57
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
57 points (90.1% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35702 readers
2197 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
What you're posing as a counterpoint to potentially not being able to recycle paper products, we should automatically go straight to cutting down more trees.
Imagine making paper on your own property. You have two trees. You cut down one tree, plant a replacement, and make 100,000 sheers of paper product. When you're done with a sheet, throw it in your yard. It's composting, right? Sure. You've made no efforts to recycle clean paper. When your 100,000 sheets run out (printer paper, note paper, toilet paper, and paper towels), you have to go cut down the second tree. How big is that replacement tree? Is it going to ready 100,000 sheets later? Will it get struck by lightning, caught in a wildfire, hit by a car, or catch a disease? You'd hope not. So wouldn't it make more sense that, even though you're planning to replant trees, to recycle as much paper as you could? You wouldn't have a yard full of composting paper and you wouldn't have such a close dependency on your two tree plots. No, this isn't solved by having a whole forest available when you scale up the consumer side too.
Now consider that an average American consumes 7 trees per year and a tree takes at least 20 years to mature for processing. That's 140 trees growing simultaneously to support one person.
So no, we can't just blindly throw all our paper in a landfill and ignore the impact. Why so many places do single stream with tuna oil soaked into paper, I don't know. I get the frustration.
Metal isn't so clean either. Every time it gets processed, more and more is lost to oxidation and to contamination during smelting. Sure, it's more easily recovered from the single stream can, but I'm not a fan of metal newspapers
You're seriously underestimating how many trees there are. The only reason we're losing forest is because of grazing land. That's clearcutting, where you remove the tree and just destroy it or just burn the whole forest. As a vegetarian I'm obviously not here to defend grazing land, but if you look only at wood and paper production, we absolutely can replace the trees we use with enough time for them to regrow completely.
Doing so devastates ecosystems by turning them into monocultures, but you're only talking about the replacement rate of trees. We don't have to worry about the replacement rate of trees, we have to worry about greed for land and environmental impact.
You cannot make paper out of all wood.
Additionally, the process to remove lignin, a binding protein, from wood in order to make paper is extraordinarily environmentally destructive. Paper mills do not smell good and are toxic waste sites for a reason
Yes, I know all that. The argument I was replying to was that you run out of trees if you use them to make paper without recycling. That argument is false. You're arguing with points I didn't make.
That was my take away with what they were saying in a broad sense - making more and more and more paper is unsustainable not matter what. Reforestation is still hard on the creatures dependent on the original environment...monoculture destroys economies (only for poor people, obviously) - in the end, no matter what, creating new paper products on a whim is selfish, greedy and avoidable
I figured you'd extrapolate and consider the damage caused by needing so many trees every year, not just the simple math of needing too many trees.
and i figured you'd read what i actually wrote instead of arguing with someone who didn't exist