An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)
hwfo.substack.com
hwfo.substack.com
If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place.
The author is recommending a half measure based on the assumption that the US cannot fix its own problems. They are also implying a false equivalency: banning single use plastics is not the same as recycling plastic. A more equivalent comparison might be the tradeoffs between plastic bottles for soda, water, or oils and glass or metal containers. It is also true that plastic straws are a much smaller problem then other usages of plastic such as bottles or event fishing gear and even bags.
Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with reducing plastic usage. Doing so is smart and will be important for the health and well being of future generations -- human and nonhuman -- of life on earth.
This assumes that:
(1) Plastic can actually be recycled. Unlike a lot of other materials, it degrades rather substantially every time you try, and plastic quality coming out of recycling isn't generally uniform enough to make anything more than the big, chunky "recycled plastic toys and benches" you'll occasionally see. More and more, it's evident that "plastic recycling" is a myth mostly funded by plastic producers and crew, who wish to have it be seen as "not the terror it actually is." Hard on profits, you know, if people don't like your product. The Guardian has done some great work on the truths behind plastic recycling, and they're not pretty. That's before you get into the biological impacts of microplastics on "literally everything on the planet that's alive."
And, (2) that "biodegradable materials" actually do that in realistic end of life conditions. They don't. People date landfill digs by reading the headlines on the newspapers that are "slightly yellowed compared to when they were buried."
Treating plastic as the life-toxic sludge it is would be a far better start. At least with metal recycling, we know it's actually being put back into a smelter for recycling, and that it uses far less energy than the original materials (though "pure circular" with most metals is still a problem as they just dilute the various alloys down with virgin metal enough to make the additives not a problem in current systems).
"Oh, it's fine, it's recycled!" leads to far more plastic use than "No, we literally can't do anything with it, the best we can do is go burn it to offset coal use" (which is what my local area does with plastic, as it seems to have the best impact for the least cost, and the burn temperature is probably hot enough to decompose all the nasties...).
On the other hand, making plastics from biomass carbon sources or from direct air capture and burying the material in landfills permanently is actually a form of permanent carbon storage.
It's probably just best to reduce plastic use as much as possible.
It's unfortunate that the US still apparently used plastic straws in 2021. Here in the UK they have been phased out over the past few years, with an official ban since October 2020. It seems the same in other European countries from what I've seen.
Sure, let's turn all the plastic into atmospheric CO2. What could go wrong?
Then, if you buried that plastic (made from atmospheric CO2) in a landfill after use, that would plausibly be removing CO2 from the atmosphere, not adding it. Assuming it doesn't break down in the landfill and leak out as methane or something.
That's the whole point: the one saving grace of plastics is that they maintain the sequestration of fossilized CO2. If you let them decompose all the way back to CO2 then you have eliminated that last remaining benefit.
That's the reality. Why does the US/California make it seem like recycling is a magic trick to save the planet?
Because it's the most profitable step of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, [some people add other entries] chain, so it's in their interests to pretend the other steps don't exist.
If I buy a bottle of water packed in plastic and don't worry about it because I assume it's recyclable and therefore "of zero net impact" (also not true, but implied by most of the standard recycling glossy brochures), I've helped their profits.
If I bring my own water with me, or use a water fountain or something, I've not contributed to growing the profits of all the companies in the chain of extracting oil from the ground, processing it into various precursors, making it into a cheap, flimsy plastic, pumping water out of the ground to fill that bottle, trucking it across the roads built of oil with fuel built of oil, and selling it to someone, then also the profits of dealing with the waste plastic (trash, recycling, whatever)!
Reduce (don't buy stuff in the first place) and Reuse (finding ways to have things be not-single-use) just don't have nearly the profit chain.
Pay attention to just how much rhetoric about climate/trash/etc boils down to, "We can consume our way out of problems caused by overconsumption." There are no shortage of companies happy to sell you "green" versions of whatever you might have otherwise bought - but very few people are willing to ask the question, "Should you have bought it in the first place?"
A lot of the messaging — paid for by the fossil fuels industry — is "we're all in this together." Image of countless families sorting their plastic bottles or whatever.
Don't look around the corner at industry generating a magnitude larger amount of waste. Are you doing your part?
They used messaging to make their problem our problem.
Because propaganda has more impact than the truth.
https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-Ener...
Instead of having to pay to sort and process, you just grind it up and mix it in with the coal (or heave the bags in, I'm not sure as to the actual feed mechanism though I keep meaning to see if I can get a tour).
I'm not actually in the program area, but I know where to drop my bags of plastic to get them into the program (one of the recycling companies in the area of the program handles it, and I'm over there often enough that I'll toss a few of the bags in the back of the car if I'm going that way).
Landfill space is not the issue at all. Landfills do not take up that much physical space, and we have plenty of empty space to use.
The issue is around the greenhouse gases released creating all of those disposable products and the resources going into their production.
If it was just landfill space, we would be totally fine.
> Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land.
Over that time scale the land automatically remediates itself. There's a hill in Rome made of a big pile of Roman garbage. The hill is more useful than the pots were.
From the article linked below:
If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high.
That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable. That's ignoring all the advancements we'll make over the 100 years to harvest that garbage or further increase efficiency of landfills.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...
> That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable.
That is NOT a big landfill. That volume could be easily hidden in all but a couple of US states.
Moreover, it is a concentrated supply of many useful materials. It might not be profitable to mine it today, but if the "earth is running out of resources" people are correct, it will be. (And, if they're not, generating trash isn't a problem.)
The trash pyramid is 100 cubic kilometers, that could fit in a few of the biggest open pit mines.
Make the export of detritus illegal, send the excess to dumps, and if Americans deem this offensive then they can legislate additional subsidies for domestic recycling (even potentially becoming a net importer of detritus!).
Plastics where not really a thing 100 years ago. At our current progression I think we should avoid the big catastrophes (Nuclear war), push for developpement of poor places(get more genius) and advance technology as fast as we can.
At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.
The problem is that today's plastic, in far less than 100 years, is reasonably likely to be finely divided into small numbers of molecule sized chunks, and spread evenly throughout the entire biological systems of the planet. We find microplastic in ants in the middle of untouched forestland, because it spreads so well on the wind.
> ...and advance technology as fast as we can.
It's an interesting gamble, certainly - solving the problems created by our current technological development path by pushing further down that development path.
It's just not one I expect to work. You don't generally solve problems by "doing more of what made them in the first place."
Either a system is sustainable or it's not. If it is, it can continue forever. And, if it's not, it won't. One way or another, it won't, though you can pick the method early on, and later, reality will force it on you. The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who thought it didn't apply to them.
Plastics in their current form won't exist as new products in 1000 years (though the current stuff probably won't have broken down entirely). Either something far less vile and toxic to "all life" will have been found, or, more likely, industrial civilization will have done the usual "overshoot and collapse" thing, so we won't have the technology to make them in their current form then.
None of that changes the fact that plastic are toxic to life now - and, so, we ought not be using nearly as much of them. I don't mind "durable plastics" quite as much, but the bulk of it is single use, and splitting out all our recycling, I'm regularly reminded of just how much plastic one cannot avoid, even when trying to minimize it.
If the reality (which it probably is...) is that people won't stop doing anything until the external reality we live in forces their hand, the outcomes are almost always far worse than if we decide to stop doing those things earlier.
Plastics are convenient, certainly. They're also a horrid biotoxin that has, quite literally, blanketed the planet in the form of microplastics. We have no idea what to do with the stuff, and burying it only works for so long (and if you're really careful to not let the bits and pieces leech into groundwater). But, I mean, at least you can get water without having to use a drinking fountain!
The mistake you are making is thinking the plastic system is a closed system. It is not. The plastic system is part of the universe, which is populated by people who constantly create new knowledge to solve problems. And we never know which new knowledge will be created which will affect this system.
For example, when nuclear power was invented one might have predicted that cheap, clean power would be available to all. But you probably wouldn’t have predicted the environmentalist backlash to it and resultant continued dependence on fossil fuels.
Or Malthus predicting worldwide food shortages and starvation as the population grew. He had no way of predicting the invention of fertilizer.
There are a million examples of this but the takeaway is: people solve problems and create new knowledge that is constantly redefining what is possible.
> The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who thought it didn't apply to them.
On the contrary, the history of civilization collapse is rife with people who insisted on thinking about things as closed systems and stifling open ended progress (e.g. ancient Sparta).
It is actually hard to think of an example of a civilization which couldn’t have been saved if only they had the right knowledge. Say the cure for a disease or a piece of military technology.
I believe that is the point the other person is trying to make. That humans continually solve problems, create new ones, and rapid progress means a higher likelihood of developing the new solutions needed.
I am especially wary of man made chemical molecules that have a long lifespan (BPC, fluorinated compound, etc)
With technology we make two step forward and one step back at the same time. We create new wonderful opportunities but we also create damage that we often overlook at first.
Of course it is practical. Here in Norway we recycle about 30% of all plastic from domestic and industrial waste already. We have some way to go though, glass and metal is over 80%.
Some plastic is especially well suited to re-use; for instance, we recycle 73% of PET used for drinks containers.
That 70% needs to go somewhere, and a landfill is the best place for it. Not an incinerator, a low income country, or the bottom of the ocean.
None of it goes to a low income country, and very little to the ocean.
And our plastic waste per person is less than half of that of the US. Reducing plastic waste isn't merely a question of recycling, one must decide which plastics to allow for which purposes so that recycling can be effective. But not using it in the first place is the most effective.
And lastly what does the population of the country have to do with the problem? I this mentioned over and over again in various contexts.
Reducing the amount of plastic used is certainly a good goal, but it's a non-solution to the current problem. Non-recyclable plastics and the recyclable plastics which are destined to be mismanaged on a truck tomorrow are all better off in modern landfills.
I find it commendable to encourage people to consumer less stuff, but the war on plastic straws has been a huge step back - it's done relatively little to actually help, but has imposed huge and everyday annoyances on everyone. These should be the exact opposite goals of environmental reforms when there are much lower hanging fruits available.
Not on everyone. I can't remember the last time I used a straw, I manage to drink from a glass or a cup just fine. Is it really a huge annoyance for you? I understand that for some people (e.g. people with Parkinson's or a broken jaw) straws are a necessity, but most people should be able to manage just fine without them.
It's true that there are bigger contributors to plastic pollution, but it's hard to argue that plastic straws in the oceans or nature are a good thing.
If we are concerned about plastic waste, let's put a general tax on plastics to reduce their consumption across the board and let the market decide how to do that reduction, instead of picking and choosing which plastic products to ban.
While I don't think people need to justify using straws, I will go ahead and say straws are very important to me. I like cold drinks with ice in them, but I have cold sensitive teeth that hurt when I drink from a cup with ice and no straw. It is way easier to drink in a car with a cup, lid, and straw.
I simply prefer using a straw. Do you want to go through a similar exercise where you justify every single one of your consumption practices?
They are such an upgrade to plastic straws that I don't understand why we haven't been using them all along.
If that sounds like too much work for you, there are reusable plastic straws available.
You can get them in kitchenware stores (expensive ones from WMF, or cheap ones from Sewa), and even Ikea sells them.
A tax is much more free market than a ban.
I dare you to find a less significant source of pollution in my day to day life that's more inconvenient to ban. Perhaps clothes pegs or shoelaces? The list is short.
We banned straws because everyone saw that picture of a turtle with a straw through its nose, meanwhile other countries are dumping millions of tons of plastic into the ocean that absolutely dwarfs the pollution plastic straws could ever hope to make. It's like both of your legs have just been cut off, you're bleeding to death, and someone puts a bandaid over a pin prick on your shoulder, and pats themselves on the back for saving you.
And don't forget the whipped cream! There's just not a good way to sip from something with a cream topping without getting am embarrassing face full.
We’re in the middle of a climate crisis and the war on plastic straws is emblematic of everything that’s wrong about our policies. We’re looking way to hard at something totally inconsequential.
For individual businesses the math is against conservatism. Failing to deliver cutlery and getting massive complaints (especially if they lead to politically charged boycotts) is the second most expensive option - the most expensive option is forcing customers to state their preference (and baked in preferences like those submitted by UberEats are small check boxes that users don't see and so restaurants often ignore). The cheapest option is probably just to put a straw jar somewhere on the counter, but then you'll tend to get complaints from employees/franchise owners about theft - while that theft is rare and inexpensive, it is very visible.
This, but for paper receipts! It blows my mind that the default everywhere I go is to print a receipt, then ask me if I want it. I never do. I am not expensing these two slices of pizza. I will not need to deduct this bottle of shampoo when I file my taxes.
And then the merchant prints a receipt for themself! As if the computer that printed the receipt couldn’t just save a record of the purchase to a database!
The miles and miles of receipts that probably get printed and then thrown away probably adds up to something nontrivial, it’d be such an easy win to only print receipts on request.
IMO the best reason to avoid receipts when you don't need them is because thermal paper is really nasty stuff.
> the most expensive option is forcing customers to state their preference (and baked in preferences like those submitted by UberEats are small check boxes that users don't see and so restaurants often ignore)
Every significant player in the food delivery market here has their app work the exact same way: there is a clear, big checkbox for "I don't need cutlery". It's impossible to miss if you've used the app more than once, I'm sure people missed it the very first week it was introduced but now it's standard, everyone knows about it. Check the box? Restaurants don't send cutlery. Simple as that. Want to hear something even crazier? I'm pretty sure the checkbox is checked by default, so if you don't uncheck it, you don't get cutlery (not 100% sure because it may just default to whatever you chose on your last order).
This is just not a problem whatsoever. I'm sure by now it has already saved millions of pieces of plastic.
They'll only use that money to convince gullible people that climate change isn't happening, that every government regulation will magically have exactly the opposite impact, that solar and wind power are scams, that recycling is bad for the planet and that science and democracy have been taken over by idiot hippies that will kill us all because they stupidly hate fossil fuels for no reason.
That's a heavy price to pay.
If that impact includes support for some of the worst regimes on earth starting wars and undermining democracy then I think you'll find there's been a recent shift in public attitudes on this issue.
There are people with fossil fuels. They want to make money from their access to fossil fuels. They will strive to do so, and some of them will strive without concern for the collective good. I think those things are clear.
If fossil fuels are burned for energy, that contributes directly to climate change. If those fossil fuels are converted into plastics which are put in landfills, that directly contributes less to climate change. I hope that all of the above is uncontroversial.
Where I get confused is this:
Do you think that reducing demand for plastic will result in less fossil fuels being burned? Do you think that reducing demand for non-burning-uses of fossil fuels will result in so much less production of fossil fuels that the overall price of oil-for-burning will go up?
I'm no economist, but your claim is the exact opposite of how I thought it works. Can you explain?
I'm saying the money spent on noncombusted fossil fuels funds climate change denial just as much as the burned stuff does.
Is it the carbon that's the problem or the groups that have prevented a carbon fee being enacted for decades that is the problem?
The carbon. It's definitely the carbon. If we collectively stop having economic incentives to burn fossil fuels, the political side will sort itself out.
We could improve the economics either by having cheaper alternative energy supply like solar power, or more expensive demand like plastics, or imposing an externality like a policeman who comes and slaps you every time you burn 1 BTU of hydrocarbons.
But you think the 'politics' is easy once we have renewables or carbon fees imposed via legislation.
Let's all hope that none of those things became very political around 3 decades ago, because that would be bad. And then wed be in a weird catch-22 were we can only do the easy bits once we sort the politics out.
Nice.
Focusing on plastic bags and straws is such a transparent "something just be done: this is a thing: it must be done" response.
90% of the time, the plastic bag in question is filled with products packed in plastic[1] and half the time, the straw is stuck into a clear plastic cup to show off the frappuccino.
[1]: Fruit and veg aside, why am I expected to buy a new spray bottle for every half litre of kitchen cleaner, say? Why can't I just buy one bottle and spray and then some kind of refill?
There's a company (whose name escapes me at the moment) which appears to be aiming for exactly this and is advertising all over the streaming services I watch. Now, clearly their ads aren't doing their job since I can't remember the name, but it's out there.
More prosaically, I've been using the same Dawn dish soap bottle for months now because I bought a giant jug of dish soap at Costco and just refill the little one as needed. I assume it'll be less waste at the end... I just wish the big jug was made out of glass or aluminum instead of plastic.
If you search a lot harder, there are some other options. Like for cleaning sprays, there are dry refills that add no plastic and require adding your own liquid, like this one - https://meliorameansbetter.com/collections/homecleaning/prod... - there are others out there, but I've been pretty happy with this product.
However that's literally just a bar of soap unfortunately, and won't get things the kind of clean I want. I bought one sprayer of caustic bathroom cleaner because they have more resistant sprayer hardware to handle the bleach, and just refill it with cheap bleach or bleach cleaner. The best option would probably be buying bulk dry chlorine at a poll supply store
And it's not even an unreasonable position for those people. Making an enormous effort to just find a bottle of soap is not sustainable.
I always find it funny when they give me a huge plastic cup with a plastic lid and then a paper straw. If straws are that big of a problem, get sippy cup style lids and skip all straws.
Starbucks said that the new plastic lids were more easily recycled because they were larger than straws (which aren't normally picked up by recycling machines) so it was still a net positive. But this goes back to the articles point of "its plastic, and its probably not going to get recycled anyway"
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/23/starbucks-s...
Yeah, the straw is a prime example of bike-shedding.
So much talk and energy spent on something so unimportant.
Everybody can have an opinion about straws.
Worse it makes reasonable people argue against what is intended to be regulation to save the environment. Thus, fracturing what should otherwise be a strong public opinion that we can and must protect the environment.
While it is efficient as a manufacturing process, typical lifetime is lower than that of more durable material such as the metal or glass it replaces. The very qualities that make it a good manufacturing material makes it a poor(er) long-term use substitute.
It makes sense to use plastic capitalisticaly speaking, and in some cases it also makes sense to manufacture plastic as an affordable solution (I don't drill nearly enough to justify owning a metal), and the smelting process is far from better than manufacturing the equivalent plastic components.
But when manufacturing disposable garbage, as a species, factoring in the environmental cost, it is not efficient at all.
The example of straws is interesting cause the actual substitute to straws is the absence of a straw. No-one actually need a straw. It is a minor convenience with a ridiculous environmental cost.
- CO2 - Lifespan of materials - Ecological impact of material extraction/creation - Ecological impact of the materials themselves - Energy cost of transport/etc.
In this case, plastic is concerning because of the lifespan of the materials and the ecological impact of the materials - it may be energetically cheaper to produce & transport a plastic bag as opposed to a paper bag, but presumably the paper bag degrades faster and with fewer side effects.
Edit: no, I didn't read the article before I commented. I did now. I live in Sweden and put all our plastics in the recycle bin (one specifically for plastics). They are building better and bigger sorting and recycling facilities for plastic, but I think about 80% still is incinerated. Which of course releases greenhouse gases. But the plastic we throw away in a week corresponds to less CO2 than one trip back and fourth to work for my wife in our Prius.
Their main point is at the end:
> Banning plastic straws is stupid.
They're probably right that throwing out plastic straws is better than throwing them in the recycling, assuming that plastic straws can't be efficiently recycled. That being said, many US recycling utilities typically sort the recycling on shore, and plastics that are too small to be efficiently identified and recycled (such as straws and loose bottle caps) will just be sent to the landfill regardless. How recycling is processed differs a lot across the country, so it's hard to make generalizations.
But that doesn't support their final conclusion about whether plastic straws should be banned. The author doesn't give a reason, but implicitly that they think paper straws suck, and must suck. Which a lot of the ones today do. But it's an odd hill to die on, given that basically all straws before 1960 were made of paper. Their ire should probably be directed at the establishments they frequent for buying cheap and terrible paper straws instead of spending a bit more to get good quality paper straws. Such companies probably want to get you pissed off by paper straws to demand that your government remind the ban so they can go back to using cheaper plastic straws.
The fact that all pre-1960 straws were paper does not imply that paper straws, let alone paper straws today, do not suck.
People adjust - paper straws are servicable for most purposes, for things like bubble tea reusable straws are a reasonable investment (if you're having it often).
People adjusted because better materials came along. That’s the main reason governments were able to ban ivory: there was finally a viable alternative to piano keys and other everyday items made from ivory. Ironically, plastic was the wonder material that replaced ivory in many applications.
Few people remember what the pre-plastic world was like. It wasn’t better. It was hard to cheaply keep things sterile in hospial settings. Food spoiled faster without cheap, airtight storage containers. Everything was heavier or more flammable because wood, paper, or metal were the only comparable substitute materials.
Maybe we should be discussing how we discover the next wonder material that can make plastic obsolete instead of hand waving and saying “people will adjust” if we make it illegal to use and produce.
What purposes are "most purposes"? They don't work for shakes, they don't work for anything that takes more than a minute, etc.
Given a choice, people pick plastic straws. Who are you to say that plastic straws aren't better?
As another poster mentioned, this is with a plastic cup and lid (unfortunately).
People don't pick plastic straws - companies pick plastic straws and they stir up anti-environmental outrage to reinforce their fiscally based decision.
I think one-off examples of accidents are pretty unhelpful for discussions. Bamboo straws are also available alternatives and both those and disposable plastic straws can also cause fatal accidents - bubble tea straws in particular can easily break skin. There are also silicon straws available which might be the best option safety wise - even superior to plastic.
Metal straws don't noticeably increase the danger of drinking - but drinking while running or moving quickly is an action that can always increase the risk of accident - fatal or not.
Such incidents would increase dramatically if people started using metal straws more frequently: think auto accidents while people are drinking through a metal straw.
I, personally, have a metal straw since it looks pretty - but I don't use it all that often while walking... even while using disposable straws I generally didn't drink while walking.
If silicon straws are better, why don’t more people use them? I would posit that they’re not actually better, otherwise we’d see more widespread adoption.
> If silicon straws are better, why don’t more people use them? I would posit that they’re not actually better, otherwise we’d see more widespread adoption.
This is a very poor argument, it's essentially the same as an appeal to the natural "X is older than Y thus X must be better than Y" - in this thread we're discussing straw usage from an American perspective where disposable plastics is the norm - stating that disposable plastics should continue to be the norm because they're currently the norm isn't very interesting. It's similar to the argument that we should never have switched off of leaded gasoline since everyone was fine with using leaded gasoline.
It would apply to everyone if you got your ban on plastic straws. People would switch to straws that were stiffer and made from alternative materials, sometimes using metal ones. They would be at higher risk of suffering an injury because of a ban.
And you would be at risk, too, because I'm certain that as someone with an internet connection, you frequently ride in a car, or use public transportation, or utilize some other form of transit that goes faster than a walking pace. Those same risks apply to you in those situations if there's an accident and you're drinking through a metal straw.
"...disposable plastics should continue to be the norm because they're currently the norm..."
That is not the argument I made. It is a strawman you raised to avoid answering my question. You were promoting silicon straws as superior, and I raised the question that, if they are so superior, why haven't they supplanted plastic straws?
We got rid of leaded gasoline because it was incompatible with catalytic converters required for tailpipe emissions. It's arguable that we might still be using it if it weren't for the Clean Air regulations. Avgas still contains lead because unleaded fuel is hard on engines, and in applications that require critical reliability, such as aircraft engines, switching to unleaded is a risk we're not willing to accept from a regulatory standpoint.
And more to your point, the car enthusiasts I work with lament the days of leaded gas. They have restored classic cars from the 50's and 60's and they've had to modify their engines to work with unleaded gasoline.
Your desire to paint plastic straws or leaded gas as unalloyed evils is, quite simply, ignorant. Everything involves tradeoffs. Sometimes the tradeoff is pretty clear. But sometimes, it isn't. For you to pretend like it's a simple or easy thing to make the tradeoff choice for everyone on planet earth makes me think you're an idiotic little tyrant, to be quite frank.
You're suggesting people bring their own straws to bubble tea? That's very impractical.
A fair number of people carry around reusable coffee travel mugs and those are far more of a pain in terms of size and weight.
I'd clarify, I'm living in Canada so there might be some cultural differences here.
What do you do after you use it? Do you wash it after use or put it in your bag dirty to wash later? Not trying to argue but surprised people actually go through the trouble.
> A fair number of people carry around reusable coffee travel mugs
Yeah but that's usually in order to carry coffee they made at home. Not in case they decide to visit a coffee shop during the day.
I live in NYC and I'm not sure most people who are getting bubble tea knew they were going to get bubble tea when leaving their home.
Reusable bubble tea straws are also small enough that they'll easily fit in most purses - the length might be a bit too much for clutches but if your purse is big enough for a phone chances are the bubble tea straw will fit just fine.
1. Technically it's a bag of holding https://gadgetsin.com/the-bag-of-holding-messenger-bag.htm
Bubble tea is a 1-4 times a year thing for me. I prefer not to carry a bag.
carrying around a straw is less practical than just not having bubble tea.
Would be totally fine with an even higher(25cent) disposal fee. Makes no difference to the 4 times a year user, the frequent user gets a reusable straw.
It's not in any way/shape/form more practical to carry more things with me when the alternative is that someone hands me a disposable version of the thing at time of purchase.
Not everyone carries a bag with them -- and even if every single person on earth had a bag it'd STILL be more inconvenient for those people to waste cargo space in the bag with a straw when the alternative of being given a disposable one at time of purchase is available.
I feel like there is a misunderstanding of the word 'impractical' here.
Carrying your own straws is a lot of things -- wise, prepared, ethically-conscious, whatever -- it won't ever be practical ( practical : of or concerned with the actual doing or use of something rather than with theory and ideas. ) until the much more convenient option of being given a disposable straw at purchase time and trashing it at the end of use is no longer available to choose.
- It's deeper than most pockets, and can poke and potentially hurt you when bending over, so you pretty much need a bag (or use a shorter straw that will get lost in your drink).
- You need to somehow clean and dry it after use, and put it back in your bag
In our area, biodegradable plastic straws were already a popular option but the plastic ban included them.
I am yet to see one of these
> Lost and abandoned fishing gear which is deadly to marine life makes up the majority of large plastic pollution in the oceans
This is one of those statistics that shouldn't even pass the sniff test. Think about all of the millions of ways that humans use plastic across every single industry, job, and area of life. And yet somehow ghost gear is supposed to be greater than all of that put together?! Are fisheries just dumping a hundred nets in the ocean for every one they use or something? The number makes no sense.
And, indeed, the report in question says no such thing. What it does say is:
"12 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year" and "640,000 tonnes of ghost gear enters the ocean every year". So that means ghost gear is only around 5% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean per year. In fact the report itself states that "Ghost gear is estimated to make up 10% of the plastic waste in our oceans".
Of course, that's not alarming enough, so it also goes on to state that "[ghost gear] represents a much higher proportion of large plastics found floating at the surface" and "over 85% of the rubbish on the seafloor on seamounts and ocean ridges, and in the Great Pacific Gyre."
That sounds bad but... it should come as no surprise. Most plastic that ends up in the ocean is trash. Land-based trash plastic that is large or heavy enough to sink is less likely to flow down rivers and end up in the middle of the ocean. It will get broken up by trash processing, sink to the bottom of rivers, or otherwise not make it all the way to the ocean intact. So of course you'll see a disproportionate amount of ghost gear when you look on the seafloor or at large items—ghost gear is large plastic that is deliberately designed to sink in seawater and then is deliberately dragged out into the middle of the ocean and thrown overboard.
If your primary goal is to save animals, then Greenpeace's focus on ghost gear makes sense. But if your goal is to reduce the overall amount of plastic ending up in the ocean (which also saves animals), then ghost gear is only a relatively small fraction of the problem.
It states "Over three-quarters of the GPGP mass was carried by debris larger than 5 cm and at least 46% was comprised of fishing nets."
There's still a difference between "quantity dumped per year" and "total amount measured right now". It seems like ghost gear is not a large fraction of the plastic entering the ocean, but it a large fraction of the accumulated large pieces in the garbage patch. I presume that's because fishing gear is designed to survive in the ocean so takes longer to break down than other plastics.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/marinedebris/plastics-...
Similarly, fishing gear is specifically produced to lure, trap, catch, and ultimately kill marine life. One abandoned fishing net could be much more deadly than 10x of the same plastic by weight in the form of plastic straws, spoons, and cups.
I don't know if it's indeed so, but I can easily see why it could be so.
More companies could go in the direction Starbucks has gone, switching their iced drink cups to "sippy cup" lids to eliminate the need for straws while maintaining a lid all together. But that begs the question, is the sippy cup top more plastic than just a straw and the old lid?
Or why not just use the compostable plastic straws that are readily available rather than trying so hard to make your company look "green" by saving the turtles from straws that never end up in the ocean in the first place.
Seriously, fuck paper straws. They're up there with coke freestyle machines. Absolute trash.
I too, hate the paper straws. They are terrible. The "no straws" campaign is just a feel good thing and really does little.
Sadly, I've only seen the Pepsi equivalent once or twice and didn't get to try it.
I clicked on the link specifically because I thought it might be about straws themselves. I agree straws don’t sound that interesting but I don’t really know much about them and for all I know there’s something interesting about their manufacture, perhaps the difference in sizes, or something else.
OTOH I am already well aware of plastic pollution problem and straws’ relative place in it (both perceived and real).
Very interesting points they are raising. I reached out to https://recyclebc.ca to find out more about my local recycling org but from what I can find on their website almost all of the end product ends up in BC, Canada or at least North America. Same for the processing which seems to be local. I'll update with what I can find out and correct me if I'm wrong but those people saying everything gets shipped to Asia and dumped into the ocean aren't right, at least not universally. Here in BC at least that doesn't seem to be the case at all. If that's the case I'd really like to know why other places in first world countries aren't doing the same and I'd definitely consider the US a first world country.
Of course, it's all bike shedding anyhow. The real problems are big and complex and overwhelming, so we argue about straws instead.
A message not touched on is reducing the amount of plastic that we produce and consume should be a goal, but with attention paid to the secondary effects. For example, if you don’t wrap those peppers in plastic they’ll spoil and that may be worse for the planet than shrink wrap. But what if you cover them in edible wax instead? Whats the footprint of each decision?
Sometimes plastic will win out and other times we are being wasteful. In SE Asia, when you buy a single drink from the convenience store, it comes within a plastic bag, and you always get a straw. A plastic bag and plastic straw for a drink in a plastic bottle.
"states that ban plastic straws" generally use something biodegradable instead.
The policy, IMO, is pretty simple to figure out. The reason plastic is used everywhere is because plastic is uber cheap. Those peppers are wrapped in plastic because it adds less than a penny per unit and gives them a much better shelf life.
So, the simple solution isn't an outright ban of plastics, but rather a plastic tax. And what's the easiest way to impose that? Via a fossil fuel oil tax.
This would allow companies producing these products to evaluate their individual cost benefits of wrapping everything in plastic.
The rub is, this would have to be a global tax. Otherwise, we'll just be outsourcing our pollution problems. You'd also have to increase shipping taxes to a point where local manufacturing is the better financial option so bad actor companies don't simply manufacture in a nation with no oil tax.
Unfortunately, I think anything else is just posturing that will fall short. If businesses don't feel a squeeze, they won't change behavior. And the only squeeze they feel is financial.
No, please don't go that fundamentalist route. The "all or nothing" approach won't lead us anywhere. Steady meaningful steps is the key. Build awareness, tackle one problem at a time, improve one aspect at a time, and you'll be able to bring people with you, allow them to adjust, business to be created, etc.
You can't be perfect over night. If you try, it won't happen, not today, not tomorrow, and not 10 or 30 years from now. If you do it steadily step-by-step, you'll at least have a chance.
Meaningless things are things like banning plastic straws, awareness things, or even to a large extent funding day long excursions to the beach to pick up trash. Those are things more similar to urinating into a hurricane.
It's not a fundamentalist thing. Rather, it's an Amdahl's law thing. The politically and socially popular actions have almost no real effect on climate change or waste production. The problem is we are mad at the wrong people. We blame individuals for waste when the amount of waste an individual produces is a TINY fraction of the waste generated by corporations. Further, a lot of that waste for a citizen is unavoidable. I can't help the fact that every item of food I eat has been wrapped in plastic, bundled in plastic, and then is shipped from halfway across the global only for the grocery store or restaurant to unceremoniously throw away that plastic garbage.
Frankly, we won't reduce our climate impact through good feeling programs and broken corporate promises. We NEED laws that impose monetary losses on businesses for waste production to change anything.
"[...] zero plastic thrown in a garbage can in the United States enters the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre", in bold letters.
But then later in the article, it admits that about 50% of US plastics (it is unclear whether is all of them or only the ones meant to be recycled) were shipped "to Indonesia and Vietnam, which proceeded to improperly dump over 80% of it."
So, it does go into the ocean in the end, whether the fault of the US or any other country, the point is that your plastic straw has a big chance of finding its way to the sea.
IF you put it in a recycling bin. Here is a quick breakdown:
- Black bin (trash): Goes to a landfill where it is regulated by the EPA and stored in containment and the off-gas is harvested for energy
- Blue bin (recycling): Gets shipped by boat across an ocean to a third world country where it is dumped because that is the most profitable thing to do and it is no longer subject to regulatory oversight that it actually gets recycled
Trash goes into what is called, waste transfer stations, see [1], where there's an effort to salvage recyclables from regular trash as well, what you do with the black/blue bins is basically helping them do their work (and this is good).
Let's say then, that all this plastic goes into the "plastic that could be recycled" bin, of which we actually DO recycle 3.1 million tons of it (as stated in the article) out of 35.7 million tons (total).
But then it goes to say "We used to send half of this to China until they banned it [...]", and it is not clear either this is half of the recycled chunk, or the total amount of plastic that gets thrown away. It wouldn't make sense for it to be the recycled chunk, as ... we are recycling it, right? But then, it could, maybe, as it could be sent to those countries for "recycling" and they then "improperly dump it" (as also stated in the article).
1: https://www.dumpsters.com/blog/waste-management-transfer-sta...
The idea that we would not ban that and instead ban drinking straws because of that is even more absurd than the nonsense that I thought was in play.
This is a very metropolitan thing and not the norm. Waste Management in San Francisco for example has spent a ton of money on fancy machines and people to hand sort.
:(
> Locally: You must reduce the amount of plastic shipped overseas by putting it in the regular garbage instead of the recycle bin.
The premise is that recycling creates pollution but landfills do not.
The author is saying that you should put plastics in the garbage rather than in the recycling.
recycling can -> overseas countries -> ocean
They already have silverware and a whole process for cleaning it and whatnot. Why not just also invest in metal straws and re-use ? It seems like it would be cheaper than even plastic straws long term. And of course less waste.
Given that most restaurants that go through a lot of straws want to provide the option for takeout anyway (for which you can't use metal straws), it makes sense that most restaurants don't bother.
Problem was: they're expensive and people steal them!
It 'solves' a tiny non-problem (US based plastic straw disposal) while actively damaging the bigger cause.
Apparently America can't recycle and the solution to that is to just give up? If Americans can't be trusted to recycle then I have no faith in them regulating landfills or any basic government function that doesn't involve blowing people up.
Maybe they should try recycling? Like actually doing it? Not intentionally messing it up like a grumpy teenager trying to get out of doing chores?
We should try to use more easily recyclable materials (steel, aluminium?) for some stuff we made of plastic now (bottles? car parts? ... ) but it cost a lot more. Try to compary stainless steel straw and plastic straw :-(
I suppose if they ever went to paper straws where I live, i would just have to order a personal metal reusable straw.
I suppose that's the sound of the system working.
Certainly I note use fewer plastic bags since they started charging for them, though I have also thrown away quite a few broken, much, much thicker, bags and bought a lot more small bin bags since then.
But neither the straw or bag are anywhere near a major contributor to plastic use, though I can see plastic bags certainly were a major litter source and are much less often found in hedges now.
I prefer liquid drinks without a straw, but I find that most of my friends and family prefer straws. And not paper straws. Don't know a single person who likes paper straws.
My wife works for Starbucks and when they were pushing the sippy lids, many customers would ask for straws to go with the sippy cup lid.
What do they end up containing in the long run, after all the other material has been eaten or biodegraded? If we come back to a landfill site in two hundred years time is it going to contain a particular type of mineral? Will it just be trash still?
On what kinds of timescales does it metamorphose significantly, and into what kinds of material?
It sounds crazy, but could it be that trash in the ocean is actually a better option?
I don't know where we stand better chance of getting a plastic consuming bacteria. (Do we even want that?) But the rate of natural decomposition of plastic on the ocean or underground is probably similar.
If you live elsewhere, you should do this analysis yourself. I live in the UK, which apparently exports plastics to Turkey, Netherlands, and a bunch of other countries. So I guess it’s fine to recycle here?
But we also live so close to the coast that straws and any other litter in the wrong places can easily wash into storm sewers then eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
I believe the OP meant plastic straws. I live in Poland and haven't seen plastic straw in a while - all replaced by paper and other natural material straws. I don't feel it's stupid, but I might be missing something.
It's also a surprise to me that US uses recycle bins to just ship the contents overseas. How stupid that is? Why not actually recycle it?
Why? We don't have them anymore in germany. People move on and new solutions get invented.
Seeing a plastic straw is weird to me.
Even more reason to use plastic straws. If there is one country I don't want the US to follow, that's germany.
> People move on and new solutions get invented.
Like toxic paper straws?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241276
> Seeing a plastic straw is weird to me.
What's weird about them?
Yeah, it'd suck if the US had higher life expectancy, more political stability, better civil rights, better healthcare, lower unemployment, lower inflation, lower crime.....
What a nightmare scenario!
As for inflation...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/economy/german-inflation-indu...
The united states is a continental nation with infinite resources. Germany is a tiny european country the size of new mexico. Good luck to germany. They are going to need it.
Funny how we are so much worse than germany and yet most people around the world wants to move to the US?
"The U.S. continues to be the most desired destination country for potential migrants, as it has since Gallup started tracking these patterns a decade ago. One in five potential migrants (21%) -- or about 147 million adults worldwide -- name the U.S. as their desired future residence. Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and Saudi Arabia appeal to at least 25 million adults each."
https://news.gallup.com/poll/211883/number-potential-migrant...
Without imports the US doesn't even have enough resources to sustain its own lifestyle. The only infinite resource they seem to have is ignorance.
https://www.google.com/maps/@14.5674227,121.0375559,3a,90y,7...
[1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5806619/Manila...
There are plenty of (older?) pictures of it covered in plastic online. I don't think there's any reason to doubt the author's picture.
What would this look like? I'm guessing it's more than just giving them a fleet of trucks and landfill equipment.
A plastic jar is going to weigh like 10% of what a glass jar the same size weighs and it won't shatter if you drop it. That's a pretty big advantage when you're shipping a tractor trailer full of jars of spaghetti sauce or something.
That's just not true. All plastic eventually ends up in the ocean. The "it's all decomposed in 50 years" is a myth.
There was a pretty convincing article about all of that here on HN a while back.
Plastics are not evil creatures that grow legs and night and burrow out looking for the closest body of water.