I'm in this picture and I don't like it
painfully agree on how "zero waste" type stuff can spiral out of control in a mentally unhealthy way. I have hoarding tendencies and struggle to throw anything away to begin with, and if I encouraged that I would quickly live in a garbage pile.
Reusing single-use plastic containers is...I can't go down that road.
I don't really agree on mending items being pointless as a sustainability practice, because it isn't and doesn't have to be a completely isolated and individual behavior.
this is why specifically Visible mending is a cool thing: it is a way to repair clothes but it's also a visible, public display, which shifts the balance of what's acceptable in society. If people see you wearing clothes that have obviously been mended, that plants the idea in their mind that this is a thing you can do with clothes, and instead of just imagining what it might be like, they can see it.
Doing and talking about these things makes overconsumption more of a thing people think about and notice and less of an everyday, unnoticed norm.
And then, you can teach other people to mend, you can even fix their stuff for them if you're crazy. If you've got a community of people practicing these skills, it's not an individual thing anymore. It's the exact same as any other sustainability practice, you have to do it as a team with other people. It's not about the individual act, it's about the cultural change.
Also. Even if my choice not to buy a thing doesn't impact whether the thing got manufactured, Corporation still didn't get my money if I didn't buy it. On a scale of 1,000 or 10,000 people, that's definitely not nothing.
In contrast, if you are reusing plastic containers, you still bought the plastic container.
If you reuse them in a way that replaces your need to buy something else, that's fine, but the trouble with plastic containers is that you accrue them at a much higher rate than you can reuse them because the use they were manufactured for is so short-lived.
however this does not address the main reason I mend my stuff: because the quality of stuff has gotten so much worse that if I buy a new thing it will almost definitely be much shittier than if I just fix the old thing
Mending is great. Hoarding garbage is not.