This is why I recycle.

But it still sucks to see so much work undone by a few greedy fucks.

the recycling system is broken and often just a complete lie in many places in the world.

In many places in the world, or mainly the US? I keep seeing this claim repeated but usually any proof is just about the US

Recycling (edit: besides metal) does literally nothing, like it's actually 0% helpful, as long as we're producing more plastic than ever before every single year. We're closing in on 500 million tonnes of plastic produced—not total, produced—annually. Every single person can put every single piece of plastic in the recycling bin, and we'll still have more plastic than existed 50 years ago. There are many things that individual action can accomplish, and this is not one of them. We need legislation for this.

Isn't it somewhere like only 1% of the recycling stuff actually getting recycled? The rest goes to some kind of landfill to a poor country that decides to take it. I saw this in some documentary

I'm kinda to the point where it feels like nothing us normies do will change anything so until billionaires are illegal it's basically like fuck it.

I don't see it as a way to justify inaction. I see it as a way to be forgiving of myself if I mess up sometimes.

Example: in the worst of my grief, I threw away some recyclables because I just couldn't wash them out properly. It took everything just to eat.

I didn't pile guilt on myself over it. I recycle 99% of the time, I never litter. I have to check my pockets for random trash before doing laundry.

Utility companies, corporations, and rich people are not cleaning up after themselves and their inaction almost negates everything me and everyone I personally know can possibly do.

Knowing they are dumping faster than I can shovel doesn't mean I stop shoveling. I still want and actively work to leave this place better than I found it.

Those 91 jets just mean I don't feel overwhelming guilt when I fail. I just try to do better next time.

Not to mention avoiding plastic leeching.

Not quite a compare - you can move house, you can't move planet. It's not that I would stop looking after my own garden if my neighbours weren't looking after theirs. It just feels pointless. Using your analogy, if all surrounding neighbours had rotten rubbish in their garden, no matter what you would do, it would still stink in your garden.

It feels pointless until a corporate drone tells you that you are a part of the problem and about a new law designed to punish you for taking "shortcuts" in life. Like I have to pay an additional tax in my area to help salmon streams but a few miles away is an oil refinery that gets tax breaks yet the water surrounding them is devoid of life... somehow I'm a part of the problem and I have to pay for it.

Even better: compost the rich!

Wow, I'm starting to think the military might be a net negative on this earth.

It may have changed now but when I was in the Navy in the late 80s we just tossed all our trash into the ocean twice a day. Everything: paint cans, medical waste, regular trash. It was disgusting

It's not the woman that's being criticized, it's the people claiming that the ones not doing that bear all the blame for damaging the environment.

I think it's more like a response to the way one of these things is given a disproportionate amount of time and attention. We're all expected to micromanage every aspect of our lives to diminish our comparatively miniscule impact of personal choice while the state and the ruling class just do whatever the fuck they want actively slaughtering the environment for fun.

You know what would help me minimize my carbon footprint a lot? Public transportation. A renewable energy grid. Affordable food created along sustainable and environmentally conscious supply chains. Electronics and clothing that is manufactured with long term use, maintenance, and recyclability in mind.

Those things are all out of my reach to implement. Me properly sorting my recyclables (which i do) is such a minor impact compared with those other things. Any offsetting done by proper recycling is immediately undone the moment i step into a grocery store, having driven there in my car for lack of public transportation, and buy food that was wastefully produced and transported to my grocery store via fossil fuel based energy.

The majority of our time and energy should be going into fighting back against the state and the ruling class who refuse to structure society around environmental impact, not on almost the almost irrelevant impact of individual workers. We can and should promote recycling, but we can hammer home that point when our whole society isn't top down engineered with total indifference to the environment.