“Eco-friendly” Products are a SCAM

Something that really infuriates me about green washing, companies like Apple. They claim they're taking steps to be eco-friendly/ carbon neutral/ negative but instead of making their products easy to fix and last a long time they're making their products extremely difficult/ impossible to fix.

Eco friendly label being printed on plastic is peak irony 😭😭

The fact that recycling is the first thing most people think of as “eco friendly” is part of the problem. The slogan is REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE… in that order! First, reduce the amount of stuff you buy and accumulate. Then reuse packaging and containers, give away clothing, etc. THEN you look to recycle. Recycling was never meant to be the main thing.

As a graphic designer, i’ve seen A LOT of cases where companies print a recycled paper texture on stuff to trick customers.

Whoever called cheap, shitty faux leather "vegan leather" was a genius

I can't help but to mention the new "recyclable Keurig pods". The effort to recycle them is so substantial that one would be better off just using a real coffee pot. 😂

The minimalist trend took it too far. When it comes to sustainability, we should shop like a minimalists, but we don’t have to stage our homes like one. As a lazy person, this middle ground appeals to me because it means I can spend less time shopping and less time throwing things away, while also reducing my environmental impact. Win-win-win!

Worked in a grocery store, and the most important thing I learned is to ignore anything on the front of the box with groceries. The front is marketing. The back of a box has all the info you need.

People always forget that the order in Reduce>Reuse>Recycle is important. I don't care about apple making their phones from recycled materials. Reusing my old phone is INFINITELY more energy efficient than recycling. To recycle you need to introduce energy into the system, and to re-manufacture you're introducing even more. Reusing? Well you introduce 0 if it's still working.

There's a wide gap between 'minimalism', rejecting fads and trends, and dont-buy-crap-you-dont-need

One of the worst greenwashing offenders is the company that made that laptop on your left. They purposefully go out of their way to make their products non-serviceable and have been actively lobbying against the right to repair making sure that the only alternative to a problem with your device is its complete or near-complete replacement. The environmental impact of a single of their devices easily dwarves all toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes a family will use over a couple of generations.

I hate how everything is plastic, even most of the products that appear to be plastic-free. For example, virtually all glass jars with metal lids contain plastic in the lid. If you search for cotton clothes, most of them will be a mixture of cotton and plastic. I'd kill for an accurate "plastic-free" search term we can toggle on at places like Amazon.

So true. Eco labels tell us nothing about the true sustainability of the products. And it’s becoming harder and harder as a consumer to understand what to look for.

They tried selling plastic bottle in Germany 🇩🇪 all the citizens would recycle ♻️ those bottles because they wanted their money back and they sent those plastic bottles back to the companies so they can recycle them, the problem was it was cost companies too much money to recycle those bottles in the plant and so now the companies switched back to glass bottles and closed those plastic recycling plants.

Main infuriation to me is how these corporations made reusing/recycling their products’ trash/leftovers the consumers’ problem in the first place…WITHOUT having to leave any other options for said products. Example: My dad remembered when all he and his family had to do was use the milk they paid for, maybe rinse the bottle out, then stick the empty bottles back out on the step, and the milk man/company he worked for did the rest. If you lost a bottle or broke one, that was ok, you could get another one on the next round if you wanted. They had the option to buy milk in other packaging, but preferred the glass bottles. So, why won’t corporations do this now, other than because GREED?

As a Biochemical engineer, we are in such a dire situation. Like the fact that people dont know the difference between the resin symbols and think it means recyclable is so dangerous.

I remember one day at my dads house, i asked him why he didn’t have a recycling bin. He said recycling was a scam that was way too inefficient and used too much energy, and that most of it just got thrown out anyway. As much as i dont want to believe him...... he had a point

Funny enough, my environmental science degree made me cynical and it caused me to stop recycling. If you buy a product, do it to improve your immediate environment, don't do it thinking you're saving the planet. I've called this "don't poop where you eat" environmentalism.

"Eco friendly" is to use old stuff that are made to last.

Problem is those paper container substitutes were coated in PFAS to make them plastic like in their water repellent property, ends up being even worse likely. Not only poisoning the environment producing these chemicals and containers but also poisoning the consumer of product contained within