Hacker News Reader

The plastic straw thing confuses me. I'd like someone to explain to me how anything besides the random runaway straw gets into the ocean. I live 60 miles from the ocean. We're people throwing them into storm drains that flow to the delta that flow to the ocean? We're people in San Francisco traveling to the beach and throwing them into the ocean? Couldn't we focus on not littering instead of legislating things like straws?

View on HN

Plastic trash is mostly from a few sources in Asia. China and Indonesia iirc.

we literally ship our trash to china to "recycle" it (now china wont take our trash anymore). Turns out they were often just dumping it in the ocean. Now other countries do the same. It doesn't show in american metrics, because the other countries help us to be blissfully ignorant.

Maybe that should have been the public message we focused on, the actual dumping of trash into the ocean by foreign countries, and us sending it there when we supposedly recycle, instead of "little girl convinces law makers to go to paper straws!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com