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Comment by MattyRad | Hacker News Reader

To me it seems like a lot of people are more interested in absolving themselves from guilt than actually coming up with legitimate solutions to plastic waste. Like the article says, straw waste is negligible, it's even fairly obvious that straw waste is negligible, but banning straws will give faux-environmentalists an "easy win" in their minds. There's a dozen better ideas (all listed here on HN recently), ranging from taxing corporate plastic generation, to better recycling filters, to charging extra for plastic products (like some states do with plastic bags). It's unfortunate that this non-solution has gained traction, but "Ban Straws!" acheives a simple-minded satisfaction versus "0.5% tax penalty for large scale corporations exceeding x tonnes of consumption grade plastic!"

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

None of this crap really fixes anything, it's just a way for Western people to pander to a hyper-liberal worldview that "solves" peripheral problems because it's too privileged to fully understand the central problems facing the world.

I read a paper someone posted on here a few months back that described men as less environmentally conscious when their masculinity is threatened. The experiment itself was poorly structured and rife with assumptions of what constitutes environmental consciousness and threats to masculinity. I bring this up because it's an example of multiple academics devoting their time to totally nonessential problems in an effort to gain recognition in the winds of a hyper-liberal zeitgeist.

Hunger, access to goods, guaranteed medical care, literacy, freedom from tyranny and corruption, democratic institutions in the third world, clean water.....these are some of the actual problems that face the world.

Single-use plastics are a problem too, but plastic straws are not the central aspect nor the simplest low-hanging fruit with which to begin tackling the plastics problem.

Care to explain why you believe the "authors assumptions of what constitute environmental consciousness and threat to mascuilinity" was wrong ? Because the way they defined it seemed ok to me from what I remember.

No matter the limits of the study, though, comparing an academic study, even one that's biased by the author's ideology and worldviews in general (like any and every scientific study every written, especially those about political issues) with a purely activist action is questionable. The very process behind them are different. Plastic straws ban was just impulsed by some viral videos of turtles with straws stuck in their noses. There's a logical chain of event which makes considering this as "virtue signaling" a fair analysis. It's questionnable to assume academics who linked environmental consciousness with masculinity were actually virtue signaling and looking for some recognition when it could just be that their worldview and past experiences "naturally" lead to such hypotheses and the way they built their study just proved their point due to how they were designed.

Secondly, the way you hierarchize what you consider real issues vs unimportant ones also betrays your own position and is by no means absolute, AND it's not a good argument I believe. 99%¨of what I see on HN is not relevant to actual problems as you define them, for starters. And more than 99% of research activity is disconnected from any of those issues, and making all research focus on such issues wouldn't even help anyway, or so I believe. The academic study you refer to does not by any means claim to be revolutionnary when it comes to solving environmental issues, but it is very plausible that a part of why so many people don't care much about the environment is tied to sociocultural factors.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16017864

>None of this crap really fixes anything, it's just a way for Western people to pander to a hyper-liberal worldview that "solves" peripheral problems because it's too privileged to fully understand the central problems facing the world.

You managed to crystallize my exact thoughts into words.

Whether one think it’s a viable complete solution or not does not mean efforts are feel good charades. They swapped a thing that is not recyclable with one that is. The people who made this decision are solving one problem. The recycling industry being crippled is another problem that is not yet solved. There’s no need to throw our hands up and say “this didn’t even save the planet! They are such fakers!” It’s a good effort, and fixes one problem they can solve, that’s how things get done, people keep fixing the problem in front of them until the issue is actually resolved.

That's a good point. Like another comment below regarding culture, it's a good PR campaign to raise awareness about plastic waste, which can help lead to better solutions (and better culture) down the road. Sometimes the cynic gets the best of me.

> They swapped a thing that is not recyclable with one that is.

Perhaps that could have been done while keeping the straws.

You state it's a "non-solution", but is it really? We've shown time and time again that appealing to people on the "big, intangible thing" just isn't working.

Lots of hand-waving about taxation on big businesses isn't useful if there's no pressure from the general public to get us there. Framing the issue with something as relatable as straws gives some grounding, providing a foundation to build the harder arguments on.

We started with plastic bags in the UK, we're working our way through straws (and things like wasting ugly food), momentum builds, and soon you'll have an entire populace trained to spot wasteful use of resources. It's a giant education piece for millions of people - edging and nudging behaviour, where "shock change" has fundamentally failed so far.

You also diminish the importance of simple-minded satisfaction. We want people to run towards solutions, not be beaten away from bad habits.

I was listening to infinite monkey cage the other day (the 100th episode - actually watched it)

The format wasn't great (too much in too short a time), but one assertion was made that the damage caused by 1 'bag for life' was equal to 100+ disposable bags.

This seems to stem from a UK Government comparative study [0] of supermarket bags, which showed that a cotton reusable bag must be reused 131 times to match the lower environmental impact of a conventional plastic shopping bag used just once.

However non-cotton bags had far lower reuse levels, and it isn't clear at a quick glance how they determine environmental impact. They also neglect to account for double-bagging that used to be prevalant, or the larger bag sizes of "bag-for-life" meaning you need fewer bags for your shopping. It looks from that report that typical bags need to be reused 4 or 5 times to be effective. [1] suggests an average of 6 times.

One thing that has changed though with the 5p charge, coupled with things like Blue Planet -- people think about their use. In the past people would have a bag when buying 2 or 3 things, now they often don't, using pockets or existing bags. The change in attitude is probably more of an impact than bag reuse.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36917174

Selling reusable bags at $1 turns a $0.015 cost into a $0.55 profit - from a store's point of view. This scales quite nicely.

Reusable bags in the UK are 5p, and the big shops certainly give any proceeds to charities.

$1 sounds far better though -- fewer people will treat them as disposable. I guess you should vote with your wallet.

> "big, intangible thing"

As the article stated, the global problem of plastic waste entering the ocean may be big, but it is definitely not intangible. The source of most plastic entering the ocean is poor coastal countries that lack developed solid waste management. (By contrast, the US is responsible for only 1% of plastic that enters the ocean annually.)

It took me some time, but I found a non-profit that helps develop waste management in African countries. If you want to make a tangible difference in future oceanic plastic waste volume, a donation here might help: http://www.waste.nl/

Throwing solid waste in a hole is not management of that waste. What we need is recycling technology that works and is widely used, which requires money, which means we need to target the advanced economies first.

I strongly disagree. Properly using and managing landfills worldwide is one of several necessary first steps towards a better ocean.

We are multiple large breakthroughs away from recycling technology becoming a viable path towards meaningful reduction of ocean-bound waste. Meanwhile, poor coastal nations continue to use the ocean as a landfill.

Assuming you’re able to dodge corruption in local officials, a dollar towards waste management development in Africa will go much further (in reduced kg/year of trash going into the ocean) than a dollar towards recycling technology R&D.

Here's an article that gives some more shape to the problem: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-13/5-countries-dump-more...

Don’t forget, it’s politically easier to push around end users than businesses. If you ban one-use disposable cups, Starbucks would lose its mind. Much easier to nickel and dime customers in ways that visibly look like you’re trying to solve something.

It's like walking home from work, seeing a house in flames, peeing into the fire and going home thinking "Today I did good".

Almost - I think it's like driving home from work, hearing about a house on fire on the radio news, then, when you get home, you pee and think "I'm doing my bit contributing to the water supply for the fire fighters."

This is closer, but I think the best analogy for this is hearing about the fire, deciding to never buy matches again and thinking that you're doing your part in preventing house fires.

C'mooooon. Are plastic straws the biggest problem facing the planet? No. But they do account for ~3% of the plastic in our oceans. Doing something here is absolutely better than doing nothing. As Churchill said: "Perfection is the Enemy of Progress". This is definitely progress.

>But they do account for ~3% of the plastic in our oceans.

Source?

https://get-green-now.com/environmental-impact-plastic-straw...

>And, as of early 2018, data from Ocean Conservancy’s TIDES system shows us that straws/stirrers are the 11th most found ocean trash in cleanups, making up about 3% of recovered trash.

Recovered trash is maybe be different than total trash?!

0.022%

...all those billions of straws add up to only about 2,000 tons of the nearly 9 million tons of plastic waste that yearly hits the waters.

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-science-amount-straws-plastic-...

Are there better ideas that don’t involve taxes? Businesses voluntarily getting rid of straws so that they’re not part of the problem seems like a good, cheap solution. And it doesn’t require human effort to continue buying straws, forcing many customer interactions to decide: straw-or-no-straw, tracking how many straws were used, and reporting that data back to the government, all so that we still have this plastic waste. I’m not seeing how an option like this I’d preferable. But I’m open to other ideas. And I agreem, this didn’t matter so much in terms of impact.

> Are there better ideas that don’t involve taxes?

If straws have an undesirable externality, that externality should be compensated for. We do this by taxation.

Well you could change culture. In my country straws aren't used much. You don't need a straw to drink. In fact I only see expats drink coffee with a straw.

protecting those pearly whites ;)

it helps, whether good dental care or not, to find ways to prevent staining your teeth as part of regular, daily routine

Okay, I'll help you out. Quit caffeine.

No more soda, no more coffee, no more stains, no more jitters. Detox is unpleasant but only takes a couple days. The cravings never go away though.

No more fun.

Coffee is protective of the cardiovascular system, and reduces mortality.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42081278

I didn't need a BBC article to tell me that coffee reduces mortality -- the odds of coworkers dying drops significantly after one has their first (or third) cup ;-)

The whole point of drinking a $5+ beverage is to enjoy the taste of it. That means, even if you use a straw, you're going to hold the beverage in your mouth so that your tongue and nose can experience it.

Straws really are only necessary with extremely elderly people, the sick and young children wherever one can't reliably lift the cup to their lips because of limited motor skills. Or perhaps in the USA where people drink 32 OZ beverages from a bucket that is liable to spill because of the waves caused by the ice cubes bobbing around in it.

So straws are a beauty product! But you still don't use them with hot coffee right? Otherwise you get melted straws and yucky plastic tasting coffee.

Most people I know who insist on straws for everything cite hygiene. You don’t know what contaminants are on that cup rim, bottle, or can opening, but you can reasonably assume the straw (if you unwrap it yourself) is cleaner.

Part of the reason they are big in the US may be the fact that we drive so much. There are many Starbucks stores with drive-thru windows.

If you want to consume a beverage while driving, a covered cup with a straw is much easier.

(One could now say “Americans shouldn’t drive so much!” or “don’t consume food while driving”, I guess. We should probably also build more dense housing in walkable neighborhoods, invest in mass transit, and shorten commutes and working hours so everybody has time for a leisurely breakfast at the neighborhood cafe.)

Drinks are easy to spill when walking around. Outside of the straw, these cups are mainly sealed vessels. How often do you go for a walk with a latte or water in hand?

One of the coffee chains I use has stoppers to keep the coffee from sloshing out of the sipping hole in the lid while I'm driving the coffee to the office.

The other one does not offer stoppers. So I have to improvise with either wooden stirrers or plastic (for now) straws. The wooden stirrers don't fill the sipping hole entirely but they do enough to the movement of the coffee that I don't have to worry about coffee sloshing out. But they make the coffee taste like wood. So I use a plastic straw. At first I took their advice and did not drink through the straw. But if the coffee has cooled sufficiently to be sipped carelessly, it can be sipped through a straw.

Here's an idea. An autoclave, IV hardware, and coffee sold to the public in pouches. The hardware is reused with the help of the autoclave.

When Starbucks introduced the little green non-recyclable stopper sticks they claimed the idea was for people to wash and reuse them. But there are no signs in Starbucks to encourage this and of course no one does. Except maybe me. I got sick of finding them everywhere. There must be a hundred under my car seat. So I've allowed myself no more. I've carried about a half dozen in every handbag, washed and reused them. My BF and I joke that everyone should be issued one stopper stick per lifetime....ha! But recently I was shocked to find out Starbucks cups aren't even recyclable! So I bought one of their reusable plastic cups, only to find their little green stopper sticks don't fit. :(

C'mon Starbucks, with all your profits, you can do better than this.

Its actually not that complicated. Don't use plastic.

>people are more interested in absolving themselves from guilt than actually coming up with legitimate solutions to plastic waste

Yep, it's pure politics, and it's not much different than any other political situation. Most of the people speaking up are more concerned with HOW a problem is addressed, rather than IF that problem is actually addressed. They don't ask for less crime or mass murder, they ask for gun control. They don't ask for lower unemployment, they ask for immigration enforcement. And, politicians are only measured by whether they implemented those specific controls, and not at all for whether they actually managed to make progress towards solving or reducing a problem.

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