I have this app called Too Good To Go and it lets you buy shit from grocery stores that they would otherwise throw away for a cheap price (think like 15 euro worth of stuff for 3-4 euro). Today I went for it and got sort of disappointed, as a got like two cheeses, plant based butter, a box of eclairs, 15 little desserts and a steak. Sort of decent catch, not very nutritious. We gave the steak away as meat is not eaten in our house.
The app is a hit or miss. You can sometimes end up with a big box of veggies you can eat for a whole week. Just not today.
Anyway, it always makes me think how fucking much food is thrown away. Like, the app is so full in just my City. According to the app, 124kg of food is throw out every SECOND in this country. How anyone has to get hungry because they can’t contribute to the profit is just insane. I hope we can one day look back at this time in disgust.
We have a similar app where I live, though I’ve never actually tried it I should.
Extremely tangentially related but I have been in a bad habit lately of buying disposable nicotine vaporizers and every time I get one I feel great shame. The amount of waste they generate is absurd, with cardboard and plastic packaging as well as tossing out a whole ass battery and such. This shit is not sustainable.
There is a reason the west produces magnitudes more garbage than the rest of the world, I always threw out so much less trash and especially food when I was in China and had easy access to a fresh wet market.
Tangential, but there are refillable versions of those vapes that cut down on waste almost entirely (and cost less). You buy the device once, and then a bottle of nicotine salts, and the refillable cartridge. The only waste you’re producing is the cartridge every once in a while when you replace it (no extra cardboard, plastic, etc) and the plastic nicotine salt bottle when it’s empty. You aren’t throwing away a battery, electronics, or the bulky device. And I mean the same form factor as what you’re probably buying too, I’m not talking about the old fashion cloud-blowing box vapes.
Oh yea I’m well familiar, I used to use one like that but have in the past year tried to eliminate my nicotine habit so stopped for a good while but sadly have gotten into lately picking up some of these disposables, usually just when I’m going out for the weekend or whatever.
But I do see a lot of people who buy only the disposable vapes very often, and even in general their existence upsets me lol
I understand that. I don’t use any of it anymore but when I did I used the refillable ones.
It’s just insanity to me that every single one of those has: a PCB, with chips (they have usb charging, and timing chips to auto-turn off, and a draw sensor), and a battery. Then the metal casing it’s all in. And that all gets thrown out. A reasonable sized battery and all its lithium[1], thrown out. Fully functional chips, thrown out. A PCB with a nonzero amount of gold, thrown out. And people go through them at a rate that’s just absurd.
Each vape battery has somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5 grams of metallic lithium. ↩︎
You’re 100% right, its ridiculous and you have articulated what I was thinking far better than I could. I work for a second job at a place that sells these disposable vapes and like I’m guilty of indulging too ofc but it blows my mind how many of these we sell. And it all ends up in the trash. Some people are buying one every other day, they should probably be banned honestly. Its an opulent level of waste