Zero waste, a pointless theme

There’s a festival this weekend, so media have been implicitly lauding people and even commercial establishments that generate very little trash, but I’m not too impressed. In order to reduce your waste that much you have to devote your life to it, and don’t tell me the woman described in the CBC piece, living in St-Constant, can make the purchases described without using a car – buying everything in bulk, going to farms, buying wine en vrac. Bulk buying also means plenty of clean, safe space for storage. A certain level of wealth and leisure are necessary before embarking on this venture.

As a reliable source tweeted recently, “100 corporations are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions and presenting the crisis as a moral failing on the part of individuals without noting this fact is journalistic malpractice.” Which isn’t to say that making a few changes in your lifestyle is futile, but there’s a commonsense limit to how much you as an individual can do, vis-à-vis how much time and money you have to devote to it and how much of a dent you can really make in the problem.