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David Kirtley's avatar

It's not just Puerto Rico. They are just the canary in the coal mine warning of what is going on everywhere.

It really comes down to the fact that the environmental movement has been destroyed by both the faction that has used it to promote their Marxist dreams along with the corporate leaches that have made it a scam by just promoting lip service over actually addressing the problems.

99.5% of all recycling is a scam. Yes, that is a totally made up statistic but I believe it is most likely accurate -- if not conservative. Just about every product that you buy is ridiculously over packaged. Everything is designed for single use.

One of the biggest sources of the waste is companies making things intentionally non-interchangeable to create vendor lock-in. They also want to make everything non-serviceable so things have to be replaced rather than repaired.

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Jim the Geek's avatar

Puerto Rico is just a preview of what awaits the rest of the world. When you base an economy on the concept of perpetual growth, the inevitable result is the exhaustion of resources. Manufacturers now use extremely low quality in order to keep production going, creating our landfill economy. The end result is illustrated in James Howard Kunstler's "World Made by Hand" series that explores what happens when the oil is all used up. Those who own landfills become the providers by mining the buried trash for usable items, like bent nails and empty glass containers. As pointed out here by David Kirtley, recycling is a cruel joke. Our relentless pursuit of comfort through technology will get us to a point where the resources needed to keep it going will be exhausted. Already makers of electric cars are having to consider reducing the range of cars because the materials needed to make batteries are becoming scarce. In this podcast (https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/kunstlercast-411) Christopher Bystroff theorizes that we are at or past the population that the earth can carry. When this happens in nature, the organism that has excessive numbers dies off until equilibrium is again reached.

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