Mike Tannenbaum

current biodegradable products can only decompose if they are sent to a special factory, where the temperature and humidity is specially controlled, and lumped together with other compostable plastics. (If those plastics are thrown into landfill and mixed in with other trash, it doesn’t matter if they’re compostable or not. They’re not going back i... See more

We risk losing the lives we have made if we don’t take better account of nature.

Coordination Failures occur when a group of humans could achieve a desirable outcome by working together but fail to do so because they don't coordinate their decision-making

All coordination is a choice. To win this coordination game, we need to choose to coordinate to make this into a multiplayer game

without a market demand, those recyclables are almost useless; placing them in the recycling bin won’t make a difference if you can’t make money off of them. If the demand isn’t there, or the quality of the materials post-use is incurably dirty, they end up in landfill or incinerators.

the rate for plastic packaging is higher at 13.1%, and rates for key plastic packaging such as PET and HDPE bottles are more than double that amount

We tend to think of the environment as a subsystem of the economy, but it is entirely the other way around. We are part of nature, not separate from it.