Takatakatakatakatak

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  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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    1. I use starlink - I paid for the hardware on the ground, the rest of it is in space. There is no other internet out here.

    2. We have no public services, I have to drive to them or provide them myself. No water, no sewage.

    3. The power is generated 36km from my house and the cost of gold plating the grid to get that power is disproportionately reflected in MY power bill so that those in the city 200km away can have electricity.

    Can I ask what demographic you fit into that you seem to sincerely believe the world would keep functioning if everyone lived in cities, and that with your obviously limited exposure to how the world works, you believe you have it all figured out?







  • Obviously plastic causes a whole bunch of other problems but using it for bags literally does save the rainforests in a roundabout sort of way.

    Corporations being corporations, very few are going to spend the extra money to offer you FSC certified paper bags sourced from a well managed, renewable plantation. They are going to buy the absolute cheapest product available that they can slap their logo on.

    The inevitable consequence of that choice is that those bags likely come from a country with little to no regulation of their forest industry. In all likelihood those ultra cheap bags are either a) made from irreplaceable old growth forest that was then burned to cinders and turned into a palm oil plantation.

    Or b) made from low grade timber imported from the other side of the planet. When this timber arrives, it and everything else in the hold are completely and utterly black with mould. All good though, you can just blast it with a mixture of industrial bleach and a cornucopia of the harshest chemicals imaginable before draining and allowing that entire slurry to wash into the river, which then flows to the ocean.

    Now you can make paper!

    Even where I live in Australia, we’ve rapidly shut down sustainable state forest logging for hardwood. These decisions were made on emotion, but essentially out of a desire to do good. It’s just unfortunate that the people making that series of decisions doesn’t really understand the consequences of their actions.

    We do not have anywhere near the amount of sustainable plantation required to service the needs of our local paper making industry. Further still, you can’t make quality paper out of plantation pine alone: you need hardwood.

    There’s massive investment into hardwood plantation timber over the next few years. Unfortunately we are looking at 30 years of buying our bags from countries where there are no standards, and no hesitation to pump chemical slurry into the ocean or cut down old growth forest to make shopping bags.

    So yeah, I’ll take the plastic thanks. I’ll re-use it as a bin liner before it goes to landfill but at least it isn’t burning sludge diesel in TWO directions as the ingredients are shipped around the world and it didn’t pour a thousand litres of filth into the ocean or tear down an old growth forest.