Waste | TheNewLanguage

Plastic

A pollutant entering the digestive systems and blood streams of a wide variety of fish, reptiles and mammals, including sapiens.

The chemicals used to produced plastics are absorbed by organisms on the bottom of the food chain and enter the systems of many, if not most, living species. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 93 percent of the population had detectable levels of BPA, a hormone disruptor, in their urine. Also, plastic from landfills seep into the groundwater and are then consumed in drinking water.

See the video: When did we become a plastic society?

What Are My Choices?

What can you do? Here are some choices that are available to you.

1) Share this definition with others and tell others about the environmental and health costs of plastic use.

2) Support legislation for a plastic tax to be paid by producers and sellers of single-use plastics (such as food containers and shopping bags).

3) Do not use plastic bags at the grocery store or plastic utensils for take-out food. Use reusable shopping bags, water bottles and utensils.

4) Ask your political representatives to increase restrictions on pollution, such as BPA, from chemical manufacturers.

5) Hold plastic producers financially responsible, with fines or penalties, for plastic pollution.

6) Ask your grocery store and local merchants to use bio-degradable plastic or reusable materials as opposed to plastic.

Capitalism

1) A system that reduces human beings into economic actors (shoppers and consumers) and other living things into assets and commodities.

2) A system that defines human beings only and as nothing more than economic actors that are valued according to the size of their transactions and as participants in markets (i.e., as buyers, consumers, labor). It sees no other aspect of them as being of significance or value.

3) A pervasive system of reductionisms; a claim that transactions and market participation are the sum of an individual.

This system and its definition of human beings is so pervasive (and persuasive) that many people willingly define themselves according to these terms. Those who see themselves (consciously or unconsciously) as only economic actors (and most are pressured to do so by this system) are driven to vie with others on these terms. This may result in single-mindedness and ruthlessness, as well as a contempt for other living things and ecosystems except in how those things might be bought or sold and contribute to their effectiveness within markets.

Defined as only economic actors human beings then seek to increase their value within the marketplace. This pursuit often causes them to disregard the interests of other living things and the biosphere as this can only interfere with their efforts to maximize their value as economic actors.

This system also holds that any demand in the marketplace—the fulfillment of any desire—is legitimate. It does not allow for the hearing of concerns about the waste or harm that might result from a demand and it’s satisfaction and there is no thought about its long-term viability. In the market, demand is necessary and any criticism against a demand is met with hostility.

Garbage Can

1) A gateway to the trillions of tons of waste that human beings bury and burn every year.

2) An object that gives people permission to think that waste is acceptable; it is permission to destroy in the guise of convenience.

3) One component in a system that causes habitat destruction and pollution.

Human beings are the only species that produces waste and products that cannot be absorbed into ecosystems and used productively within them. What other species produce can be can be, usually in a short time frame, cycled back into the ecosystem and used productively within it.

This familiar object influences the perceptions of human beings by rendering a behavior that is destructive to ecosystems and the biosphere into what seems to be an ordinary and acceptable act with no negative consequences. In short, it makes normal a behavior that is unknown among all other living things.

Dropping an item into a garbage can is one of human being’s many “out of sight, out of mind” practices.

Alternative behaviors available are recycling, less consumption, composting and the use of re-usable packaging.

Person

1) A member of the only species that produces waste.

2) An animal that often thinks of itself as apart from the rest of the living world and superior to it.