spinnetrouble

We need more alternatives to plastic, not the same number or fewer. Why wouldn’t we make sustainable materials from waste streams to replace the environmentally harmful ones that we banned ten years ago? Your preferences are one person’s preferences. You’re free to continue using apricot scrubs and baby oil, nobody’s trying to take them away from you. However, I would really like to find an environmentally sound, no-fossil-source, physical exfoliant with greater uniformity than the ones you like. (As an aside, milled pits, seeds, and shells (like nut shells) aren’t good exfoliants for human skin. They’re effective scrubbers, but the milling process leaves a lot of points and jagged edges in the resulting product which causes small tears in the skin barrier, reducing its ability to keep your insides safe from the outside.)

It kind of sounds like you’re neglecting the need for continuing innovation in materials science and engineering. We’re not just talking about replacing the horrific plastic microbeads in cosmetics, we’re talking about doing the work to develop entirely new materials that could potentially be used across a wide range of industries. Relying on pits and shells is definitely not the way forward here when we could be developing replacements for plastic wrap and styrofoam using stuff like food waste, fungi, and seaweeds.

Starch is a polymer. Cellulose is a polymer. Chitosan is a polymer, as is chitin. They’re just materials made of long chain, repeating units. One of the ways we can “fix plastic” is by making materials that have similar properties out of naturally-derived stuff that has nothing to do with fossil sources, like plants, arthropod shells, and fungi. We leave a LOT of possibilities just lying around in food production waste streams. This is exactly the same as “replacing plastic,” and the only real difference is which version writers like to use in their articles.

I’m an American. I’m not one of the “good” Americans, though, since I’m disabled, not Christian, not capitalist, and not white. I’ve spent my whole life getting shit on as a third-class citizen by Americans steeped in American culture and public school education that has, at every turn, preached American exceptionalism and pulling oneself up by their bootstraps while totally ignoring every benefit offered to them and withheld from people like me.

I think that you’ve been lucky so far, but now that you’re being asked to sit the fuck down and listen while other people talk, you’re taking it badly. After a lifetime of privilege, it’s really easy to mistake being brought into line with everybody else’s equality for oppression; please don’t do that. It’s a bad look and sets you up to feel bad unnecessarily.

There are like 8 billion people on this planet and you’re one of about 330 million Americans. It’s pretty reasonable that your perspective isn’t the majority opinion, and that other people from other countries may also think their home is the best possible place to live and everyone else is an unlucky chump. Instead of dismissing all the critical comments as the kvetching of the jealous, unwashed masses outside your borders, it may help to look at them as nothing more than other people sharing their own viewpoints. Also, reading about events like Juneteenth, the MOVE bombing, the Kent State massacre, the Jackson State killings, and the Tulsa massacre may help you better understand why people from other places side eye Americans.

And seriously, the metric system is based on the physical properties of Earth and base 10 counting, not dead oppressors.