And that is entirely a question of waste management.
The plastic straw that the EU just outlawed would never have ended up in the ocean. Meanwhile, plastic gets dumped into rivers by the truckloads - outside the EU.
The EU didn’t outlaw “plastic straws”, it outlawed a range of things, one of which is the plastic straw. But then why do plastic straws always come up? Because this is also in response to a video of a turtle in pain with a plastic straw up its nose (so yes it did end up in the ocean).
And creating less single use products is a step of waste management by the way. Now I’m not particularly in favour of paper straws, but bamboo straws have taken off as a replacement and that’s a rather good thing I would say.
But again this is only about straws because you made it about straws. The same applies to many other single use plastics.
It was a European plastic straw? Was there an address on it, or how can you tell?
The point the person you responded to was making wasn't about plastic straws, but rather about the fact that European trash almost never lands in the ocean: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
And as a parent, I can assure you that I get reminded of this on a weekly basis.
We should ban more single-use non biodegradable plastic.
I like the single use biodegradable plastic bag for example, where I can have the organic compost inside, so less mess everywhere.
Those should be standard. But currently they are way more expensive. Standard plastic from oil is cheap.
Why not, you know, paper?
And this type of plastic does not. After some months it will, but that is the idea.
Not missed the old plastic straws apart from when at a burger joint that gives you the useless paper ones. The bagasse and PLA straws do not disintegrate as quickly and work as well as the old ones.
Whether they are actually more environmentally friendly is another discussion.
How would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast this morning?
A significant amount of plastic straws and bottle caps actually did up at least in the rivers - a single look at how the Isar in Munich looks after a party summer night is enough evidence - and what enters the Isar, Danube or any other river will eventually end up in the ocean or get stuck in a major lake where it degrades, gets eaten by fish and then ends up in humans when we eat the fish.
Metal bottle caps can at least be fished out by magnets and recycled, but there's no way to capture plastic particles yet.
And that does not take into account all the plastics trash that gets shipped overseas to some piss poor Asian or African country, where it gets sorted, and all the refuse just gets dumped on some landfill where it eventually gets washed into the ocean by rainfall, or it gets incinerated where it creates absurdly toxic combustion products.