- What did you learn?
- What is your position or point of view?
- How do you feel about it?
- Now what? What are you going to do about it and how?
For the talk with the trash collector 闫师傅, it was very informative. I actually had a community trash collector back in Beijing, so I did know about this job before. But there were something new for me to learn also.
What I did not know before was how the prices fluctuate throughout the “seasons” as the Shifu was calling it. It did make sense to me tho because they were selling the recyclables to the government but I truly assumed that they decide the prices all by themselves.
Also I didn’t know that so many things that I usually throw into the recycle bin were not taken by the collectors and that there were things that they wouldn’t bother to recycle just because of the price so that was also something new.
In terms of the opinion on the job, I realize there are many negative opinions especially among Chinese households against those seemingly “lesser” jobs so I’m glad that Shifu was treated with respect among his family.
For the reading:
I guess what I learned from it was the details on how people initially thought about plastic bags and the battle back and forth on the ban and fees against it in the USA. What I was most surprised about is how advertisements can diverge people’s attention from what problems they are interested in and what sounds “emergent” to them, and how corporates like ACC can abuse that characteristic about human beings to manipulate the public’s opinion and feelings towards plastics. Because in the end, public opinions are important and people are generally stupid……
For me personally, I’m all for any actions that go against the usage of plastic bags or paper bags or actually any human-made products that are not sustainable, but again, the success of them largely depends on how the public feels towards those products, which is hard because public’s mind is easily manipulated. So I guess the most long-term goal is to better educate the public, and also as we discussed, provide a way or option for the public to live more sustainably, such as labeling the kinds of plastic used in certain products to facilitate more effective recycling or provide plastic-free options in stores.