filip on Nostr: From a business perspective, it's fascinating how the American defense industry ...

From a business perspective, it's fascinating how the American defense industry overcame the gloomy business prospects of the rising opposition to American involvement in overseas wars. They correctly identified that seeing Americans soldiers getting killed overseas in questionable missions had the largest impact on the popular sentiment, and political candidates would have interest in addressing this. Now there seems to be at least one or two active wars (Ukraine, Gaza) that Americans supply weapons to (and have no real interest in ending). They found a market for their products while eliminating the negative perception.

I wish we would apply the same acumen to some green initiatives. In Canada you can no longer buy single-use plastic bags anywhere. But stores sell much thicker plastic "forever bags" for a fraction of a dollar, and I see people buying them every day. What's really the net impact at the end of the day? And on top of that, most products I buy, including some produce comes in plastic containers.

Seems like we missed the mark. Would a better solution have been to standardize the take-away plastic bags to be easily reused as garbage bags? Everyone still has to buy garbage bags, so we are not adding any net new plastic. On the other hand they would not be single use any more, and we would eliminate having to dispose any shopping bags.