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
230 to
224 a
221 of
182 ago
174 and
172 hours
170 reply
170 in
158 is
150 that
103 i
98 plastic
91 it
81 you
79 on
78 for
76 are
67 not
67 be
62 we
60 this
57 but
55 they
55 straws
52 with
51 it's
51 if
51 have
50 all
49 or
43 use
39 was
39 more
39 as
38 so
38 at
37 about
36 don't
36 can
34 straw
34 people
34 from
32 them
32 fishing
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.