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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many millennia of using paper straws a single day of this fiasco wiped out from carbon savings.

Paper straws are generally more energy and resource intensive than plastic straws.

The switch to paper straws was theoretically about eliminating single use plastics.

As someone who has done scientific surveys of beach flotsam: my personal feeling is that the switch to paper straws will change precisely nothing as far as global plastic pollution goes.

Hold on - you’re saying that by using paper straws, you damage the earth even more than plastic ones? Plus they don’t even work? Why is this not all over the news!?

Almost all the plastic alternatives are worse. Plastic is a wonder material and unfairly demonized.

Instead of banning plastics we should have invested in waste management infrastructure in the developing countries where almost all the ocean plastic originates from. Probably would have been cheaper too.

No mention about how most plastics contain endocrine disruptors[1], this is having a real world impact on human procreation. BPA was only the first of many boogie chemicals in this space. This is also impacting children in a way we don't understand fully yet [2].

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3572204/

The biggest impact to human procreation is globalization and falling wages amongst the working class. Survey a few millennials and ask if they'll be having kids. They don't have the time or the money.

We've removed BPA, but there are plenty of other hormone analogues we're exposed to. Soy, for instance.

Endocrine alteration is probably nowhere near as bad as the particulate matter we're breathing in, the amount of sugar we're consuming, or the time we're spending on our phones.

All this to say that I don't think "plastics as hormones" is as bad as the other stuff we have to worry about. We should triage it appropriately.

> this is having a real world impact on human procreation

Which, like it or not, is one of the best things we can do for the environment.

I was thirsty at a popup in a park recently and they handed me boxed water. Since I really hate the taste of water passing through cardboard I asked for a single use plastic cup, preferably with a single use plastic straw. In those words.

Nature quickly healed.

I pretended that using the recycling bin would change something, but I know that nobody takes our garbage anymore.

Good job, I guess? You sure owned the libs.

Nice I snagged another one, I should start making a tally of people guessing my political affiliation on this forum since they have no aggregate chronology and respond to a single data point

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29879903&goto=threads%...

What are you exposed to in order to come up with this stuff?

The point is that paper everything is an uninspired knee jerk reaction that isn’t holistic enough to address the environmental impact

You may not like it, but your post sounded like a boomer Uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, so if you don't want that reaction, consider your words.

Back in my day, China took our garbage and said they were recycling it!

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