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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

This is like the moronic replacement of plastic straws in Ontario.

The paper straws work for many drinks but for some, like Iced Capps, they disintegrate half way through the beverage.

The frustration is that they’re making life stupider in order to harness a drop in the bucket of change. Go clean up the fishing industry’s colossal waste first.

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When I lived in Northern California, I used to volunteer for beach cleanup every few weekends. Over a couple of hours, I would personally pick up 5-20 pounds of trash along the beach. The most numerous types of trash were: hundreds of candy wrappers, dozens of cigarette butts, and dozens and dozens of plastic straws. Most of the straws were from fast food restaurants, but a lot were from people eating food at the beach then throwing away the straws. It's kinda disgusting.

The next time you visit a beach in Northern California and gaze at the powerful waves of the Pacific crashing into the clean, sandy beach, realize that it's an illusion. The beach is basically a garage dump. It only looks pristine because dozens of volunteers pick up hundreds of plastic straws from the beach, every weekend.

Sure. I’m not saying it’s not a problem. Just that it’s a fraction of a percent of the big picture problem.

Naturally they make us domestics sacrifice before any industry needs to evolve a little.

Sure they soften a bit, but I've never had significant issues with cardboard straws. Plastic straws are awful in terms of trash, and disposable plastic bags need to go away too.

It’s funny because while I LOVE cloth bags because they’re just better UX, you need to use them like 1500 times to break even emissions wise.

generally the idea is to do tiny things that people hate so they a) feel like something is being done and b) don't actually impact industry or make people want to do more to impact industry

that's because we're not allowed to actually impede wealth accumulation

It's kinda genius because then when the regulations are proposed that would actually make an impact in the industry, the company leaders can be like "see? This is just virtue signalling like those awful paper straws! And we'll have to pass the costs on to you, our customers! You don't want that, right?"

why do we even need straws in the first place? just stop bothering with them at all

Straws exist for car users convenience mostly. The other main case is thick drinks like smoothies and thick shakes. Which ironically are the only drinks that paper straws don’t work for.

I need straws for many cases, but honestly I agree. I rarely see people do what I do which is take the lid off and just drink it like you’re at a restaurant. There’s something about it that makes most beverages nicer.

And the fact 95% of all plastic ocean waste comes from 10 rivers, 8 of which are in Africa.

I think you're specifically referring to plastic waste in the ocean. This number is not at all accurate in terms of total plastic waste (including landfills, etc.).

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