But it is the same. By using plastics excessively we treat all life on this planet as disposable. You feel better about it because you haven't chosen to see it head-on, yet, by the sound of it. Try watching some Ron Fricke films. They're amazing tools of acceptance of the complexity of our world and the people who inhabit it. You can get that feeling of ego death without the need for mushrooms if you let yourself. I find these films very helpful. Their names and release years are Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Chronos (1985), Baraka (1992), and Samsara (2011).
It's not about whataboutism, at least not always. On a different and valid scale it's about how we abuse our world and the animals and people who inhabit it without even thinking about it. You don't currently conceive of the suffering you've caused throughout your life with the garbage you've contributed based on the products and services you selected and so on and so forth. We all have ecological impacts.
As an example, where I live there are large semi-migratory flocks of Canada geese. Hundreds of thousands of them sometimes congregate here and when they do and they get honking, the sound is surreal. It resonates in your chest and sinuses. I never know quite how to feel when it happens. But this isn't my point, my bewilderment at hundreds of thousands of honks. It's that every year more of the geese are honking off key, struggling to vocalize normally, because they've either got plastic impacted inside them from our local garbage or they've injured their vocal cords from similar exposure in the past that they survived. In the summers I see the fraction of them that stick around and they're generally more emaciated in their upper bodies. They have more trouble keeping up with their goslings, and they aren't as generally lively as they used to be, by my impressions. I suspect a great deal of this has to do with our pollution including plastics. They consume so much of it they sometimes end up starving to death.
I could say it's not my garbage but how I am to know once the truck picks it up? It's getting there somehow and we all contribute. So many of us litter and dump garbage illegally, too, and it's awful. The roadsides are lined with plastic trash.
I collect road killed butterflies in the summer for my art. There have been fewer to collect each year, but beyond that, on them and the other kinds of insects I also examine I keep finding shreds and fibers of plastic tangled on the sharp thorny projections of insect exoskeletons. I once found one of those gorgeous emerald green sweat bees so encased in plastic fibers it struggled to walk across my windowsill. I thought it was sick, but it was just mechanically disabled by so many tangled strands. /r/insectsuffering suggests to me the strong possibility that many predatory insects do possess a rudimentary conscious awareness sufficient for suffering. The kinds of microplastics I remove from my specimens is generally one of three types: There are rough edged whitish shreds that I am certain come from plastic bags, there are variously coloured fibers but mostly transparent or whitish that are usually Polyester of some similar synthetic, and there are harder, more wiry fibers that come in a wide array of colours including metallic and neon hues, and I believe these are probably Nylon, but to be clear I haven't taken my own observations beyond visual, and informally pulling them apart, that kind of thing. I'm not a scientist; I'm just observing for my own reasons. And my photos are here if you'd like to look. If you scroll down a little you'll get to the focus stacks of butterfly scales. These are my favourite subject. Their scales and their eyes, and their feet, too.
Plastics have destroyed our world even more than animal agriculture. Our scientists don't yet understand the full scope of how catastrophic it is, but they accept the catastrophe of it. Animal agriculture as we practice is is abhorrently and unnecessarily cruel, but so is our blind disregard for the impacts of the millions of tonnes of plastics we've released into our biosphere. These substances injure and kill many billions of animals every year causing unfathomable suffering, and the damage is done. There's no putting the plastic back in the bottle. Every year from now on more animals will suffer and die from plastic exposure even if we stopped making it, and we won't stop making it. We won't even slow down until collapse forces our hands.
It's not whataboutism. We fucked our world in every way possible all at once because we insisted we needed to breed uncontrolled and we discovered the petrochemical technology to support our overshoot. This supported our animal agriculture industry as much as it supported our more agrarian efforts. And it's where we get the stuff to make plastics, too. So if you want a tangible villain it's fossil fuels over everything else, but it's not even about fossil fuels.
It's about the emotions we valued so much over our generations that we chose to ignore the limits of our environment on every scale. It was feels over reals based denial that led to our climate crisis, our plastic crisis, our failed Covid responses. Did you catch "Don't Look Up"? The film itself is the film depicted in the film itself and we're consuming it with popcorn as we race toward extinction due to our climate crisis and the multiple crises of chemical pollution we've caused in excess of our atmospheric emissions.
If all you're concerned about is meat and animals you're using that one thing to pretend the bigger picture isn't more important -- and it is. But I think both of you offered some good ideas in this thread. We don't accept these kinds of things overnight. Just keep taking the time to think about it more. If your experience is anything like mine you'll find it helps in feeling better about living in a dying world, too. Familiarization helps us reach acceptance of things we cannot control, and one of the only things we actually can control is our emotionalism, which we most commonly pretend we can't. That's stuff for a different comment but it all ties in and I think it's all important. In short, we facilitate self dishonesty by abusing the intoxicating nature of our elective emotional responses and the substances responsible for our perceptions on these scales are so supremely addictive we don't want to see it. This is how we ended up with an increasing number of people who don't care what is real. It's one more aspect of living in a feels over reals based society. And it is entirely, 100% unnecessary suffering. We could and can choose to address the problems and heal some of this damage and trauma. There's nothing stopping anybody but the constraints of their circumstance coupled with the rules they've internalized to handle their emotions, their emotional expectations. Ugh I'm doing it again. You're probably long gone, too.