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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Why is the world so obsesed with plastic straws? Are those really the most polluting item right now? Why do we not focus rather on plastic bottles for eg. soft drinks, which are the only option in many markets? Or useless double and triple packaging? Even the term "carbon footprint" is used to shift focus from "big oil" to "average joe" [0]... how many years of plastic straws is equivalent to eg. deepwater horizon oil spil?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

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Virtue signaling only works if people can see you do it. So if you're a restaurant, how many noticeable things can you do to demonstrate you care about the environment without actually changing your business model, profits, or unit economics?

togo packaging:

Plastic Bags,

Plastic(-lined) Cups/Lids,

Plastic containers,

But uhh, also, we should totally charge companies the cost to clean up the waste they produce.

Or a soda... in a plastic bottle... with a plastic label... wrapped in a plastic "sixpack"... on a plastic pallet, wrapped in plastic wrap.

Isn't the point of plastic pallets that they're more durable/reusable than wood?

Well yeah, but even if they're 5 times as durable, dumping 5 wooden pallets into a forrest is a lot better than one plastic one.

Plus all the plastic inside plastic inside plastic coverd in plastic carried on that pallet.

What is the value of projecting our collective oil dependence onto the companies that provide it? Pretending it's somehow oil companies fault while not making any personal changes is delusional.

I think focusing on straws is stupid, but so is pretending that but for oil companies we'd have no problems

Sub out “oil” for “tobacco” in your comment for a moment.

Our personal choice is to use fuel, because we need energy, BPs personal (well, corporate) incompetence was at fault for the totally useless (nothing good, no heat, no transport, no plastics, just damage to our environment) oil spill in 2010.

So, we, a collective of millions and billions of people are being put on pedestal for using straws (if we do, many of us don't), while one incompetent company (people there) offsets the efforts of literally millions of people.

I'm not trying to excuse oil spills, but I think it's dodging responsibility to base our whole lives around drilling a dirty fuel out of the ground and then blame only the company when these happen. Using oil entails some risk that it's going to contaminate the environment, and we are collectively responsible.

Responsibly isn't equally weighted. Regulatory capture and decades of insidious 'education' and advertising also tip the scales.

The solution is collective though. Externalities cannot be ignored forever, even if the short sighted grifters die before the world is an uninhabitable waste.

And we don't even need straws. You can just drink from the rim of the glass at a sit down restaurant like you do at home, or a to-go drink could have a sippy lid like a coffee.

I can't be the only person that just does this when the drink comes with a paper straw.

Unfortunately, as soon as they hand out the straw, it doesn't matter if you use it or not, it's going into the trash. So often the wrapper gets wet while it's sitting on the table and they just discard every paper product left on the table.

Milk shakes, boba tea, thick smoothies, and similar drinks are all awful to consume without a straw. If an establishment insists on me using a paper straw with them, I'd rather just not order them.

"Awful"? Isn't that a bit of an overstatement? Also, I get a milkshake maybe two times a year. Doesn't warrant every other drink normalizing on straw usage.

You don't need plastic bottles either... you can use glass ones... and a lot more plastic bottles are produced and thrown away than plastic straws... and they usually come with plastic labels, wrapped in plastic 6packs, on a pallet, wrapped in plastic wrap.

You could easily replace that with a glass bottle in a reusable plastic crate.

I've seen quite a few videos of flood waters carrying waste down some random (usually asian or african) rivers... didn't see a lot of straws there.

I think they were just seen as low hanging fruit since you can usually do without straws entirely but then eliminating plastic straws got hijacked as a way of selling alternate straws.

So basically it's like most other attempts to make stuff more environmentally friendly in the US.

ESG browny points is probably a key component of that. It's dangerous to let politicians decide what is considered green. There has to be a quantifiably measurable way the impact on the environment from any single product is judged. If there isn't a clear way to do so then we should refrain from blanket banning a product.

Fun fact Tesla has the lowest ESG rating out of all of the auto companies listed https://www.indexologyblog.com/2021/05/25/update-teslas-stan....

It's interesting to see Tesla a company that spearheaded EVs ranked lower than Exxon, GM and Nike on "Environmental Social Governance".

Nike which is one of the top ESG rated companies makes luxury shoes in sweatshops by people with almost no rights as close to slavery as one can get. Telsa on the other hand pays people fair wages and does not use forced labor is less environmentally and socially responsible.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/17/your-favo...

Because they are so utterly pointless. Plastic straws are a symbol of an almost entirely unnecessary use of plastic.

And that symbolism — as seems to be the case with just about anything with any semblance of symbolic value nowadays — has become politicized and polarized, which in turn has further elevated straws' symbolic value for both sides (there's a "straw man argument" pun here somewhere).

The right is obsessed with how the left is trying to control even the most trivial aspects of everyone's lives, and the left is obsessed with how the right would rather selfishly spew plastic into the environment than to give up even the most trivial conveniences.

This feels like a tension that can exist only in the Twitterverse. I really can't imagine pre-internet society actually having strong opinions about any of this.

So is double packaging (eg plastic bottles wrapped in plastic to form a "sixpack", on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic, so plastic within a plastic within a plastic, prepackaged bananas, double packed cosmetics, toothpaste in plastic covered cardboard boxes, etc.), and it contributes a lot more (by weight of trash) than straws.

But we have basically zero impact on the first, and drinks in a plastic bottle are sometimes literally the only choice, and no politician dares mention cocacola and walmart, but we all get blamed for straws that we maybe use twice a year... in mcdonalds.

Straws are essential for drinks served with ice, in particular cocktails.

Definitely not "essential" for cold drinks

Since the ice cubes float on top, your nose and upper lip tends to bump into them otherwise. Maybe there’s some clever drinking glass design that could avoid that.

large ice cubes that are actually square solve this problem pretty well.

Huh, not in my experience.

Nose? It's perfectly possible to drink anything without getting your nose wet.

you can drink through a cocktail straw if you really want to, but they are intended for you to stir the drink to your preferred level of dilution. this is more like the least essential use of a straw. a small wooden stick would work just as well.

reusable glass / metal (or even durable plastic) are available. I use them at home all the time. I wouldn't mind them at a restaurant either, I mean we use glasses and dishes that are washed with every use when eating our why not straws?

A drink is far less likely to spill if you use a straw.

Yet somehow many of us manage to go about life without ever using a straw or spilling anything.

It's really not that hard...

Being able to be less careful, or be a less coordinated person, and yet not spill, has utility.

Not at the expense of manufacturing, consuming and disposing of plastic (or PFAS...)

I was responding to zukzuk's argument, that straws have no utility.

It is a small thing, though I do get annoyed when going to a restaurant that they just automatically throw down straws for every drink. They don’t even make them something you can request, if needed. The assumption is that they are wanted. Once they are on the table they won’t take them back. I’ve tried to express this to the servers, but they just look at me like I’m a weirdo and then next time I go there they do the same thing again.

We probably don’t need bans. Just get the restaurants to only provide straws upon request.

> Why is the world so obsesed with plastic straws?

The world? It's just the media and virtue signalers who are obsessed. Far less than 1% of the population. Sadly, these people control the megaphone and makes it seem like "the world" is concerned.

> [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

Hilarious. The virtue signalers' manifesto - "Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception."

> "Citizens see themselves as part of civil society, as actors in the political system"

Actors. Don't they just follow direction? Sounds about right.

> "I have 100% clean electricity at home because people organized to make that option and the solar and wind power behind it available."

And I can guarantee that her "clean electricity" mostly comes from burning biomass, natural gas, etc. I'd bet all my upvotes on that.

> I do some of my errands by bicycle because the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition worked for decades to put bicycle paths across the city and otherwise make it safer to get about on two wheels.

Just some? Why not all of the errands?

> That vegan options are available at a lot of fast-food chains is because enough consumers have created a profitable market for them.

Vegan options exist because wealthy industrialists want to feed people processed slop instead of actual food. The people aren't hankering for some in/anti-human diet. Billionaire industrialists who want to make more money by creating a new industry paid PR firms to push veganism to dull minds. Just like tobacco companies supported "women's equality" a century ago to breakdown the taboo on female smoking and sell more cigarettes.

The author of that article is why we have paper straws. The problem with virtue signaling is that the ends are the pseudo-virtue, not actual good. A virtue signalers feels good because he gave a bum $100, even though the bum used the $100 to buy drugs and kill himself.

The author of the article virtue signals even though she produces more carbon pollution than 99.99999999999999999% of the human population. Think about that.

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