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   clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 02:16:53 JST clarity flowers

   landfills were invented within human memory. the trash can as we understand it is a 20th-century invention. disposability as a concept had to be invented. none of this is inevitable or necessary.

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     hermlon (hermlon@yuustan.space)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 03:18:14 JST hermlon

     in reply to

     @clarity afaik before landfills people used the streets for disposing stuff. but thinking about it, a surprising amount of people still treat streets as landfills even today

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 03:18:25 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • hermlon

     @hermlon https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/112684289443720953

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 03:23:24 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     The common narrative here is "before landfills we just threw things any old place" and as such they're a "sanitary" invention. But this completely ignores that before the modern era, plastic didn't exist and metal was considered precious (and rightfully so–it's non-disposable, can be re-forged, and is procured under extraordinarily harsh conditions, often by slave labor or other lower-caste people).

     Without metals, hazardous waste, and plastics, a landfill is a just a large compost pile.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 03:25:25 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • hermlon

     @hermlon yeah no I know! you're all good. I mostly just wanna emphasize that I'm talking less about waste management (which is an ancient and crucial part of building a city) and more about "garbage" as a concept that expands past things like biodegradables & earthenware

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     hermlon (hermlon@yuustan.space)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 03:25:26 JST hermlon

     in reply to

     @clarity I didn't mean to make an argument for one time use products. It was just an adjacent thought that came to my mind.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 03:40:27 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     I have this whole other train of thought about metals and mining. It feels like mining as a technology is a metonym for empire-building. Is Omelas made only of wood and stone?

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 03:53:46 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     anyway my ~~Liberal~~ solution to disposability is to mandate that all merchants must accept returns of any non-compostable goods they distribute, for free, in any condition or form and including packaging. If you deliver items in boxes to me you also have to pick those boxes back up.

     And then, obviously, eliminate publicly-funded garbage collection for everything except compost. Would also need some stricter standards on what qualifies as "compostable" since a lot of that stuff is BS.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 03:57:04 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     there are milk brands that sell their goods in glass bottles that the grocery store will give you $2 for if you bring them back and that's how everything should work. Like the whole system is fucked obviously but I think we could take some real stepwise progress to reducing this problem even in our current hell.

   • Embed this notice
     Emilia (lazerwalker@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 04:00:24 JST Emilia

     in reply to

     @clarity In Germany, literally every beverage bottle (occasionally plastic, overwhelmingly glass) is returnable to the store, and it’s fully culturally the norm you’ll return your few dozen bottles for the few euros bottle deposit refund

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 04:01:34 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • Emilia

     @lazerwalker yeah!!!! I've heard about this kind of thing being much better in some european countries. would love to see this extended to plastic packaging.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 07:11:03 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • Emilia
     • Inga stands with 🇺🇦 🇵🇸

     @IngaLovinde @lazerwalker oh, yeah, I absolutely agree. Especially given what we've learned about microplastics.

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     Inga stands with 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 (ingalovinde@embracing.space)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 07:11:05 JST Inga stands with 🇺🇦 🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Emilia

     @clarity @lazerwalker would be even better to see the plastic packaging (including plastic bottles) to be regulated out of existence... like, my tomatoes absolutely don't have to be in this plastic box, and mineral water would be just as fine in a can.
     In Germany it's words because the deposit for glass bottles (reusable many times, but very heavy and therefore with large transport footprint) is just 8c, the deposit for cans (almost infinitely recyclable and very lightweight) is 25c, and the deposit for plastic bottles (almost non-recyclable, so the deposit basically only means that they end up in one heap rather than spread all over the city) is the same 25c. A scheme that I suspect was devised by plastic manufacturers to evade responsibility.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 08:19:33 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • Philip

     @mez it's an outgrowth of mass-production, right? there are so many more Things now, many more than our society actually needs or is even capable of maintaining.

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     Philip (mez@mastodon.nz)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 08:19:34 JST Philip

     in reply to

     @clarity I just did a big project with some archaeologists and was surprised that less than a hundred years ago people were just throwing their waste (mainly pottery) in to holes on their land. I’d never given thought to how modern communal/public landfills are.

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     Jamie McCarthy (jamiemccarthy@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 08:46:52 JST Jamie McCarthy

     in reply to

     • hermlon

     @clarity @hermlon The word “biodegradable” is doing a lot of work. Most streets and sidewalks in most large cities for much of history were drenched in human piss, shit, and food waste. Before the electric and cable-driven streetcar transformed American cities like Chicago and San Francisco, their streets were littered not just with horseshit, but dead horses. Horses collapsed from exhaustion and they just unhooked their corpses and left them

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 08:46:52 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • Jamie McCarthy
     • hermlon

     @jamiemccarthy @hermlon kindly don’t say “human” when you mean “european”!