresses out this point.

Besides there is this point regarding recycling:

“It was propaganda that did not appear propagandistic. It also shielded corporate polluters from blame by shifting responsibility onto individuals.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/20/plastics-industry-plasti...

agree, I'm pretty frustrated with the notion that end-consumers are entirely responsible for somehow reversing the trend of pollution by voluntarily opting out of the packaging system. Firstly, it is mostly impossible to do completely without enormous effort and sacrifice, secondly, only a tiny fraction of the population is actually going to attempt to do such a thing, and thirdly, as you said, manufacturers and industry will continue to produce and discard the majority of waste in any case. From a political point of view, putting the blame all on consumers is the perfect story for polluting industries to hide behind - "it's all your fault!". It's a scam, and only legislation and interruption at the supply chain will have any impact. The only genuinely good thing about consumers engaging in voluntary source reduction is that they raise their own political awareness, since the main thing they need to do is vote.

"Even as their ad was inducing guilt in viewers for spreading trash, Keep America Beautiful’s members were fighting legislation that could have done much to address the problem."

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/20/plastics-industry-plasti...

My CSAs drop the produce off at my pick-up point in milk crates they bring back the next week.

My food coop loads the bulk bins from giant bags.

Grocery stores don't have much appeal to me.

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