The question Plastic VS carton VS glass VS tin— harm to environment is almost certainly off-topic here, and Sustainability SE might be a better place for it.
Question: But are individually-composed "because it belongs in" a proper off-topic close reason?
I saw this close justification:
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this belong in sustainability.stackexchange. com
Here are my concerns:
- If one chooses to specify a reason why something is off topic, one should actually explain the reason why it is off-topic and not why one thinks that it might be on-topic somewhere else.
- It gives new users the idea that thinking that "it belongs in" is a perfectly good indicator of off-topic-ness, which it is not.
There are not-so-infrequently questions that can be on-topic in two or more sites. Topicality elsewhere has no direct bearing on topicality here.
- OP decides where to ask
- The community decides topicality (sometimes with moderator help)
- Decision to manually delete and repost is available to the OP if there are no answers
- And migration is an option exercised exclusively by moderators.
These roles are built-in to how SE works, and we shouldn't try to "get around" the way the features work, except in exceptional cases (tautology alert!) We should all try to stay in our lanes.
The only "because it belongs in" option that this site currently allows us is meta:
The close reason in question: