We used to have earbuds that don't need to be charged because they had a headphone jack, didn't get lost so easily because they had a cord attached to a headphone jack, never lost the bluetooth connection because they had a headphone jack, and they cost less because they had a headphone jack. https://bsky.app/profile/daisyfm.bsky.social/post/3l3mfjc6sn62k
I don't think earbuds make up a significant percentage of the patch to be here virtue signaling and shaming people for what they were encouraged to do by corporate greed. Your source says the great majority of the patch comes from agriculture and fishing.
Cheap and disposable plastics and electronics IS a significant part of the world garbage problem and yes, plastic particles is MOST of the garbage patch specifically.
Whoa, dude, hold your horses! I'm in no way blaming consumers. Making consumer electronics cheap crap that breaks easily and everything of decent quality prohibitively expensive is 100% on the greedy corporations, not their victims the consumers.
Ok, admittedly a poor choice of example. Doesn't invalidate my intended point though, however ill-stated heh
This is tough -
(US here) Gets me thinking about dollar store headphones. Consumers could buy decent headphones for about $10 direct from overseas. When that’s equivalent to more than an hour of wages, there’s still demand for the $1 version. Should this need not be met out of a sense of social responsibility?
(I don’t have a perfect answer myself)
Econ 101 on my mind here btw:
The problem is that our economic system has encouraged an environment where reputation is a thing to be immediately cashed out. You can't even know if those $10 earbuds are any better than the $1 version.
You can make some reasonable assumptions although they will be imperfect:
Wouldn’t be as frequently imperfect if freaking review fraud weren’t entirely ubiquitous (grrrr)
When people talk about disposable plastic they don't mean electronics like earbuds. They mean packaging, plastic bottles, plastic bags etc.