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Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

The first example I saw (think the order might be randomized?) was an EU ban on plastic straws, which is silly. Straws are a negligible fraction of plastic waste, and have no good substitute ("compostable" plastic straws are also banned; paper straws fall apart easily; metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing). This would flunk any serious cost/benefit analysis. You can hide the costs by making them regulatory instead of financial (the inconvenience of not having plastic straws doesn't appear in GDP stats), but the costs are still there, they're just hidden.

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Pets remove plastic and instead poison ourselves.

  A 2023 Belgian study[0] tested 39 brands of straws (paper, bamboo, glass, stainless steel, and plastic):

  Paper and bamboo straws most frequently contained PFAS, sometimes at high levels.

  Plastic straws also contained PFAS, but less consistently.

  Stainless steel straws were PFAS-free in that study.

[0]https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-00268...

I once drunk from a pasta straw, that should also be PFAS free. Though hot liquids might cook the pasta.

That was the first one for me as well and I was surprised they included it. I have never seen a disposable straw that does the job well, except for plastic. I actively avoid restaurants that use the cardboard straws because of it. That's how bad they suck. I can't believe the EU was foolish enough to ban plastic straws when there just isn't an actual viable alternative.

Quality of non plastic straws has improved dramatically, I don't even notice they are not plastic anymore. Unless you are sucking on a drink for hours they don't disintegrate.

> has improved dramatically

They are not covered with PFAS anymore?

Dramatically as in their ability of not melting while drinking.

enjoy the paper straw coated in tasty PFAS i guess? As far as i can tell that’s the norm…

i avoid straws altogether.

The actual text is "Bans the worst beach‑litter plastics (straws, cutlery, sticks) and cuts pollution" and the tooltip says "Targets the most littered plastic items with bans, design and collection rules, and extended producer responsibility to clean up coasts and waterways."

I looked a bit further, it bans a long list of plastic single-use stuff: plates, cutlery, certain food containers, certain cups, and a bunch of other things. It also regulates some labelling for other single-use products.

It claims that "80 to 85% of marine litter, measured as beach litter counts, is plastic, with single-use plastic items representing 50% and fishing-related items representing 27%".

Saying it's just a "plastic straw ban is" ... eh, well, a straw man. And single-use plastics are a substantial source of litter/pollution (I didn't investigate the accuracy of this claim in-depth).

In conclusion, this seems about as accurate and good faith as the ol' "EU bendy banana myth".

How exactly (and if) do plastic straws from the EU end up in the Pacific Ocean, though? Maybe they could have started with that

You might as well ask how microplastics get into fresh snow in Antarctica - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61739159

Because people litter them and it ends up in the ocean? And it is based on research, as I quoted in my previous post.

My entire point it's not just about plastic straws. I don't know why you need to reduce this to just plastic straws.

Obviously I implicitly meant all single use plastics. But random people littering is not even remotely the main source.

Poor and unregulated waste management is. Of course the fact that a lot of western countries were and still are exporting their plastic waste to poorer countries where they somehow end up in rivers and oceans.

However there is no inherent reason why plastic straws or anything else inherently have to be dumped into oceans.

Of course silly token measures are much easier than actually regulating the global fishing industry..

> Obviously I implicitly meant all single use plastics.

On a thread that is about someone misrepresenting a single-use plastic ban as a "plastic straw ban", this is very much not obvious at all.

As for the rest: if there is no plastic, then there is nothing to "waste manage". Or at least less, and mismanaged waste actually breaks down in a reasonable timeframe. It's been an issue for decades. Everyone knows about it. Nothing really changed.

You missed his point. People have measured this. Basically all plastic waste in the oceans come from Asia. This was true before these EU regulations and is also true of America where such bans don't exist.

It's a good example of why EU regulation sucks. It sounds like it solves a problem until you learn anything about the problem. Then it becomes clear it's all cost and no benefit.

The reason the EU passes all these rules is nothing to do with the actual problems themselves. It's because they think that by doing this they can forge a pan-European equivalent of the USA that reduces the existing nations to mere historical geographic regions. It seems to be some kind of simplistic idea that if most laws are written by the EU, and it has a flag, then it is a nation that can rival the US. If you believe that then to make it happen you have to pass a lot of laws.

Giving paper straws at coffee shops should be criminalised

Drinking coffee from a straw too

> metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing

Boohoo. Don't use a straw then. Out of the billions of beverages consumed during the last 24 hours, it's a given that >95% were consumed without one.

It's also of course an entirely arbitrary line to draw. Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?

> Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?

Funnily enough, there are contingents of people who exclusively use paper plates and plastic cutlery. I think there's an interesting parallel there. Those kinds of people simply do not want the effort and cost of maintenance. I'm not particularly sympathetic to this mindset in either case, but still.

In part, the rest of society subsidises the price of cheap disposable items by paying for their disposal and clean-up. I'd much rather that the manufacturers were made to bear that cost, though I doubt that would be practical in a global market. Probably the easiest way to implement it would be to add a cleanup charge to the price of those items (e.g. like VAT).

On a related note, I'd want any branded litter (e.g. McDonalds cartons) to be charged back to the company - it should be their responsibility to deal with the rubbish they produce and they can easily add a small charge to each order.

The Germany municipality of Tübingen implemented a "Verpackungssteuer" (tax on single-use packaging, utensils). It was fought by the local McDonald's franchisee up to the highest relevant court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) and finally approved.

Dozens of other German municipalities were just waiting for the final decision to implement their own local tax.

> It's also of course an entirely arbitrary line to draw

Banning straws is the "entirely arbitrary line to draw." Why not banning paper plates as well? Plastic bowls too?

They are banned. There is no law that bans just the straws.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/904/oj

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