I’m surprised the youth of Lemmy hasn’t picked up more on the “liquid soap is bad for the environment” thing. I got berated at length by my Millennial SIL (me, GenX) for using liquid soap, and because this was family, I actually did a deep dive into the subject so I could win the argument and put her in her fucking place, and it turns out she was right.
Why did I have to learn this in meatspace, and not on the internet from random kids? Things ain’t right, I tell you, when my extended family knows and/or cares more about an environmental topic than left-leaning Lemmy.
Why did I have to learn this in meatspace, and not on the internet from random kids? Things ain’t right, I tell you, when my extended family knows and/or cares more about an environmental topic than left-leaning Lemmy.
Because everything is on fire and while using less soap and laundry detergent bottles is certainly a good goal to aim for, it is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic and worse it is rearranging deck chairs according to the directions of a captain who is trying to distract everyone from dealing with the fact that the ship is sinking.
Recycling by and large doesn’t work but corporations really don’t care because recycling is a great way to sell consumers the experience of being environmental when consuming and it provides way to shift blame and get people focused on recycling rather than the actions of big corporations.
As recycling implodes as a cultural ritual of “doing your part” to save the environment there has been a rise in advertisements from companies selling smaller detergent and soap bottles and I think they are trying to fulfill the same emotional need and story .
Which isn’t to say these soap bottles aren’t a good thing, but if the left leaning people you interact with aren’t focused on this… I don’t think that is indicative of anything but the high number of existential environmental problems we face and the general refusal of neoliberal and rightwing governments to tackle them.
I didn’t mention recycling, but then, I didn’t mention much about the topic.
It’s not recycling that’s the issue. It’s the fact that millions of people are paying to move mostly water around, which has - in aggregate - a huge impact in terms of fuel consumption. Each bottle of hand soap is not expensive to transport, and cleans far less, than a single bar of solid soap. And this isn’t the only environmental impact; recycling or no, bar soap requires far less packaging, and that packaging is often renewable resources that are bio-degradable, whereas liquid soap nearly uniformly requires quite a lot of plastic packaging.
These weren’t the only points in ecological favor of bar soap; I didn’t memorize the list, but the arguments were substantial, unequivocal, and not debatable. And easily discoverable online.
Basically this.
Going green is good, but the reality is it’s out of the control of the average individual. Corporations sold us the blame, made us feel like we could do something so they could pass it off as our responsibility.
Even if every single low to middle income family took charge and did everything they could at their own inconvenience, the progress would still be far less in comparison to what the wealthy could achieve. Sadly, we barely ever think about this and even modern climate activists like that young Swedish girl have come to perpetuate the lie that the wealthy have sold us.
Not all recycling is useless. Aluminium and glass are two things that benefit greatly from recycling. Recycling aluminum takes 95% less energy than smelting it from ore, simply because it’s such a complex process. And recycling glass is just a matter of re-melting it.
Is that not shampoo?
They make bar shampoo, too.
I feel like most people just don’t need to look into it much. Like, it’s kind of obvious enough (if one is aware of it), that no plastic bottle is better than a plastic bottle, and it’s not like bar soap is a massive downgrade.
Personally, I tried them for climate min-maxing reasons, but then found out that I actually prefer them by a lot.But then as the others said, it’s not like it will win the climate war. So, if someone does have a reason or even just a preference for liquid soap, there’s no point in berating them specifically for that. Like, wash yourself with liquid soap all you want, and rather give some vegan food options an honest try or take the bus more often or something along those lines.
We’ve switched to solid shampoo — only drawback is it can be harder to tell which is shampoo and which is conditioner, because there’s no single-use plastic telling me which is which.
My favorite was that time I was making enough to afford the payments on a mortgage but they wouldn’t give me a mortgage because my credit score wasn’t good enough and they were worried I couldn’t make the payments even though I provided the income information that showed I could totally make the payments because fuck me for being young I guess.
So instead I spent years paying way more to rent, preventing me from saving up enough to buy much of anything.
At 25 I lived in a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom house with 13 people in a beach town and chuckled to myself about how people waste so much money on having a house all to their own when they could be having so much fun, surrounded by friends every day. Sorry 25 year old me… I enjoy quiet, peeing indoors and not fighting over power usage and who left their dishes laying around.
I own a house, car, etc and I still make sure that I get every last drop of shampoo out of the bottle. Not saying that is how you save enough for down payment but just that they aren’t mutually exclusive.
The only thing that it indicates is that you’re not wasteful.
But i’m thinking if you cry about it, the meaning is pretty clear.
“Own” is a very tricky word, when paired with “Down Payment”
