I don’t think earbuds make up a significant percentage of the patch

Cheap and disposable plastics and electronics IS a significant part of the world garbage problem and yes, plastic particles is MOST of the garbage patch specifically.

be here virtue signaling and shaming people for what they were encouraged to do by corporate greed

Whoa, dude, hold your horses! I’m in no way blaming consumers. Making consumer electronics cheap crap that breaks easily and everything of decent quality prohibitively expensive is 100% on the greedy corporations, not their victims the consumers.

Your source says the great majority of the patch comes from agriculture and fishing.

Ok, admittedly a poor choice of example. Doesn’t invalidate my intended point though, however ill-stated heh

Or we could just have quality standards and price controls so that regular people can afford decent headphones that don’t break all the time whether they prefer wired or wireless 🤷

And a worldwide ban on child labor, of course.

Somewhere the discussion chain has the following transition:

-> Hitler

Don’t fool yourself. Slave labor of children is not exclusive to batteries. They make most of the world’s textiles, for example.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods-print

My point wasn’t wired vs wireless. It was disposable crap that breaks vs corporations not deliberately making crap the only thing most people can comfortably afford.

My AirBudz are over five years old and still play for like five hours before I need to charge them… and I used them 40+ hours daily for all of those years.

Again, wasn’t making a wired wireless argument. See my other reply itt for elaboration.

Earbuds? Yes.

Real headphones? Nah