RickJay Waste is caused by aggregate production/consumption. You are trying to trap me in a false dichotomy based upon ‘feelings’. If enough individuals reduce their consumption, IN AGGREGATE there will be an impact. It only works if an individual is willing to do their, admittedly, small part.
As for the rest of your argument about tipping points and climate change. I have never found eschatonian justifications for behavior compelling. If the eschaton is assured then nothing I do will be relevant, so I have to act as though it is not assured, and do what I can.
Much of China’s waste is created by the production of goods meant for American consumers. China is ramping up waste in order to sell more junk to us. So by consuming less you can decrease the amount of waste that China produces. Sure, it’s insignificant, but that’s the way ecosystems work. Frogs keep the fly population from reaching epidemic proportions in an individual swamp by eating them. No the individual frog’s fly eating is not going to make a significant dent, but when you count all the frogs as well as fly eating lizards, or sap that traps flies etc… It ultimately makes a difference.
As for paper plates, you are tangentally going after every example and focusing on it so you can build another straw man. Paper plates are just an example meant to stand in for any unnecessary disposable good. Other examples are like at McDonald’s when they give you a bag for a single burger, or when you buy something from the deli and they give you a plastic bag for your two items.
Your individual contribution doesn’t mean much, in and of itself but by trying to talk people out of behaving this way you are actually doing more damage than your individual contribution to the damage, because you are convincing other people that their efforts are pointless too, when it is the aggregate that we need to work on. Say you are convincing to three people, and three people don’t bother this year. It would be interesting to see how much waste you and the three people you convinced not to reduce waste produce in a single year. I bet that the four of you together could fill your entire house with garbage. If you can eliminate just one room’s worth of garbage out of that, then you’ve made an impact. That’s landfills filling up less quickly, less crap produced and transported. It’s the aggregate that matters, and as it is, there is an aggregate movement of people trying to reduce their individual contribution, so you would be part of a networked effect that includes millions of people.