I love me some free stuff. Something I like about today is that if you want to learn a new tool or a new skill, you can get started almost immediately as long as you have a computer and an internet connection.

Is hard to be mad at Google for using my information when I get access to software like google sheets, docs and drive for free. I can access hours of YouTube videos about a variety of topics and have it all synchronized with my phone so I can access it on the go. All just for the “tiny” price of giving my personal information for more personalized ads.

Is amazing to live in a world where I can call my family back in Mexico, stay in touch with my friends, jam away to the music I like and have more hours of video content available than I have hours in my life.

Having said that, I think we’ve all seen the headlines. Is not hard to find evidence of the damages social media platforms are doing to our mental health and the disruption they bring to the current social order.

From the increase of suicides in teenagers to the election of a certain orange-looking president.

If you are of the mind that all we need is a bit of regulation, some privacy laws that protect the consumer, I’m afraid to tell you that that will never be enough. Not because these platforms are pure evil in search of new ways to harm you, but because of the simple fact that their business model can’t have your best interest in mind. Let’s see why.

If you know anything about software development, then you are extremely aware of the human hours needed to create a site like Twitter or Facebook. So, how do these companies pull it off? How do they make their money if they are free to use?

They run ads.

Simple enough right? They put some ads in the sidebar, in between content or before your video. It seems like a win-win for everybody, we get access to amazing software and companies looking to target relevant audiences to their product get to run ads efficiently. What’s the issue here?

The issue here is that — like most things — this is not the full picture.

You might’ve heard this before, but in a free business model like the one used by most social media platforms, the users are not the clients, clients are the companies that paid to have their ads shown. And the product? The product is you.

This means that when developing the “app”, the goal is not to give users the best possible experience in the platform but to keep them engaged so they see more ads. It doesn’t matter if the content is low quality, false or if it enriches the life of the user in any way. All that matters is that the user stays on the platform as long as possible.

Companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and the like have some of the brightest minds working for them. Can you imagine what hundreds of smart people can do when they work together and get paid well for it? Well, you don’t have to, the result is they create awesome products.

The problem here is the business model, the problem is the goal.

The goal of most social media platforms is to please their customers, the advertisers. It doesn’t matter how much regulation is created to try to mitigate this. The reality is that the goals of most social media platforms will never be a healthy one and loopholes and outright corruption will always exist.

I’ve personally tried to quit Facebook for a while. But coming from Mexico, where Facebook is strong and used by most people, it’s been a difficult journey. I personally don’t have the time to reach out to all of my relatives and friends to see how they are doing — although I could be doing better — nor do I have the time to tell them how my life is going.

Facebook allows me to stay in touch with them, to feel happy when they succeed in their careers and in their personal life. My father — who isn’t particularly tech-savvy — can use WhatsApp well enough to call me whenever he feels like talking. This is of great value to me, and saying bye to it is not an easy thing to do or even accept.

I have found ways to work around it. Deleting Facebook from my phone and only using it when I have time to sit and use my computer has clearly helped. But, did you notice? Is up to the consumer to fix the issue.

Facebook takes zero responsibility if a teenager commits suicide because of an algorithm they wrote that keeps a positive — most likely negative — feedback loop where the user can’t see any other post but the post that is the most likely to keep them on the site.

The human brain can’t keep up with the pace of software development. It takes thousands of years of evolution to adapt to new circumstances, but the speed at which technology is advancing makes it not a fair fight.

Just like we have regulations for alcohol, Tabaco or that green Kush, we should have rules around the way social media platforms target human psychology.

They are not only creating addiction in the general population. They are giving unlimited, free access to the drug and leaving the responsibility of regulating to the individual, while the supplier paints themselves the hero by suppling us with set drug for free.

So, we’ve arrived at the root of the problem. If social media platforms use us as products, then we need to change the dynamic. A simple push won’t do, we need to flip it around, we need to make them accountable.

The solution? pay for the service you are using. Become the client and demand a product that works for you. Make their priority to be to keep you satisfied with the service been provided. We need a social media platform with a subscription model.

A social media platform that uses a subscription model for their business would make us their customer. The focus of those bright minds working at set platform would be to give us the best possible user experience.

This wouldn’t solve all problems, of course, internet service providers come to mind. But even with them, in the places there’s more than one provider, I’ve been able to negotiate a better price by simply suggesting that I might change suppliers if they don’t price match. Is not a perfect solution, nothing is. But being the customer does put you in a much stronger position and makes your voice more valuable.

I know you might have your doubts. I don’t know how a social media platform with a subscription model would be able to balance the offering of the same features the big platforms do while keeping our sanity and health as their goal. But that’s the key, the only way we will come up with a solution is if those bright minds have the goal to create the product they can.

It took Facebook 12 years to go from a website created to connect Harvard students with one another to interfere with a U.S election. Imagine what 12 years of development could do, if their goal was to give us a great service, not to use us.

Would you promote seatbelt use if it worked only 10% of the time? I definitely wouldn’t. While in a crash, I would happily take that extra chance of making it, this is not the most effective way of tackling the problem. If seatbelts worked like that, the solution wouldn’t be trying harder and making them more common, but to tackle the issue of ‘why are we having crashes’ in the first place.

This is the issue with recycling. Is not fundamentally changing anything, is placing the responsibility on the individual and its individual choices. And while the impact of our choices does carry great power, it doesn’t matter how much you recycle, when 100 companies in the world are responsible for 71% of global CO2 emissions.

But hey, — you might ask — . What if we all recycle? Wouldn’t that stop us from wasting plastic? I mean, if all the plastic we use comes from recycling, then there wouldn’t be a need for new plastic. And in short?, no.

“What about all that plastic I put in my blue bin every week? If it didn’t work, then they wouldn’t pick it up right?”. Well, this is where we are going to have to dig a bit dipper and check some history.

Above you have two symbols, you’ve probably seen them before and might mistake them to be the same, but they are not. The symbol on the right is a recycling symbol, it means that the product is recyclable, or at least it can be recycled somewhere (not necessarily where you live). The symbol on the left is a resin identification code, basically, an identifier of what kind of plastic you are dealing with. It was created by the plastic industry in 1988 to trick people into thinking that plastic is recyclable and that maybe it’s not so bad to the environment.

If this comes as a shock to you, you are not alone, most people are not aware of this, I certainly wasn’t. Not to mention that out of all of the identification codes, #1 and #2 are the mostly likely to be recycle if you are lucky.

Recycling is expensive, labor intensive and inefficient. Most plastic degrades after two to three uses, and it can’t match the price and flexibility of new plastic. In this profit-first world we live in, companies are never going to choose the ‘greener’ option if it doesn’t make sense economically. Which is why, through all of our recycling years, we’ve only been able to recycle about 10% of the plastic we’ve made.

Don’t believe me? Check what Lewis Freeman, Vice President of the Society of the Plastic Industry has to say. Not convinced? Maybe Larry Thomas, President of the Society of the Plastic Industry can:

“If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they’re not going to be as concerned about the environment.”

— Larry Thomas

So we’ve arrived at the core of the issue. Recycling is being used as a tool to shift the blame of climate change from the producer to the consumer. The plastic industry has created a narrative that if you make better choices, we can keep consuming plastic without having any consequences. And the worst part? It’s working.

How recycling is damaging the environment? Is damaging the environment by making people complacent with the status quo. Is stopping us from having real conversations that attack the root of the problem. When we recycle we feel good that we did our part, and we stop pursuing the real problem. The problem with recycling is that it was never supposed to be the solution. It’s the side dish, not the main course.

Just think about it, we’ve been recycling for decades now and we’re still having the same problem. Not even that, is a problem that keeps getting worse despite the increase in “green” culture around the world. With plastic production being forecast to reach 34 billion tonnes by 2050, we clearly new a substantial improvement in the way we tackle the issue.

Legislation got us into this mess, and legislation is what will get us out of it. We need to push our “leaders” to act on this and for us to help take the blind off from our communities. If you want to mitigate the consequences that climate change is having on our planet, we need to force our leaders to act and to act now.

Now, I want to make something clear.

You should keep recycling!

I know I just made you spend your time reading this article where I trash recycling (see what I did there), but the reality is that plastic has its uses and recycling should definitely be part of the fight for a cleaner future. Just remember that “reduce reuse recycle” is in that order for a reason. We need to first reduce our dependence on plastic before investing so much of our energy in recycling.

If you are asking yourself what can you do, the next points are a good place to start:

• Contact your local representative. You can usually send them emails or call them and ask what their plan for reducing plastic consumption is.
• Vote. You need to be involved in the decision making process.
• Educate yourself. This article was a good start, but there’s a lot more that I didn’t cover from people far more knowledgeable than I am.
• Influence your inner circle. The part that if everybody did something, it would amount to something big is definitely true, just shift your focus from only recycling to educating your inner circle. Remember that the best way to do so is by example.

If you’ve taken the time to reed all the way here and feel a little discouraged about all of this, I feel you. This is one of the reasons that got me in to writing and convince me to do this article (If you can even call it that). Recognizing the problem is always the first step to finding a solution. What the plastic industry is doing, is diverging our attention and allowing them to place the blame on us. So don’t let that stand! Go out and spread the word!