Plastic seals food, sterile medical implements, medicine, beverages, etc… it’s seems like plastic is used as a way to seal things safely. Post pandemic rising, I see even more. My work used to be have plastic utensils in the cafeteria, for example, an already wasteful thing. Now, post-2020, every fork, knife, and spoon is individually wrapped in a plastic wrapper. I feel like the more my desire to escape plastic intensifies, the more plastic I see all around me everywhere.
How can we get away from plastic as a safety layer?
The best way to get people out of cars is to give them good alternatives, so I think you need to start by improving infrastructure and public transport.
Yep. The big issue is that the US landscape was designed for cars from the get go va Europe where cars were an afterthought. You don’t get rid of cars by making them forbidden or too expensive you get rid of them by making useless or less useful than alternative options a.
Some US cities came after the car, but anything on the eastern side existed well before cars. Those cities had walkable neighbourhoods, dense downtowns and public transit. A lot of that was bulldozed to make the roads wider and provide parking for the car. North American cities were not built for the car, they were bulldozed for it.
That’s my point.
American cities were designed before cars as well. The difference is that the car and fossil fuel industries lobbied for cities to be completely redesigned around cars in the 50s and 60s. And governments all across the US bulldozed their own cities to do it.
Suburban areas were designed after.
Yes but the highways that connected them to urban and productive areas were made by destroying the old downtowns