graemep parent
Learned helplessness. What can we actually do about it?
Talk about it (worked for the ozone layer and some pesticides), use less (not that hard), support any alternative. And I think this works for any topic. The helplessness is a feeling, hard to assess the impact of individual actions, so why bother? You do what you can/think of and continue living - with a critical mass things will move in the right direction.
> Talk about it (worked for the ozone layer and some pesticides)
Partly, if not largely, because we were lucky enough to have an influential politician who had been a chemist:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22069768
It was also a much simpler and cheaper to fix issue than micro-plastics because it involved replacing a few substances, used for particular things, that had alternatives.
Vote for political parties that have it in their party program. Prefer buying products without plastic packaging, this includes bottled or canned products; find markets if you can't find it in your local grocery store. Donate or join up with anti-plastic activist organizations.
IMO a start would be to require that plastic-producing companies accept all their used products back at end-of-life and incinerate them.
Wait for the science to deal with it, or become a scientist yourself. With how ubiquitous it is, it's going to be hard to filter it out of the entire planet, so chances are you'd want to find something to deal with it in humans.
Plus any planet-wide solution risks having its own side effects which may be worse.
Science doesn't "deal with it". Science just gives us the facts. Politics and economics has to deal with those facts. And politics/economics today is inadequate for dealing with our most complex problems. Leading to either learned helplessness or populism.
I guess we need to upgrade politics somehow.