This really disturbs me and it's not just about coffee pods. Some of my good family & friends have these machines & don't understand the impact that the pods have on our world. They are an utterly unnecessary use of resources & are incredibly damaging to our only home & life support system...the Earth.
And it isn't just about an incredibly self indulgent & mindless use of a polluting substance that is hard if not impossible to recycle. It's also about all the bits that are forced on us via packaging.
Now, in the 21st C, when humans are faced with the collective and connected problems of climate change, rising CO2 levels & other toxic emissions, plastic, pollution in general, soil and water degradation & deforestation ...out of control consumerism has created a world in which nearly all the food we buy is wrapped or packaged in single use, non-biodegradable PLASTIC.
When cans, jars or any other bulk items arrive at supermarkets or any store, every single slab is wrapped in stretch plastic. That's quadrillions of miles of non-biodegradable, single-use material that required billions of tons of dirty fossil fuel to source & to make.
The really sad thing is that most ordinary good people don't think twice about it. They think that the amount of plastic their families use is much less than it actually is or they have given in to the process because it takes time, effort and a little extra money to source environmentally sustainable packaging & products.
And in the end, those good folk usually vote in governments that are perpetuating and making our environmental and human rights problems much worse through legislative inactivity and tax breaks and actual tax payer funded grants, to fossil fuel and emissions greedy corporations that only have profit dollars as their aim. Corporations don't care about people or life on Earth. It's true. It's called capitalism and it relies on consumerism.
Anything a company does for others, unless it's extremely wealthy beyond needing more money and is run by good people with other people's welfare at heart, is simply about hard cold profit. There used to be a thing called the triple bottom line which required a company to ask three questions before taking on a project "Is it fair? Is it affordable? Is it environmentally sustainable?"...but most companies have scraped that. Now it's actually illegal for corporations not to do everything they can to strive for more profit and growth no matter the impact on environment or people.They're answerable only to the laws made by each nation's Government and their own company share holders.
If you want proof....look at how many companies use palm oil in their products. It's not like they don't know that Orangutans will be the first great ape species to become extinct because of deforestation due to palm oil. None of us are exempt from using palm oil because so very many companies use it. I've just discover that my toothpaste, Sensodyne, which I've been using for sensitive teeth since I was a teenager, uses palm oil derived glycerol. SO, I've been unknowingly contributing to the demise of orangutans since I was a teenager. Well, ever since they started putting palm oil in it.
This is why I believe we need Green Governments all around the world...to implement laws that require companies to do the right thing and change the way we package & make all products. Only Governments can make the good things cheaper & the bad things more expensive!
That's why I know the price on carbon was such a ground breakingly good thing. It reduced emissions by 8% for the short time it was permitted to operate. Sadly, power hungry people used it as a political tool by calling it the 'carbon tax' when it was only operating as a tax for the first 3 years after which time it would transition into an emissions trading scheme. After three years companies that emitted over a certain tonnage of Greenhouse gas emissions could buy permits for those extra emissions and then exchange them on the world market. Each year the number of permits were to reduce to give companies time to clean up their operations.
Companies were not permitted to pass on costs of emissions to consumers and quite a number of companies were fined for doing so, including Brumby's Bakeries. It was calculated that the price on carbon would on average only cost people $20 a year for those 3 years....and then nothing at all. So what was the fuss about? Now Australia is left lagging behind all other countries except maybe Trump's America.
Anyone who voted in either the Liberals, who are diabolically bad on environmental and human rights issues, or Labor, who aren't that far behind them, is unavoidably complicit in furthering the damage to our life support systems.
If you say to me that you don't vote Green because of one or even two issues that are not to do with human rights or the environment, then you are not really aware of the seriousness of our global situation.
Complacency and ignorance is now no excuse. It is in the end all up to the responsibility of each voter to do the right thing for their children's future and for all human rights. AND I would say to you the ONLY real choice is to vote GREEN.
If you need any further convincing, please look up the ocean rubbish gyres, some of which are the size of Tasmania or larger. This last month our Warrnambool beach has been covered in plastic rubbish. The Life Savers do their best to clean it up during patrol....but it shouldn't be up to them to clean our beaches. We are responsible for that plastic rubbish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
http://www.marineconservation.org.au/pages/plastic-pollution.html
http://saveourshores.org/what-we-do/pollution-prevention/
http://greens.org.au/policy
http://greens.org.au/policies/ecological-sustainability
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