EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021 | Hacker News Reader

EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

fastcompany.com

190 pointsjohnshades180 comments

Reading these comments makes me sad, but I am also beginning to understand the opposition to limiting carbon emissions.

Introduce an initiative that is "obviously good". I mean, none of the commenters here will be disadvantaged by single-use plastic being banned. It is obviously better for the environment. Whichever way you look at it, it is an improvement on the current state of affairs. And yet, people will moan and complain, criticize, pull out "statistics" out of thin air, say that this "does not solve the real problem", that it isn't important. And this is the enlightened HN community, the epitome of progressiveness.

This is similar to the climate change discussions. Moving away from fossil fuels is obviously better for the environment and for us. And yet, people will moan and complain, criticize, point fingers, say that it's the other guys who pollute, or say that this particular change "doesn't matter", because there are bigger polluters out there.

I am very glad the EU is making this move and I'm happy there are still some places in the world who can effect change. I wish the EU was similarly radical with respect to its beloved car industry, or with moving towards nuclear power (not away from it), but one can hope.

>It is obviously better for the environment.

Except it isn't and plastic is for many uses the best material. Take glass for example.

Cons of Glass:

It breaks

It costs more to ship

It is more expensive to recycle

Glass takes twice as much energy to produce

More pollution is created in the manufacturing, shipping and recycling of glass

Glass creates more than 6 times the global warming gases than plastic

-------------------

Cons of plastic: Litter (but people throw glass away too)

Some plastics can leach chemicals

Some plastics contain PVCs

Unless I'm missing something, this seems spurious, what makes you think a ban on single use plastic plates, cups, straws, coffee stirrers and cutlery means people will use glass equivalents? Or rather, to make the comparison valid, single use glass equivalents.

They won't. By and large, people will simply do without these products because the equivalents will be too expensive for most people.

But he's just trying to explain that if people tried to stay at the same level of quality of life then they'd have to switch to technology that isn't advantageous to the environment.

Glass is a mineral; the earth's crust is full of practically the same thing.

Glass can be reused; sterilizing and re-filling milk bottles is a thing, for instance.

Plastic doesn't really recycle; it downcycles. Plastic from higher grade products usually can't be used for the same grade, only for lower-grade stuff.

Downcycling is less of a problem for glass.

OK here's the elephant in the room - China produces about a third of all pollution. I wanna say over half of ocean pollution comes from 10 rivers in China. In other words - China affects this whole thing more than anyone else in the world. And they're not far away from being more than the rest combined.

So now look at a family who uses some product like straws or plastic forks. Is it a huge inconvenience for them to stop? Probably not. A little obnoxious, but they can obviously handle it. But now the question they ask is why are they inconvenienced as another party (China) is doing so much more? Why do they have to sacrifice while someone else is the bigger issue?

And before I get yet another accusation that I'm anti climate change or whatever - I'm not. I'm explaining a very obvious reason why this is always an issue. It's because people don't like a scrimping and saving while their neighbor doesn't have to. If the green people can't get that through their heads then this debate will never be constructive.

Reducing demand for disposable goods that are likely manufactured in China would eliminate any pollution associated with its manufacture.

OK. You're still ignoring the problem that China pollutes way more. Us not buying their plastic crap doesn't change that.

I can't agree with this more. Seems like so many people would rather bicker and moan about the "real issue" behind climate change than actually get out there and try something new. I am glad Europe is trying to fight this battle. They are trying to fix it, it may not be the end all solution but it is a step towards one.

They're banning single use plastic only. Other plastic plates are not banned. Given how much it costs in Europe to rent square meters to store stuff I wonder if event companies won't just buy multiple-use plastic plates and just throw them away anyway as it's cheaper than to pay personal to clean them, transport them to containers and then rent the space to store them, secure them etc.

Why wouldn't they just switch to paper plates instead?

And wooden single-use cutlery is pretty common already today.

Really? I've never seen it in the US, except in the form of wooden coffee stirrers.

You see them some in the US, there are also some that are that are made from corn. They feel/flex like plastic but are biodegradable.

The ones that look and feel like plastic are essentially plastic. The conditions it takes to get them to break down don't happen in a landfill.

Wood doesn't break down under landfill conditions either, at least not on human time scales.

But wooden objects do biodegrade within human time scales if just left in a meadow. The same is true of polylactic acid objects. Neither wooden nor PLA objects break down in a home composting system like orange peels do, but both biodegrade much faster than e.g. polystyrene.

You don't want things to break down in a landfill. They do decompose in industrial composting facilities, though, which are becoming more accessible (we just signed up for a service that costs $5/week for a decent-sized bin).

They usually come with this warning that they are only biodegradable on specialized facility.

Yes. My local cafe has metal spoons for my yoghurt if I'm eating in, but wooden if I'm taking out.

It's not unusual in the UK.

It's not common. But a few cafes around me are wooden utensil only. Metal and paper straws I've also seen an uptick in.

Chinese or most East Asian food restaurants have wooden single-use chopsticks

I have seen bamboo plates and cutlery, though it isn't common.

I try to use paper whenever possible for environmental reasons, and it's really only usable for dry foods. Some paper has a waxy coating that helps, but it's quite a bit more expensive and if you are doing any sort of cutting/poking the food, you still don't get a lot of time before you break through.

So tl;dr: paper is a worse user experience. Worth it IMHO but many people will certainly not agree.

That waxy coating is very likely just plastic. Wax coating of paper products has dropped out in favor of plastic and that makes those paper products unrecyclable.

Wax-coated paper is also unrecyclable. We are talking about biodegradable here, not recyclable.

Disposable plates and paper boxes covered in grease and food bits or soggy with liquid also shouldn’t be tossed in the recycle bin (except in places which explicitly accept them), with or without a coating.

this is exactly what happened with the previous ban

single use plastic bags were banned, so now instead people accumulate the more dense multi-use bags under their kitchen sink instead

This is false. Plastic use has been dramatically reduced by the previous law. Source: Assessment of measures to reduce marine litter from single use plastics, European Comission, 2018

Anecdotally, I see (a) lots of paper bags, and (b) lots of people carrying canvas tote bags, a decade after the plastic bag ban in SF.

if the retailers switched to using paper or canvas bags I can certainly believe that

however UK retailers swapped to selling heavier duty plastic bags instead

I buy the $1 Ikea bags and then throw them out :)

> I wonder if event companies won't just buy multiple-use plastic plates and just throw them away anyway

That would make those plastic plates single-use, wouldn't it? It raises the question of whether single-use is only about the supposed intention of the producer or also about the actual usage of the item.

I'm going to keep saying it. The issue is trash disposal especially in third world countries. You can't just pile trash on landfills.

I'm countries like Switzerland were most trash is incinerated to generate electricity, getting rid of plastic bags has little impact if not increase overall CO2 use since a alternate bag uses way more CO2 to be produced.

One stat stated that a woven bag would need to be used 7000 times to offset the CO2 vs the amount of CO2 used to make a plastic bag.

If you look at the EU's own numbers on it they say that 150,000 tons of plastic are tossed into European waters per year. Single use plastics make up about half of that. This is less than 2% of the 8 million tons of plastic tossed into the oceans worldwide.

We're basically trying to fix less than 1% of the problem with this. Considering how much ire this is raising I'm not sure this is a good use of the time of environmentalists.

Sigh. And here's a reasonable criticism of this implementation and surprise surprise - you're downvoted without anyone responding.

You're thinking rationally. Go for the most effective changes first. The low hanging fruit. If that means plastic straws and forks then so be it. But it's pretty hard to imagine this is the best path and it's a lot easier to think it's just pencil pushing beurocrats coming up with an idea to appear progressive.

If there's data out there that shows this move will be significant then fine, but at the rate these bans are going I see nothing but it exhausting what momentum we have to improve our behavior.

They were likely downvoted because...

> 150,000 tons of plastic are tossed into European waters per year. Single use plastics make up about half of that

Regardless of the worldwide issue, the poster themselves states it's 50% of the plastic in european waterways, why shouldn't europe care about reducing 50% ?!?

Because 50% of very little isn't a big impact. Look into Asia and Africa for plastic pollution. At the rate they produce Europe could literally be plastic free and it would barely make an impact.

It s not with conservative thinking/ whataboutism that we re going to change anything. We europeans are happy with this change. You also dont consider how it make every citizen talk about it : it may spark better behavior about waste everywhere, because why should I care if the power in place doesn't ?

> The issue is trash disposal especially in third world countries.

It's partly trash. It's also partly clothing, which makes up huge amounts of microplastic. It's also partly industrial equipment such as fishing nets.

90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from Africa and Asia. First world countries put their garbage, generally speaking, into garbage dumps.

This EU rule will do nothing.

First, comments like yours is how nothing ever gets done.

Second, you use citation-free statistics that are misleading. How much plastic waste from Asia is from "recycled" US and European ("first world", to use your dog whistle) plastics?

edit: to repeat myself, How much plastic waste from Asia is from "recycled" US and European ("first world", to use your dog whistle) plastics? - the research that 90% of the plastic waste in the oceans comes from 10 rivers is such common knowledge that the NY Post is one of the top hits if you search for this. Plastic from those rivers comes from ostensibly "recycled" western plastics, so this is actually very meaningful policy from the EU.

> First, comments like yours is how nothing ever gets done.

The politician's fallacy, is a logical fallacy of the form:

1. We must do something

2. This is something

3. Therefore, we must do this.

There's also the all-or-nothing fallacy, where you don't do anything because it's not perfect.

Here is the paper the statistic is based on.

https://twin.sci-hub.tw/7148/507066f35e75c25d1b1e160ada5693c...

ABSTRACT: A substantial fraction of marine plastic debris originates from land-based sources and rivers potentially act as a major transport pathway for all sizes of plastic debris. We analyzed a global compilation of data on plastic debris in the water column across a wide range of river sizes. Plastic debris loads, both microplastic (particles <5 mm) and macroplastic (particles >5 mm) are positively related to the mismanaged plastic waste (MMPW) generated in the river catchments. This relationship is nonlinear where large rivers with population-rich catchments delivering a disproportionately higher fraction of MMPW into the sea. The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88−95% of the global load into the sea. Using MMPW as a predictor we calculate the global plastic debris inputs form rivers into the sea to range between 0.41 and 4 × 106 t/y. Due to the limited amount of data high uncertainties were expected and ultimately confirmed. The empirical analysis to quantify plastic loads in rivers can be extended easily by additional potential predictors other than MMPW, for example, hydrological conditions.

It’s worth pointing out that this is a single study, and I’m unsure of the accuracy of their methods of inference and sampling. The link to a previous comment in this thread implies that it’s incorrect, so keep that in mind as well.

>The EU's research on the topic says about 150,000 tonnes of plastic are tossed into European waters every year.

>That is only a small contributor to the global problem, with an estimated eight million tonnes of plastic entering the world's oceans annually. And once there, plastic can travel great distances on ocean currents.

That's 1.875%. Furthermore, single use plastics make up slightly less than half of that amount.

How meaningful is this again?

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45965605

I'm going to assume good faith and spell this out plainly:

1. People in the US, Europe, Australia, et al. "recycle" plastic.

2. The recycling companies in these regions export commingled and low quality plastics to reprocessors in China

3. The commingled low quality recycled plastic can't be reprocessed economically, and ends up in a river.

At any rate, the EU number you cited as well as NA numbers are about to rise, because China cut the world off from dumping it's garbage there: https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-i...

That is probably the reason for this plastic disposables ban, and more that are to come.

Comments like yours are how ineffective policies get put in place which do little to nothing while simultaneously burning out the drive to change by making people feel hopeless. Just because you can identify a problem doesn't mean any effort to resolve is a good one.

Here is a HN comment from 3 months ago that includes extensive research on the subject. More specifically, much of the plastic waste in the ocean looks to be from merchant shipping abuses, not single-use plastic litter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18731627

Yes, we also need a worldwide ban on plastic fishing nets, and their replacement by something which biodegrades.

Pretty hard political problem though.

Just coming back from India. They've banned plastic bags and containers in any established store here, at least in the city I went to. Perhaps these countries have started taking more concrete steps than whatever it is thats leading the west?

And it caused quite many problems for them when they made that change.

How so and in what way? Just stating something without even the slightest bit of explanation is hardly believable.

Plastic was invented and became highly used because of its convenience and affordability, both to produce and ship. Do you really need peer reviewed data to entertain the idea that removing plastic could cause the inverse to be true? Because if not I'd ask for your studies that show transitioning away from plastic not being a huge obstacle.

> 90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from Africa and Asia

You might find this reddit comment interesting, because it debunks this statistic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/badscience/comments/aj0idr/debunkin...

Plastic in the ocean comes from roughly 3 sources: industrial equipment, microfibres from clothing, and land-based waste carried into the sea by rivers.

The 90% figure only applies to this last one.

This says that by weight, only 8% of the pacific garbage patch is microplastics and that the majority is fishing gear with fishing nets accounting for 46%.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...

It is still better than doing nothing. It also will promote materials that are a better fit for recycling.

In the case of banning plastic bags, certain areas have seen an uptick in feces in areas because the homeless were using the bags for defecation and sanitation. The ban he had an impact, detrimental to the point where a first world nation is on track to have preventable disease outbreaks. There are cost benefit analyses that should be done prior to saying that a ban is better than nothing.

Homeless sanitation is not independently sufficient justification to support heaps of littered disposable plastic bags everywhere.

There are many other possible ways to address this problem.

And yet none of those will be done, but we'll still continue with the ban. After all, it's the thought that counts.

Imagine that “free plastic bags” had never been a thing.

There are homeless people without adequate toilets. Would you suggest “let’s fill our world with heaps of littered plastic bags, because some homeless people might be able to use them as portable toilets” as a remedy?

No, that would be an absurd solution.

Yeah, instead we would have no solution at all and would just consider the higher amount of disease to be just a part of life. Homelessness isn't a new problem, it's simply one we don't do anything about. So these ideas of "we could do X to fix it" don't matter. We're not going to do them.

Do (almost) nothing directly. But it may facilitate similar things in other countries/regions. It may stimulate, and the experience can also help executing policies. New technologies or methods can also be developed first. So I could be more meaningful than it looks like.

If we do not start it first, who will? Look for example at Eastern Europe where no sorting was just few years ago and today it works, and it's much cleaner. Same will happen in other societies.

Banning those items, presumably, will create incentives to find alternatives.

If we are lucky, some ecologic friendly alternative that makes economic sense will appear and will extend outside the EU. If we are very lucky, that hypothetical alternative could be extended to other uses of plastics.

The real problem is that plastics are just too convenient. We are just too comfortable to change anything. Applying evolutionary pressure to the economy could generate better solutions.

The reality is that the replacements will use up more energy than the plastic things. For example ceramic cups require more energy for transport, and chemicals for washing up.

How do we know the replacements will use more energy? Because they are more expensive. If they weren't, they would already be used now instead of plastics.

y, I used to think this way. We went on a river clean up(major river in the midwest), they take you in a small boat up river and drop you off. I wasn't expecting we would not accomplish much. 8 of us a mix of kids and adults we collected a huge pile of trash and debris from the edge of the river. The volunteer group comes by and picks up all the piles of trash the groups collect while we are eating lunch and piles it up in the parking lot. The twenty groups that went out made a huge difference. It was an amazing amount collected.

A lot of small efforts can make a huge difference. I think setting a good example in the first world will translate world wide.

Never underestimate the tiniest effort/gesture.

We also do a road side cleanup, I assure you the first world doesn't put all their garbage in the trash. It's amazing what people will just throw out their window.

If we saw more people on the green side doing this I think we'd see a much more willing world of people eager to transition. Unfortunately most would rather beat their chests and get outraged than lift a finger.

I've also picked trash in the Midwest. Days and days of walking the land and having another team collect the bags as you did. Its rewarding work.

Even if it doesn't end up in the ocean, there's less street and countryside litter. I noticed a change in the local environment when they banned plastic bags in my town, I'm in favor of this change as well. Single-use plastics are gross!

Can we do something about cigarette butts next?

The laws, technology, and culture associated with green initiatives, are a huge undertaking. When a country leads with these, they make it easier for others to follow.

And it also creates resentment in the people that live in said country, because their quality of life is affected. This could lead to situations where the public won't accept future environmental efforts.

1) Where did you get that number from?

2) How do you expect people to implement laws to protect the environment if you don't start with yourself?

It will not solve the entire problem, therefore it will do nothing.

90% of the junk we consume is built in Asia.

90% of the trash we produce is shipped back to Asia and Africa for """recycling""".

Sometimes it's good to take a few steps back and a good hard look at ourselves before blaming china / africa / russia / whoever_as_long_as_it_isn't_me.

First world countries are the root cause of China's and Africa's pollution. Why do you think everything is delocalised there ? Because rich EU/US companies want to help the poor locals ? Or because it's cheap af and there are next to no regulations concerning pollution ?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/electronic-wast...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-...

Why no plastic bottles as well? The vast majority of plastic I use is from bottles.

Coke and Pepsi would sooner nuke the EU then allow for plastic bottles to be eliminated.

I'm sure between the two of them they produce most of the plastic waste in the world but I'm glad governments are attacking low hanging fruit instead.

In Norway all bottled beverages come in refillable plastic bottles. They’re basically the same as normal bottles but a bit thicker. You pay about 50 cents for the bottle, and every grocery store has a little machine where you return the bottles and get a refund. The whole system works pretty well. I wish the US had something similar.

Same in Finland and Sweden.

Aluminium cans are recycled too, and most glass bottles.

As a side note, where I live all waste is sorted (mixed, plastic, metal, cardboard, paper, clear glass, colored glass, biowaste, batteries, lamps...).

All this might seem like a a waste of money but it is actually beneficial: the municipality creates biogas from biowaste and runs the city buses with it. They produced so much gas that they sold it to neighbouring municipalities at least a few years back.

Probably because there is a health implication there, the possibility that people could get dehydrated and not have easy access to bottled water.

There are also substantial health implications to eliminating plastic cutlery, cups, etc. We may be largely oblivious to it now and we may fail to see the connection between the cutlery going and an uptick in illnesses after the change.

The California bag ban slightly preceded the uptick in "medieval diseases" in California, which has since spread from Southern California to other cities (possibly by homeless people leaving California and taking their diseases with them). The uptick in such infections is generally traced to lack of sanitation among the homeless, but the idea that the bag ban is an element tends to get dismissed because "we can't prove it, man!" basically.

I was still in California and still homeless when the bag ban was instituted. Following the ban, my sons and I saw more homeless people digging through trash cans, probably for free bags they could use for various purposes. I never did it, but some homeless people use plastic bags as a toilet substitute. They poop in a bag and take it to the nearest trash can rather than poop on the sidewalk.

If you are digging bags out of a trash can to have a bag to poop in because you no longer have ready access to free new ones and 10 cents per bag is a financial hardship for you, well, it shouldn't shock anyone that there is an uptick in disease.

But no one actually wants to believe that or take that possibility seriously since no official health organization has announced that this is an issue.

Meanwhile, I have seen articles that suggest the CDC is actively downplaying the uptick in diseases like hepatitis. They aren't aggressively issuing public health warnings and putting this into the news. It's been slow to get press and the problem gets downplayed as largely an issue for homeless people.

From what I have read, a lot of antibiotic resistant infections are bred in third world countries with poor plumbing and the like, then inadvertently exported via travelers. But, hey, the US and Europe can both readily get in on the action by banning all the disposable items that help make modern life less dangerous than life in a third world country. Let's go with that plan.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases...

So the solution is public hygiene, like public toilets being available. Not handing out plastic bags to poop in, wrapping poop in plastic is the worst option.

I would love to see more public bathrooms that are well maintained and genuinely accessible to the homeless. The public library is often the only obvious source for a public bathroom available to absolutely anyone and homeless people are frequently asked to leave the library for various reasons and sometimes banned from it.

But way to go to completely miss the point. Disposable plastic bags have myriad other uses, such as carting trash away from your camp or even carrying some of your possessions when you can't currently afford a new bag and your last one broke or whatever.

Pooping in plastic bags in just one use that homeless people have for free plastic bags routinely acquired every time they purchase something. Every time you eliminate one more free resource from the lives of the poorest of the poor, it winds up being a hardship with myriad consequences.

I didn't miss the point, I only targeted the main one you brought up.

I think we need to evaluate public facilities. As for them replacing "trash bags" that's fairly tenuous.

All I can do is target problem areas. Personally, if I could make the rules, I would force all plastic bags to be industrial compostable so that whenever plastic is found, it can be put into the recycling.

We eliminated single use plastic bags in the UK, and there have been very few side effects, and your concept of homeless pooping in them is a new one. Though we may just have better facilities than you.

The rest are mitigated by forcing people to think about what they are doing in advance, in the same way they don't generally forget about putting fuel in the car.

If people need certain necessities to live, the way to help them best is not to provide them a random assortment of free (subsidized) materials without consideration of the negative side effects of the subsidy, but to directly give them money.

Or directly give them the service they need. The example provided was that essentially the city they are in needs public toilets.

The plastic bags being a solution is a misdirection as it is a major health hazard for the people dealing with the poop bags in the trash.

I keep hearing that. It strikes me as a way to decide now to screw people over on this specific detail on the theory that, someday, there will be UBI and everything will work just fine.

Someday never seems to come on such promises.

I was openly homeless on Hacker News for 5.7 years. Plenty of people here are UBI proponents who argued that I of all people should also be a UBI proponent due to my poverty. Such people were not throwing money at me.

I'm old an cynical. If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come.

A lot of people on HN make quite good money and routinely espouse a lot of high-minded ideals. You would think of all places, this would be one where someone trying in earnest to make their life work via some kind of online income would most find help to readily solve their financial problems and stop being desperately poor.

I'm no longer homeless, but I still live on under $20k annually. I get treated like a whiner with no real point for using myself as an example in these discussions.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they usually aren't.

I'm incredibly skeptical of such arguments. People on HN expect good, well-written content on the front page of HN all day, every day. They aggressively use ad blockers, actively find ways around pay walls and routinely tell me that writing doesn't deserve to make money and I should get a real job.

Writing is something I am capable of doing, in spite of my handicaps. I have six years of college and I know a lot of stuff and I can be on a computer at home and write.

If well-heeled, high-minded people who regularly come together in large numbers on HN can't be arsed to help me stop being poor, then it seems really extremely unlikely to me that the poor will ever get anything like UBI.

I'm not for UBI. I don't think it works. But, moreover, I don't think it will really happen.

I think talk of UBI is like when so-called friends tell you that if they win the lottery, they will give you half of it. In reality, that's typically a lie. It's an easy thing to say because winning the lottery is so very unlikely.

People actually willing to help are willing to do whatever they can in the here and now, no matter how small. But most of what I hear is promises of someday while I continue to flail and most people react to my flailing by making me feel like I am doing something wrong. I'm an embarrassment. I'm doing something socially inappropriate.

Perhaps I shall just go away at some point and leave HN to the well-heeled, high-minded types who like to talk a good game and do nothing. Then I won't be actively making them look like the hypocrites they so obviously are in most cases.

I'm tired and trying to do some paid work. If I don't return to this discussion, everyone here can just assume that's why.

Cash transfers to the homeless enough to cover sanitation and other basic needs doesn’t necessarily imply a universal basic income policy.

> If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come.

I sometimes buy lunch for homeless people in my neighborhood, and have given people blankets and cash before, and donated to charities focused on helping the homeless, but it’s pretty hard as an individual to fully help someone who has lots of problems to find all the help they need and get into a stable comfortable situation, without making it a significant long-term project, and taking on huge amounts of personal responsibility. This is frankly a better job for publicly funded social workers, but I have a ton of admiration for any private citizens willing to take it on.

Myself, I don’t have the spare attention or resources to drive someone to work every day, talk to them every day to make sure they stay on track, put them up in my house, hire them for a permanent job, etc. I have enough trouble just taking care of myself and my own small children. My meager bits of help (one meal, a blanket, a respectful conversation, lending someone a phone for a few minutes, ...) might be appreciated but are hardly life changing.

Some of the homeless people I have talked to had trouble getting a job because they didn’t have a regular place to shower, didn’t have clean unripped clothes, etc., and then had trouble holding down a job once they got one because they had substance abuse problems, didn’t have enough structure in their lives to show up on time every shift, and so on. Of course the biggest and most obvious problem was a lack of housing. Which I really have no fix for. It’s a large-scale social problem which can best be tackled collectively.

I think you're missing the point she's trying to make. She's saying that these types of bans have negative unintended consequences for the poorest people. These consequences get brushed aside "because we can just do X to really help them", but X is never actually done to the degree that it offsets the problem. Her mention of HN is that, this would be one of those places of high ideals where you would expect X to be done, but it isn't. So if it's not even done in a place like HN, then what's the chance that it will be done by the general public? And so X gets brushed aside and the negative unintended consequences pile up.

So your argument is something like “if any system or policy incidentally helps the poorest people while also doing lots of unintended damage, then it is immoral to stop doing it, because replacing the incidental aid to the poor now cut off is politically intractable”?

This is precisely the same logic that says we need to continue to use coal power plants because otherwise the coal miners will lose their jobs, and it’s impossible to support them except by continuing to hire them to mine coal. When the people who want to eliminate coal power (e.g. Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016) suggest cash transfers, reeducation plans, other industrial investment, etc. to coal-mining regions to offset the loss of coal jobs, the supporters of coal mining reject the proposals as politically infeasible.

Instead of setting up advocates for the homeless and environmentalists as enemies, it would be more productive to find mutually acceptable solutions.

So your argument

They are not making an argument. They are trying to translate my words in hopes of bridging some communication gap.

Instead of setting up homeless activists and environmentalists as enemies, it would be more productive to find mutually acceptable solutions.

I'm an environmental studies major who gave up my car well before I became homeless, in part for environmental reasons. (In the US, this is routinely interpreted as "Obviously, you are just one of the useless and incompetent poor, not qualified to do any well paid work" rather than "Obviously, you are an extremist nutcase environmental enthusiast willing to walk the walk -- literally! -- not just talk the talk." Cuz: logic (by which I mean prejudice and classism).)

So, I don't know why on earth you think I personally am setting up homeless activists and environmentalists as enemies. I see myself as qualifying for both labels.

See, I meant that there are 5 million visitors to HN every month. I run multiple blogs. I do resume work. I do other things.

I've been here nearly a decade. Yet, I still can't make ends meet.

I don't need someone to drive me to work. I don't need someone to hold my hand. I'm not a drug addict or alcoholic.

I am a woman, and sexism is alive and well, so that closes a lot of doors in my face. I'm dirt poor, so a lot of people just assume I'm incompetent and not worth hiring.

Again, I'm extremely tired, moreso existentially than physically. I'm exhausted from saying the same things over and over and over on HN and watching them fall on deaf ears.

I have six years of college. I have a Certificate in GIS.

Stephen Hawking was medically handicapped. He had a real career. Of course, he was male.

I'm quite convinced that classism and sexism are major factors in my intractable poverty. And when I try to talk about such things, no, no one wants to get the memo. They just want to assert they are one of the good guys.

While not helping me.

Because my ongoing problems are not their responsibility and are best handled by a social worker or the government. And it will all get better someday, when we have that mythical beast they call UBI.

I'm a social creature more than a technical one. And I just can't help but feel that if people here really were as committed to resolving such problems as comments here tend to suggest, I would have long ago gotten hooked up with some kind of adequate income in excess of $20k annually.

The fact that I continue to live with intractable poverty makes me feel like it's absolutely all talk and no one genuinely wants to get with the man in the mirror and ask the hard questions.

The status quo works for them. They want it to stay the same.

This is really a conversation I don't want to have. It's not a positive experience for me. It's also not likely to actually make a difference.

A much more likely outcome is that I will eventually be banned if I openly bitch too much in a way that makes people here uncomfortable, as I was from Metafilter, a toxic classist cesspit of a forum that lots of people on HN gush about the wonderfulness of.

Adieu.

Edit: This piece was written before the first paragraph -- asserting that free money wasn't necessarily UBI -- was added to the comment I replied to. I'm too tired to edit the damn thing and make it make sense in light of that additional paragraph being added.

To be clear, my point is that I don't believe the world will become a better place. If five million mostly well-heeled, high-minded people can't manage to help one pathetic, but well-educated person with a work ethic and yadda to resolve their problems, no, they won't really help people who are less "virtuous" than I am.

The world will come up with excuses to blame those in need for their problems. They need to stop drinking. They need to stop using drugs. Etc. ad nauseum.

You know, like we currently do.

I've been saying for a long time is that plastic bags were the single most important factor in the decrease of infectious and mold-caused diseases in the 20th century. Storing food in containers like paper bags that are easily penetrated by bacteria and spores is pure stupidity. Along with the prevalence of anti-vaxers, I won't be surprised if California will become the least healthy place on earth in the near future.

*I've been saying for a long time is that plastic bags were the single most important factor in the decrease of infectious and mold-caused diseases in the 20th century."

Thanks.

Do you happen to know of any supporting references?

Once upon a time, cities offered potable water every here and there. The problem is that as these watering holes become rarer and rarer, locals sometimes push for the remaining ones to get shut down citing nuisances [0].

[0]: https://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/a-nice-une-fontaine... (French)

I remember a time when (almost) all bottled water was in glass bottles.. didn't seem to be a problem back then and everyone seemed hydrated.

I also remember when the plastic bottles were hyped because they were so much easier to carry.. not sure it was worth it.

Glass is often harder to recycle than plastic. Our county's single-stream facility recycles glass into construction fill.

We really need to get back to reusing bottles rather than trying to recycle them.

So what is the best replacement for fast food and takeaway purposes? Bamboo cutlery?

Why not:

Fast food: metal cutlery at the restaurant that gets washed and reused.

Take away: your own cutlery at home.

And if you're on the go? Eating as a passenger in a car, etc.

I can fathom having a portable case for a set of silverware, that you clean when you get home.

They exist.

https://www.amazon.com/Tableware-Camping-Tools-Portable-Mult...

I've heard it's not unusual in some places for people to do this with chopsticks.

https://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Stainless-Folding-Chopsticks...

In the future we'll just walk around with silverware and a cup at all times.

I mean, as long as so many of us are driving our own cars everywhere anyways, it's not like we don't have a place to put it...

Actually you might be onto a new market, creating forks that you bring with you everywhere like a pocket knife.

I wouldn't call camping supplies a new market so much as repurposed.

Medieval Europeans would dine with knives alone, and were expected to bring their own to the table.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-knives

They exist, and some of them don't look at all like camping equipment.

https://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Pen-Shape-Stainless-Folding-...

A pocketknife already doubles as a fork.

> And if you're on the go? Eating as a passenger in a car, etc.

Maybe eat food that does not require cutlery ?

EDIT: I want to make my point sound less harsh

Part of reducing environmental damage is changing everyone's behaviour, and maybe considering eating in the car not being a good thing for several reasons, one of which is environmental impact.

If you're able to bring your re-usable bag to a store or pay extra for a new one, perhaps you can also bring your own cutlery when you eat on the go or pay extra for some wooden ones?

> or pay extra for some wooden ones

Even if it was plastic: at least you'd get a chance to say no. Of all the single use food utensils handed over counters, a considerable fraction isn't even wanted by the customer and only accepted because denying would be extra effort for both sides.

When it's not possible to sit down and enjoy your meal outside of the car, which I understand happens, then bamboo cutlery may be offered.

And what if you have motor control issues that makes it impossible to wash cutlery to any standard of cleanliness?

I've said it before, and I've said it again: these anti-plastic laws are actively hostile to people with disabilities.

That's interesting. I have no experience with motor control issues, so that comes as a complete surprise to me.

Eating involves fine manipulation of the cutlery to load it with food, and then hitting a relatively small target surrounded by things that you really don't want to, say, stab with a fork if you miss that target.

I'd have expected that if one has good enough motor control for that, washing cutlery in the sink or a dishwasher would not be a problem, as all the movements required for washing seem to require less accuracy and consistency than do those for eating with the cutlery.

So, clearly, I'm missing something about the mechanics of motor control. Is it because almost all movements involve several different muscles, and so that if one has different levels of control issue with different one that you can get some movements are impossible even though they don't require much precision, and others are possible, even with tight constraints, because even though they involve the same body parts, they differ in the contribution required of each muscle?

Running through it in my head, the largest hurdle seems to be the pinching motion required to scrape off a blade or tines. I can imagine someone being able to support a utensil from underneath, move it slowly in the right direction, but not able to apply enough pressure to clean it. It might also be harder to keep hold of a wet utensil in water, or it might be impossible to bend over to fill and unload a dishwasher.

Of course, it could be as simple as just saying that you have to feed yourself, but you don't have to do the dishes. Someone might be able to do 10 things a day, but not 20.

Which is easier to do?

A) Figuring out how to deal with the external effects of single-use plastic for 500+ million people

B) Asking a very small fraction of those 500+ million people with motor control issues who also use single use plastic to use alternatives, of which there are many - including paper, bamboo, and regular cutlery

Here's what's going to happen: everyone ignores the issue and the disabled have to figure out a solution for their own drop in quality of life.

They make compostable plastic utensils now, along with wooden ones. We should use those instead if we really need something disposable.

Please tone down the language here. I'm not for hostility against people with disabilities.

However, keep in mind this is a small fraction of people and does not justify single-use plastics. There's more discussion of alternative materials in other branches of this post.

You seem to think there are no alternatives. There are.

Dishwasher ?

I wonder how much of the existing plastic could be replaced with PLA. For a lot of use cases it should have all the same upsides as oil-based plastic.

Maybe you bring your own (multi use) take away container? Kind of like when you bring your own coffee mug to a coffee shop?

We already have an uptick in "medieval diseases"* from unsanitary conditions among the homeless. Getting takeout is one of the ways homeless individuals who have a modicum of cash income (as opposed to just food stamps and the like) can take care of themselves to some reasonable degree. They generally aren't going to be in a position to properly wash and cleanly store their own take away containers.

Soup kitchens typically have worse food quality than fast food places, plus you typically wait in line for an hour or more next to other very poor people (often, but not always, also homeless). They frequently smell of cigarette smoke and/or marijuana smoke and are often in quite poor health, exposing you to a concentration of germs.

Soup kitchens have a tendency to be a horrifying concentration of poverty that makes it quite difficult to avoid ending up sick. It didn't take long on the the street for me to decide that I would rather not eat for short stints than to go to most soup kitchens.

It's also not uncommon for people who are handicapped, elderly or otherwise have personal challenges and personal burdens to rely heavily on take out. It's cheaper than eating in the restaurant because you can supply your own drinks, buy two meals and split it between three people in the privacy of your home and you don't necessarily have to tip. (I realize tipping is not a thing in some places, but you can get take out from places where it is a thing.)

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases...

I wouldn’t be against carve outs for a relatively small proportion of the pop like the homeless. Also instead of takeout they can do cafeteria style feeding (I believe this was his if was done in the past, aka soup kitchens from the depression era).

I already addressed why soup kitchens are a worse alternative than fast food in my experience. I can't believe you are rebutting any of my points with "We can just have more soup kitchens!"

Some homeless people are living in their car, attending school or have a job, etc. It is not uncommon for homeless people to be actively trying to fit in and not be noticed as homeless.

Most people did not think I was homeless upon meeting me. They only figured it out by seeing me repeatedly and realizing I wore the same clothes for two weeks or more and had "homeless habits" of various sorts.

Even if you are not loathe to admit in line that you are homeless and entitled to the exception, how to you prove you are homeless?

Proving a lack of a home winds up being a real issue for homeless people seeking services. The lack of something is often inherently hard to prove.

Sometimes homeless people are told they can only access services if they are registered with one of the homeless services in town as proof of their lack of housing. This winds up being a serious barrier to accessing services.

Now I need my registered homeless card to get my take out in disposable containers? And then simply having the containers signals to everyone who sees me that I'm probably homeless because that is on a short list of exemptions that entitle you to disposable containers?

Let's just start tattooing blue lines across the foreheads of all homeless people to make sure they are branded for life. It would be vastly simpler than our current methodologies for politely painting them into a corner at every turn. (<-- sarcasm, obviously)

You got a point but I think there are solutions to be found.

Have a significant surcharge for disposable, then if people present their WIC/SNAP they get a waiver at checkout.

A lot of homeless people do not have WIC/SNAP. Plus, you just agreed that all homeless people need to be registered in some way to qualify.

That's how they currently handle the bag ban: People with SNAP can get free bags. I had lost my food stamps due to bureaucratic error by the time the ban was instituted. I tried to reapply and someone dropped the ball again. Meanwhile, the process of applying was such a hardship that I decided to not bother to try again.

I probably still qualify for food stamps and still don't have them.

There are lots of people who fall through the cracks for various reasons. I also don't qualify for disability. Simply having a genetic disorder does not automatically qualify you for disability. You have to prove you are impaired to a certain degree.

I can't prove that. I'm too good at taking care of myself, though it takes all my time and requires substantial accommodation, a thing that absolutely does not result in the world going "Awwww. She totes should get a break of some kind. Let's cut the poor girl some slack and give her an exception/do a fundraiser/ support her goddamned Patreon."

No, it's fuck me all the way down. And I'm hardly some rare exception. That seems to be par for the course for homeless people.

Anyway, the reality is that privileged people tend to get exceptions to all the rules because they are the right color, the right gender, have enough money, etc. You will notice that the bag ban in no way impedes rich people from having all the bags they want. They just need to pay 10 cents apiece, which isn't remotely a hardship for them. There is no cap on how many they can use (for example).

Similarly, during water rationing during the drought in California, I saw articles that indicated that very rich people, like Oprah Winfrey, simply trucked in however much water they wanted for their swimming pools, landscaping and what not.

It's always the poor people who are hurt the most by all such rules. Other people have myriad ways they can get around them, usually without being stigmatized, penalized, prosecuted, etc.

Even setting aside the inconvenience factor, that would become a hygiene problem very quickly. Disposability is extremely useful when cleaning isn't an immediate option.

Maybe we'll just bring or receive our fast-fired pottery plates, eat on them, smash them into the clay pile on the way out, and some companies collect and recycle it back into quick pottery the same way companies drop drums of water off at my house.

A lot of these comments just remind me of a roomie I had in uni would would come up with endless reasons why he never owned a single reusable piece of dishware. It's suddenly about hygiene and... do you even know how many people die in $country cuz they can't just throw their plates away?! And the time savings! He must save hours each day actually if you do the math. And are you sure using so much water to clean a plate is any eco-friendlier than the plastic he just tossed after eating that sandwich? Oh yeah, and disabled people! How would he clean a plate if he had no hands? Or if he was just a disembodied head whose only form of locomotion was to be tossed around like a volleyball. What then, huh??

But at this point you indulge him just to see if he'll even admit that he's just not willing to spend 5 seconds rinsing a plate after use. And any time he does use one of the communal reusable dishes, it'll collect mold in the sink until someone else washes it for him.

I wonder if cutlery actually needs more cleaning than wiping thoroughly with a napkin after use, at least if it is cutlery that isn't shared?

There is a tendency nowadays to be more concerned with dirt and germs than is biologically justified (possibly to our detriment in some cases--some researchers think that the rise in prevalence of allergies and asthma in children is due to insufficient exposure to things that can help train their immune systems since we are stopping those things before they get that far).

With demand, (*some) offices will install fridges and sinks to accommodate new behavior, no?

There is an edge case that is actually problematic: the one person that does not wash their multiple-use take-away container can be a source of contamination that hurts many more. This is something that buffet restaurants and school/university cafeterias actually have to deal with today. It is a minor problem (solvable with some discipline and maybe minor regulation), but it is still a problem.

Cutlery made from paper and/or wood

Or plant starches maybe?

Maybe something like sulapac (www.sulapac.com) which is biodegradable and without plastic of any kind.

For mugs and cups there is Isla packaging from Kotkamills.

Solutions exist, plastic for consumer single use stuff is just plain stupid.

I've seen these reusable cups at festivals: https://www.ecocupshop.co.uk/en/

There's a 1€ deposit but some people keep the cup as a memento. Another side effect is thieves breaking into the festival tent at night to steal the plastic pipes containing dirty cups (so they can get the deposit for them).

Those might make the high prices of drinks at some events less annoying since you get a souvenir.

Like the bag ban in California this will probably just increase trash by causing people to use bulkier disposables. Restaurants and such will replace these with super-cheap glass or metal disposables that also consume more fuel when shipped because they weigh more. Cheap paper alternatives are often from pulp that is not sustainably sourced and in many cases they fall apart and so are rejected by customers. These measures might be well intentioned but they don't work and often backfire.

There is no way we're going to decrease oceanic plastic pollution without sanctioning or otherwise pressuring the nations and industries that are primarily responsible for it. For nations it's largely China, India, and a few others. For industries fishing fleets are a disproportionate source, and most of the culprits here are also not US or EU based.

This is what I've seen happen here in Seattle. Every place just gives out bulkier multiple use containers when anyone gets takeout salad or MealPal, and people just throw them away as per usual. There's a Korean Deli all you can fit in a box type restaurant that gives a $1 discount if you bring back your own box, but that's the only place and they were doing it before the regulations anyways.

Regulations can have unintended consequences.

No joke -- McDonalds is the most environmentally friendly takeout in Seattle. The whole thing has been compostable recycled paper for a long time.

Not that I'm especially surprised but the concept of subsidiarity isn't worth much these days is it?

I'm strongly pro EU but at the same time sad that the subsidiarity principle has become so weak. The EU can be better than this. Should be, has to be.

I mean I understand that you can't introduce a bill like the GDPR effectively if every EU country does it differently. But plastic? Come on.

I support the gist of this ban by the way, yet agree with you that it has nothing to do at the EU level.

If you could build a machine that sterilized the utensils, shredded them, and then 3d printed them. If the machine was the size of a microwave, and cost under $200, you could make a fortune.

People keep trying to do this. The problem is the grade of plastic is awful, and 3d printing isn’t that fun/useful with bad filament.

What about a small injection mold?

Sincerely, the point is not of is actually going to reduce plastic in a big enough scale to make a difference, the point is that it will make business come up with alternatives and progress us towards a solution to plastic use that can then be applied in a more extensive way.

The EU, although not bring perfect, is usually the place where these kind of measures start, and I am grateful for it.

I have a lot of doubt that removing a negative behavior from companies will cause a positive one to pop up necessarily. It may, it may not. If they want companies to come up with a solution why not offer a bounty for better tech? At least then it's a primary motivator, while with bans there could be any number of other responses.

What about single use made from bioplastics? Are they that much more expensive?

This still doesn't fix the problem, bioplastics would still take long time to degrade, and they would need specific conditions to do so, we're just offloading the problem to indefinite future and prefix 'bio-' in the name makes us feel good about ourself.

For example PLA for 3D printers, technically bioplastic, but realistically it still needs to be collected and when it comes to breaking it down, the process is still pretty involved, and who is going to pay for all of that?

The biggest problem with these is that there aren't any bioplastic options right now that don't set off one food allergy or another.

Start firing up the chainsaws to mow down the forests for paper plates.

for the economics experts: how could the market eliminate this problem by itself ?

It's a market failure that they're trying to correct. Externalities aren't fixed by markets because they're external to those markets.

Keep this up and the 2nd Brexit vote might never happen.

The western world is responsible for 1,25 % of all ocean plastic pollution. Europe is only 0,28 %![0] There is no need to ban single-use plastics in the West. It's just virtue signaling and the so-called 'solutions' lower our comfort, will cause a rise in food poisoning deaths and are worse for the environment.[1]

When you mention this, people reply we should set an example and other countries will follow. The idea that Western countries should set an example to teach those 'dumb countries that can't think for themselves' how to do things seems very arrogant. And there are zero guarantees it will work. If it was as easy as setting an example, every country on earth would be a blossoming democracy by now...

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611#f1 [1] https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

Edit: An actual solution would be if the EU invested in waste management solutions in the developing world.

People mention micro-plastics as a bad thing but we don't know that yet. So far the level of evidence proving micro-plastics as harmful is on par with the evidence linking cancer to cellphones.

Everyone who is against restrictions on single use loves to cite that article to rail against them, but never seems to actually have read or understood the study:

1. While many indicators suggest a dominant contribution of plastics from Asian countries, there is very little data to document these assumptions and thoroughly verify the validity of our model. [0]

2. The study was not talking about all sources of plastic in the ocean, it is referring to plastic concentration in major rivers.

3. A good chunk of "western" waste and recycling is exported to Asia for processing. Yes, it may be mishandled there but it doesn't originate from there. Reducing generation will also reduce contamination.

4. Plastic ends up in more places than just rivers feeding ocean. Plastics accumulate and degrade into microplastics, and end up in lakes, fields, forests, parks - yes, within Europe as well.

I'm also not sure why you even think Europe is a leader here. Many African and Asian countries have been taxing or banning single use plastic for years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_lightweight_plast...

Your reading of "virtue signaling" and colonialism seems to be your own construction. I would bet most of people lobbying for this are lobbying because they want to see less plastic ending up in the environment, locally and globally, not because they care what you think.

What you call virtue signaling other people call a form of morality. Just because not everyone is doing something doesn't mean that it's not the right thing to do. And even though it doesn't guarantee other countries will follow suit, it's disingenuous to suggest it doesn't make ANY difference. It helps normalize these policies in the global mindspace. Plastic pollution is death by a million cuts. Even though any specific action might be negligible, if we continue piece by piece to remove plastics and encourage investigation and investment into alternatives we can slowly make progress. There are also compounding benefits, if we discover alternatives in one niche it could end up having benefits down the line on other, more significant causes of pollution.

I would call it a form of morality to require church attendance, or maybe to outlaw cursing.

You wouldn't want that, I assume? So maybe government should focus on guaranteeing freedom rather than thinking of ways to morally limit it.

Your “freedom” to contribute to the detriment of our natural environment ends at our children’s freedom to enjoy the same clean environment we currently have.

If my local river is full of garbage does it help that some other country has even more garbage? I see this laws helping also with the local plastic problem.

Does your local river actually have a plastic problem? I am not sure thats a problem in western countries with functioning waste management systems. I thought the water problems we had were generally from industrial or agriculture runoffs. Am I wrong?

It definitely is a problem in the US, whether there is awareness or not.

https://www.usgs.gov/news/widespread-plastic-pollution-found...

This is just in water, I would not be surprised if there is a problem of similar magnitude with accumulation in soil.

Yes it has, I live in Romania, in a village, the things got better since the garbage collection was made mandatory(though the locals complain about having to pay), So I am fine with EU forcing "civilization" on us because our politicians are not interested in this things.

Anyway my point still remains, if we can reduce the plastics in our countries by using bamboo,paper,glass,metal or better alternatives why should not do it because some other country is polluting more. Similar if China air pollution is huge then I still care that my local air is clean.

What if .5% is the biggest single chunk of plastic use you can eliminate in your sphere of influence? Should you:

a) Do nothing, because it's "only" 0.5%

b) Eliminate 0.5% because it's something you can do.

> It's just virtue signaling and the so-called 'solutions' lower our comfort

Oh, right, I see. Yeah, I mean you'll be comfortable for the next thirty years. Who cares about the next generation, am I right?

There's a huge problem with unsorted or poor quality recyling or waste electronics being illegally exported from first world countries [1] and ending up in landfills or just dumped in piles, across the world, fix that first, then move on to something else.

Banning tiny amount of single use plastic is low hanging but infinitesimally small fruit however, and the narratives created around it just conveniently distract from much bigger problems.

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/thousands-of-tons-of-uk-plastic-d... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQLilXLAIU

Why present it as an either or? Why fix one first? Do both.

I'd not be surprised if the tonnage of illegal or substandard waste exported from first world countries is 1,000,000 times greater the tonnage of improperly disposed plastic straws, plates etc etc.

So why are the EU making a huge deal about the latter and not the former? Sorry but it smacks of greenwashing and narratives to me...

If a given generation is doomed by plastic misuse, going through the big effort that would net in .5% total savings in western countries is hardly going to postpone the calamity to the following generation.

Agreed, mostly.

Money and effort spent on reducing the use of single use plastics, would be better spent recycling plastics in the western world, improving traceability for plastic containing waste exported to the third world, and improving waste management in the third world.

We don't really need to stop using plastic. There are much more urgent problems, including not dumping plastic in rivers and the ocean. Trying to avoid using plastic hardly helps the environment. There are much more useful and urgent things we could be doing instead.

I don't need a study to understand the benefit of what I can observe with my own eyes. I have lived in places in the U.S. where trash accumulates on and around the streets. The plastic trash just sits there. It doesn't degrade under heavy rainfall or years of neglect, it just continues to accumulate. Not every place in the West (or even the U.S.) has ideal sanitation services.

Does this account for the trash that we send abroad for China to dispose of?

No, it does not and since China banned garbage imports last year we will see soon enough if the theory that China is dumping Western plastic in the ocean is correct. If that's the case, we should see a sharp decline in ocean plastics in the coming years.

Only if another country doesn't start doing it for us instead, or we do it ourselves. Though I think your general point holds, and hope the Chinese ban works to our advantage, forcing research into better ways of recycling and maybe even true single stream recycling, not the scam it often is.

Plastic micro-particles are found in tap water in most places around the world:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-...

At some point the problem will become large enough that the UN will have to step up and start imposing sanctions on polluters. But we can hardly take a stand against others without fixing our own problems.

We're just upping our standards, so up yours.

It doesn’t help much! Better do nothing!

Would you spend time and resources making your web page load 1.5% faster?

I've spent time and resources making backups 1% more efficient because cumulatively it reduced expenditure on disks.

It's called Leadership.

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