What if we stopped swallowing industrial fairy tales? This question isn’t a rhetorical caress. It’s a grenade. We already know what’s harmful, and yet we keep producing it. In the marine environment, the plastic stock is estimated at between 75 and 199 million tons. And every year, about 19 to 23 million additional tons end up in lakes, rivers, and oceans (order of magnitude set for 2016, almost certainly higher now since nothing has changed). [1] That’s the equivalent of dumping the contents of a garbage truck into the ocean every single minute. [2] What if we flipped the logic? If it were the producer who had to prove that their disposable item is absolutely essential, that no durable alternative exists, that the total environmental impact is justified, and finally, that production is calibrated to actual utility - not to maximum profit? We’d go from “citizen proves the product is harmful” to “seller proves it actually saves something”. We’re not talking about a utopia [...]