One of the BIGGEST requirement for change is to *bring about a community*. Perhaps "technically" they haven't been "the best", but their major value has been creating a community of people who care and demand change. And that's a lot more than many people commenting here from their sofa could claim
A community around recycling reminds me of the article "We wash our trash to repent for killing God". Like some commenters in this discussion I believe plastic recycling is a distraction at best.
What is there to "believe"? Precious Plastic collects and creates some knowledge, furthers the education of many people around the world and transforms some stuff that would have otherwise gone to waste to useful things. I really do not understand the mental contortions one needs to undertake to judge such things as somehow negative. Is no project that doesn't scale enough to solve all the problems in a domain worthy of undertaking?
And how is it useful or respectful to be judgemental about what other people engage in and form communities around? Is being a Football fan, an archer, a woodworker or whatever in your spare time somehow more valuable or more useful than engaging with recycling, upcycling, tinkering with machines, doing community work and all the other activities that go into a project like PP?
There's definitely some people here who are against the entire concept of recycling plastic.
But the topic and difference of this thread is that football fans don't ask you to feed and house them for over a decade, while they do performative art (all while owning 10, unmentioned, hectares of land but claiming homelessness and poverty).
Huh? Football fans regularly produce significant costs for the tax payer by way of the huge police and cleanup activities needed for big games, for example.
Even if you take the stance that PP is art - artists have asked for money for as long as there has been art. Doesn't seem unusual to me.
Are you referring to the land in Portugal that they also made available to the public and that they made a lot of YouTube videos and other documentation about? I would hardly call that "unmentioned".
None of them has the faux moral aspect of plastic recycling that almost sees disposable plastic use as sinning. None of them has forced paper straws on me.
Are you seriously somehow annoyed by other people volunteering and working together on something they care about because of moral and/or other reasons and talk about it? How much time of your day do you spend in a bad mood about churches, the red cross, volunteer firefighters, your desktop environment of choice or all those other contexts where humans do that?!
And if you really insist on continuing with the metaphor: Whenever I lived in certain big cities, the situations before and after football matches most definitely had a more drastic impact on daily life than a slightly soggy straw.
When churches had significant power and shaped the discourse and culture for the worse (I am not so sure if it's worse anymore), I definitely was quite annoyed at them.
