this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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You missed my point completely. It's not specifically about carbon emissions, it's about all the environmental issues, and the personal responsibility we all have to do what we can to solve it. There are thousands of little things that individuals can do. Each of those people doing a thing on their own adds up. I get annoyed when comments like yours discourage those little actions. If all 8 billion people on the planet would do little things like recycle properly, things like the Pacific garbage patch wouldn't exist.
There’s also the factor of peer pressure the more one recycles the more encouraged everyone else is to do the same.
2.6M pounds of Houston recyclables tossed in landfill: Records reveal city broke its own recycling rules hundreds of times.
Of the estimated 2.6 million pounds of recyclables dumped where they didn’t belong, 1.1 million pounds—or 41 percent—were dumped after March 1, when the city’s new, state-of-the-art recycling center started processing recyclables.
shrug
If a tens of thousands of people do the right thing at the individual level and then a dozen people do the wrong thing out of expediency and profit, and there's no mechanism for firing and replacing the irresponsible managers, then the efforts of the many are squandered to the profit of the few.