Reducing straws won’t “save the planet” on its own. We will improve the planet by doing multiple things.
Reducing plastic use (less packaging, fewer straws, reusable shopping bags) all play a role in a much bigger effort.
My front yard disagrees. It's adjacent to a somewhat busy road, and straws are part of the debris I have to routinely clean up (along with various wrappers and cigarette butts).
How do you think they generate statistics for this kind of thing? They don't count everything, they take samples and infer from that.
It's far more likely that I live in a stray straw accumulation zone than straws are uniformly distributed over the entire city's gardens by some method.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization#Hasty_ge...
Considering that a lot of land in a city isnt your garden/house (shops, offices, parks), I would suggest that that would tend to balance out the risk of this being a SAZ.
I take your point that this is a data point of one. But if I found one straw in my garden, it is astoundingly unlikely that is the only wild straw in my city. I wouldn't start putting a figure on it from that, but it does suggest the lower bound is much higher than one.
Having never found a straw in my garden my intuition is that (not finding straws in every garden) is more likely than (finding straws in every garden) but obviously I have no valid basis to put a number of any kind on that.
Now while I think the original post is an example of Hasty Generalisation, I think the bigger issue is the generalisation combined with a sample bias. Self reported data points tend to be interesting because otherwise they wouldn't be reported. My thesis is that regularly finding a straw in your garden is interesting because it is unusual.
I assume this cleaning includes putting them in your trash and the city taking them to a landfill?
It's obviously not the best path, but cities[0] (by necessity) generally do a good job cleaning up the trash that gets scattered around.
Bigger issue is non-urbanized areas where there isn't the density/wealth to clean up litter.
[0] The collection of people and institutions, not just the government.
And of course, all the other parts of the road that don't happen to run up to a yard are not really groomed, so all that debris is flushed into the waterways.
People litter. Cigarette butts, straws, plastic bottles, etc. all very regularly and easily wind up in the ocean with an assist of a slight breeze.
(I would distinguish public trashcans like this from e.g. commercial trashcans for the use of customers of private businesses. First, they should never fill over halfway. Second, the whole thing should be kept clean. Anything else is a failure of management.)
Arguably it raises awareness and the shard belief in at least the principle of individual responsibility. Against the overwhelming tide of the "Fuck it, I'll be dead before this shit starts to really come down on our heads anyway" which would otherwise be the reigning default.
You (obviously) can't do this on your own and, at a certain level, the environmental movement's focus on bogus, small-time, feel-good issues reveals its cynicism. BUT PLEASE, stop defending it. You're just empowering those looking for a reason to resent the movement.
Like trying to start banning categories of plastic? Straws and shopping bags?
Just Ctrl+F for straws in this thread. Two top comments are taking shots at straws and once I post this reply, those two comments will have pushed the word straw to 97 counts.
Lastly just for fun, just a tally of the most common words on this page: 447 the
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170 in
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98 plastic
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The article is about merchant and fishing ships.
Actually it was primarily about these ships as primary sources of plastic dumping in the ocean.
Not about the "ships" per se.
It is usually contaminated with food and several different types of plastic are mixed together, including unrecycleable ones. Sorting them for recycling is usually uneconomical.
if everyone stops using plastic straws tomorrow it will not matter and will not make an impact on how much plastic keeps accumulating.
here are a few more ideas for helping the planet: have fewer kids - this weird trick works, learn to love GMOs - this is the future, there is no way we can sustain the population growth we are experience with everyone eating organic, drive your car into the ground or until it's too expensive to repair it.
What is doomed to fail again. You won't save the planet by focusing at the least effective, most demanding action one can do.
On the consumer side. You now no longer see the packaging as it arrives to your house. Do an image search for Pallet Deliveries (I don't want to point fingers) and look at just how much plastic wrap comes on the "reduced waste" packaging, when it's delivered to your supermarket/department store. It's utterly astonishing.
The home machinist trashes his chips, the production shop scraps them.
The problem is that people don't have infinite time or attention. So if you raise awareness and guy buy-in for something like straws, you took away time and awareness from things that could have actually made a difference. To make things worse, people will eventually realize that getting rid of straws didn't have much impact and would be less likely to participate in future causes.
Now consider your ideas that would actually make a difference. I bet they actually change people's lifestyles which means those proposals are going to be political suicide unlike plastic straws/bags.
For example, look how angry and defensive people get when it comes to their meat consumption. People will openly brag about how little they care about the slaughter of factory-farmed animals because it tastes good, just in response to someone bringing up ethical concerns.
Though I do think plastic straw/bag movements are a gateway to larger ecological movements. You can't jump straight into massive changes unless society is advanced enough to not throw a shitfit if their drink doesn't come with a straw, something that we're still working on.
So, maybe it's plastic straws today, but tomorrow a politician will have a real shot with a platform against waste wrt TFA.
My impression was the exact opposite. A plastic straw ban is invasive and annoying, which makes it a good way to prove commitment to the environmental movement.
I just want to enjoy an occasional unplanned fountain drink without having to use a straw that dissolves in my mouth. I never litter, and would happily cut out some other use of plastic from my life to compensate.
> So, maybe it's plastic straws today, but tomorrow a politician will have a real shot with a platform against waste wrt TFA.
Plastic straw bans are not a prerequisite for fishing reforms. Regulating the commercial fishing industry to fix this problem will be difficult to coordinate internationally, but the end result is not going to have a noticeable effect on most people's lives.
Those sort of reforms are the easiest policy wins and the most impactful, so the focus should be on campaigning for them directly.
Exactly this. Furthermore, we should be thinking about these issues in terms of ROI; how much time/effort/political capital does this intervention cost? And how much utility does it yield? Banning straws vs. sending them to landfill - not much difference in utility there as I see it.
Unfortunately a lot of movement environmentalism (every movement, really) is just virtue signaling ("Look at me, I fit in to this community, I don't use plastic straws!") rather than actions that are rationally constructed to make a difference.
So now, when I don’t have a shopping bag in the car (something I’ve done since back when it was specifically “uncool” to do so), and need a bag, I pay a dime for a plastic bag that has at least 5 times as much plastic in it, and it doesn’t photo-degrade in the sunlight like the filthy evil old T-shirt bags (which I also reused) of yesteryear.
Like focusing on mass murders or killing by cop only, in the USA, when talking about gun violence. I get that it’s the most visible thing but it sucks all the political capital out of the discussion to do something major.