Yes, the US is a country that cannot process its own waste so it ships it overseas just to be rid of it. The solution is not to raise money and send it to the Philippines to build landfills. The solution is to actually recycle plastic, build circular supply chains, and use biodegradable materials as much as possible.
If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place.
The author is recommending a half measure based on the assumption that the US cannot fix its own problems. They are also implying a false equivalency: banning single use plastics is not the same as recycling plastic. A more equivalent comparison might be the tradeoffs between plastic bottles for soda, water, or oils and glass or metal containers. It is also true that plastic straws are a much smaller problem then other usages of plastic such as bottles or event fishing gear and even bags.
Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with reducing plastic usage. Doing so is smart and will be important for the health and well being of future generations -- human and nonhuman -- of life on earth.
> The solution is to actually recycle plastic, build circular supply chains, and use biodegradable materials as much as possible.
This assumes that:
(1) Plastic can actually be recycled. Unlike a lot of other materials, it degrades rather substantially every time you try, and plastic quality coming out of recycling isn't generally uniform enough to make anything more than the big, chunky "recycled plastic toys and benches" you'll occasionally see. More and more, it's evident that "plastic recycling" is a myth mostly funded by plastic producers and crew, who wish to have it be seen as "not the terror it actually is." Hard on profits, you know, if people don't like your product. The Guardian has done some great work on the truths behind plastic recycling, and they're not pretty. That's before you get into the biological impacts of microplastics on "literally everything on the planet that's alive."
And, (2) that "biodegradable materials" actually do that in realistic end of life conditions. They don't. People date landfill digs by reading the headlines on the newspapers that are "slightly yellowed compared to when they were buried."
Treating plastic as the life-toxic sludge it is would be a far better start. At least with metal recycling, we know it's actually being put back into a smelter for recycling, and that it uses far less energy than the original materials (though "pure circular" with most metals is still a problem as they just dilute the various alloys down with virgin metal enough to make the additives not a problem in current systems).
"Oh, it's fine, it's recycled!" leads to far more plastic use than "No, we literally can't do anything with it, the best we can do is go burn it to offset coal use" (which is what my local area does with plastic, as it seems to have the best impact for the least cost, and the burn temperature is probably hot enough to decompose all the nasties...).
Probably the only realistic way to 'recycle' plastic is to follow something like the fungal approach to 'recycling' durable woody materials, i.e. cellolose and lignin - the slowly break them down all the way to CO2, extracting whatever energy is available along the way. This is why we get a late-season pulse of CO2 in the fall, as fungi do their work, in the northern hemisphere. Under normal steady state conditions, growing plants then uptake that released CO2 in the spring, accounting for the sawtooth pattern in the northern hemisphere Keeling Curve.
On the other hand, making plastics from biomass carbon sources or from direct air capture and burying the material in landfills permanently is actually a form of permanent carbon storage.
It's probably just best to reduce plastic use as much as possible.
> "It's probably just best to reduce plastic use as much as possible."
It's unfortunate that the US still apparently used plastic straws in 2021. Here in the UK they have been phased out over the past few years, with an official ban since October 2020. It seems the same in other European countries from what I've seen.
Once, a couple of years ago, I had a job at chemical company. They produced additives, stuff you add to, e.g., plastics to improve certain characteristics. One thing they experimented with was additives that helped to break down plastics into molecules you also find naturally. In my best layman's term, below micro-plastics and something that is found in the environment anyway and will just become part of the natural cycle. In tests, they managed to achieve that (based on legal limits for plastics in soil samples, within a year in the ground. meaning, any plastic concentrations dropped below legal limits and detectability. Quite nice. Not sure what happened to that, being a new product it wasn't cheap to produce (yet). Not sure if it was even suitable for most use cases.
Well, at that point, you could use the CO2 to make more plastic rather than releasing it to the atmosphere. My point was, this is how nature recycles biomass every year. Plastics are currently manufactered from natural gas feedstocks; you could make plastic from CO2 just like trees make lignin from C02.
Then, if you buried that plastic (made from atmospheric CO2) in a landfill after use, that would plausibly be removing CO2 from the atmosphere, not adding it. Assuming it doesn't break down in the landfill and leak out as methane or something.
But plastics are not made from atmospheric CO2, they are made from fossil hydrocarbons.
That's the whole point: the one saving grace of plastics is that they maintain the sequestration of fossilized CO2. If you let them decompose all the way back to CO2 then you have eliminated that last remaining benefit.
That's true, but it misses the point rather badly. A big reason that CO2 is a problem is that it is very stable. Getting it out of the atmosphere at scale requires vast amounts of energy. So if your goal is to reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2 (and if it's not then you've essentially given up on the future of civilization) it is much better not to let the carbon get into the atmosphere in the first place. Carbon in plastic is already sequestered. Dumping it back into the atmosphere is not progress.
That’s perfectly reasonable in the short term. Long term however we don’t want to endlessly extract CO2 either, so eventually we will want a pure equilibrium state with zero net gain or loss in atmospheric CO2.
The overwhelming majority is. So much that it's not even worth discussing the rest since it makes it look like it's not all that bad. Yes, it is that bad.
> Why does the US/California make it seem like recycling is a magic trick to save the planet?
Because it's the most profitable step of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, [some people add other entries] chain, so it's in their interests to pretend the other steps don't exist.
If I buy a bottle of water packed in plastic and don't worry about it because I assume it's recyclable and therefore "of zero net impact" (also not true, but implied by most of the standard recycling glossy brochures), I've helped their profits.
If I bring my own water with me, or use a water fountain or something, I've not contributed to growing the profits of all the companies in the chain of extracting oil from the ground, processing it into various precursors, making it into a cheap, flimsy plastic, pumping water out of the ground to fill that bottle, trucking it across the roads built of oil with fuel built of oil, and selling it to someone, then also the profits of dealing with the waste plastic (trash, recycling, whatever)!
Reduce (don't buy stuff in the first place) and Reuse (finding ways to have things be not-single-use) just don't have nearly the profit chain.
Pay attention to just how much rhetoric about climate/trash/etc boils down to, "We can consume our way out of problems caused by overconsumption." There are no shortage of companies happy to sell you "green" versions of whatever you might have otherwise bought - but very few people are willing to ask the question, "Should you have bought it in the first place?"
A lot of the messaging — paid for by the fossil fuels industry — is "we're all in this together." Image of countless families sorting their plastic bottles or whatever.
Don't look around the corner at industry generating a magnitude larger amount of waste. Are you doing your part?
They used messaging to make their problem our problem.
1. Profit
2. Shifts blame to the consumer -- if you don't recycle it's you who's bad and destroying the planet
3. Plastic is cheap. Alternatives are more expensive and less convenient. So let's try to fix the symptom instead of the root cause.
Many kinds of plastics can't be recycled at all, not even downcycled. Thermoset plastics particularly, which includes almost everything made out of fiberglass (glass fibers in thermoset plastic matrix.) That stuff either gets thrown into a landfill, or ground up and burnt.
That most of it burns is part of why "go burn it to offset coal" came out so well in some of the lifecycle analysis for end of life program I'm familiar with:
Instead of having to pay to sort and process, you just grind it up and mix it in with the coal (or heave the bags in, I'm not sure as to the actual feed mechanism though I keep meaning to see if I can get a tour).
I'm not actually in the program area, but I know where to drop my bags of plastic to get them into the program (one of the recycling companies in the area of the program handles it, and I'm over there often enough that I'll toss a few of the bags in the back of the car if I'm going that way).
Recycling sucks, but you could replace "biodegradable" with "industrially compostable" or even "ecologically safer". I'm not convinced that getting newspaper out of landfills is on the same order of importance as not littering plastics into the environment. Paper seems like a huge win over plastic and even if you have to use a "biodegradable" plastic, at least it's actually feasible to compost it.
> If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place.
Landfill space is not the issue at all. Landfills do not take up that much physical space, and we have plenty of empty space to use.
The issue is around the greenhouse gases released creating all of those disposable products and the resources going into their production.
If it was just landfill space, we would be totally fine.
> Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land.
Over that time scale the land automatically remediates itself. There's a hill in Rome made of a big pile of Roman garbage. The hill is more useful than the pots were.
In the 60s there was a junk yard that some developer put a bunch of houses on top of near my house. Decades later nearly everyone that lived there developed cancer.
> If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place.
From the article linked below:
If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high.
That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable. That's ignoring all the advancements we'll make over the 100 years to harvest that garbage or further increase efficiency of landfills.
The numbers from that article are just completely wrong. 32x bigger in volume would be just 3.2x the linear dimensions of the Great Pyramid. The volume numbers in the article are actually about 200x the Great Pyramid's volume (per Wikipedia) or a 5.9x scaling in the linear dimensions. That still is less than a mile across at the base. Their numbers would be about 30000x the volume of the Great Pyramid and so is several orders of magnitude off.
> So the base of this [100 years] trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high.
> That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable.
That is NOT a big landfill. That volume could be easily hidden in all but a couple of US states.
Moreover, it is a concentrated supply of many useful materials. It might not be profitable to mine it today, but if the "earth is running out of resources" people are correct, it will be. (And, if they're not, generating trash isn't a problem.)
A Landfill would also generate a ton of usable energy in the form of landfill gas, which can either be used for heating, or concentrated/scrubbed and used as an equivalent of natural gas.
> The biggest mining operation on Earth can be found in Germany. At the Garzweiler strip mine they remove the top ground layer to extract lignite. The total mining surface is a staggering 18,5 ml² (48 km²) and several villages had to be moved for the mining operation.
The trash pyramid is 100 cubic kilometers, that could fit in a few of the biggest open pit mines.
An alternative solution, that this article weirdly doesn't touch on, is that the US could also shift policy to stop exporting recycling material. It'd be nice to encourage expanded recycling domestically but if that fails and if ~80% of exported material is going to end up improperly dumped then it'd be far more reasonable to just make sure it's properly dumped in the US.
Make the export of detritus illegal, send the excess to dumps, and if Americans deem this offensive then they can legislate additional subsidies for domestic recycling (even potentially becoming a net importer of detritus!).
Agreed. If the issue is that recycling plastic is uneconomical and so it gets shipped out to places that pollute it, the solution is for the recycling centers to stop shipping it out. Or just accept metal-only recycling. This is something to fix at the municipality level.
I think we are not in a position to judge what is reasonable to do over hundred or thousand of years with our current technological progression.
Plastics where not really a thing 100 years ago. At our current progression I think we should avoid the big catastrophes (Nuclear war), push for developpement of poor places(get more genius) and advance technology as fast as we can.
At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.
> At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.
The problem is that today's plastic, in far less than 100 years, is reasonably likely to be finely divided into small numbers of molecule sized chunks, and spread evenly throughout the entire biological systems of the planet. We find microplastic in ants in the middle of untouched forestland, because it spreads so well on the wind.
> ...and advance technology as fast as we can.
It's an interesting gamble, certainly - solving the problems created by our current technological development path by pushing further down that development path.
It's just not one I expect to work. You don't generally solve problems by "doing more of what made them in the first place."
Your implied plan (doing less of what made the problem in the first place) seems like more of a stretch to me. It would be nice, but I can’t see many countries giving up plastic. It’s too useful. I think focusing international collaboration efforts on better waste/pollution management (eg getting more waste plastic into properly managed landfills) seems a lot more plausible.
I may not have explicitly stated it in the parent comment, but it's quite explicit other places.
Either a system is sustainable or it's not. If it is, it can continue forever. And, if it's not, it won't. One way or another, it won't, though you can pick the method early on, and later, reality will force it on you. The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who thought it didn't apply to them.
Plastics in their current form won't exist as new products in 1000 years (though the current stuff probably won't have broken down entirely). Either something far less vile and toxic to "all life" will have been found, or, more likely, industrial civilization will have done the usual "overshoot and collapse" thing, so we won't have the technology to make them in their current form then.
None of that changes the fact that plastic are toxic to life now - and, so, we ought not be using nearly as much of them. I don't mind "durable plastics" quite as much, but the bulk of it is single use, and splitting out all our recycling, I'm regularly reminded of just how much plastic one cannot avoid, even when trying to minimize it.
If the reality (which it probably is...) is that people won't stop doing anything until the external reality we live in forces their hand, the outcomes are almost always far worse than if we decide to stop doing those things earlier.
Plastics are convenient, certainly. They're also a horrid biotoxin that has, quite literally, blanketed the planet in the form of microplastics. We have no idea what to do with the stuff, and burying it only works for so long (and if you're really careful to not let the bits and pieces leech into groundwater). But, I mean, at least you can get water without having to use a drinking fountain!
Plastics aren’t a system. Some plastics are likely to be manufactured in 100,000 years simply because their made from abundant atoms, non toxic, and have useful properties. The current global economy on the other hand isn’t stable across months let alone hundreds of years. But that doesn’t matter much, the meat your eating today probably didn’t come from a wild animal like the meat your ancestors where eating 100,000 years ago but it’s still edible. Different systems to produce essentially the same thing across vast stretches of time.
> Either a system is sustainable or it's not. If it is, it can continue forever. And, if it's not, it won't. One way or another, it won't, though you can pick the method early on, and later, reality will force it on you.
The mistake you are making is thinking the plastic system is a closed system. It is not. The plastic system is part of the universe, which is populated by people who constantly create new knowledge to solve problems. And we never know which new knowledge will be created which will affect this system.
For example, when nuclear power was invented one might have predicted that cheap, clean power would be available to all. But you probably wouldn’t have predicted the environmentalist backlash to it and resultant continued dependence on fossil fuels.
Or Malthus predicting worldwide food shortages and starvation as the population grew. He had no way of predicting the invention of fertilizer.
There are a million examples of this but the takeaway is: people solve problems and create new knowledge that is constantly redefining what is possible.
> The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who thought it didn't apply to them.
On the contrary, the history of civilization collapse is rife with people who insisted on thinking about things as closed systems and stifling open ended progress (e.g. ancient Sparta).
It is actually hard to think of an example of a civilization which couldn’t have been saved if only they had the right knowledge. Say the cure for a disease or a piece of military technology.
I believe that is the point the other person is trying to make. That humans continually solve problems, create new ones, and rapid progress means a higher likelihood of developing the new solutions needed.
I agree with you too, we should avoid things that have a repercussion long time into the future.
I am especially wary of man made chemical molecules that have a long lifespan (BPC, fluorinated compound, etc)
With technology we make two step forward and one step back at the same time. We create new wonderful opportunities but we also create damage that we often overlook at first.
Plastic recycling is simply not very practical in the current day. Solving that problem is certainly something we should strive for, but plastic isn't going anywhere any time soon. We need something to do with it today and the most environmentally friendly thing to do is to landfill it. If at some point in the future we have a good solution to recycle it, we'll know where to find it. But if we keep dumping it in the ocean we'll probably cause other disasters before we'd ever run out of empty space.
> Plastic recycling is simply not very practical in the current day.
Of course it is practical. Here in Norway we recycle about 30% of all plastic from domestic and industrial waste already. We have some way to go though, glass and metal is over 80%.
Some plastic is especially well suited to re-use; for instance, we recycle 73% of PET used for drinks containers.
Or in other words, even with only 5 million people’s plastic in a rich liberal western democracy, you still can’t manage to recycle the vast majority of your plastic.
That 70% needs to go somewhere, and a landfill is the best place for it. Not an incinerator, a low income country, or the bottom of the ocean.
Or in yet other words, it takes time to change the habits of a thousand years.
None of it goes to a low income country, and very little to the ocean.
And our plastic waste per person is less than half of that of the US. Reducing plastic waste isn't merely a question of recycling, one must decide which plastics to allow for which purposes so that recycling can be effective. But not using it in the first place is the most effective.
And lastly what does the population of the country have to do with the problem? I this mentioned over and over again in various contexts.
Scale is a huge part of the current problem with global plastics recycling. There is only so much capacity at recyclers, and there is a massive global oversupply of material to be recycled at the moment. In recent history, much of this oversupply has ended up being shipped to recycling processors in lower income countries where much of it has ended up being dumped. This outcome is much worse for the world than putting it into a landfill in a high income country, despite being officially reported as "recycled".
Reducing the amount of plastic used is certainly a good goal, but it's a non-solution to the current problem. Non-recyclable plastics and the recyclable plastics which are destined to be mismanaged on a truck tomorrow are all better off in modern landfills.
I don't disagree with anything you said. But as an individual, I can at least heed the advice to not attempt to recycle plastics if I'm not certain it won't ultimately end up in the ocean. The landfill is the lesser of two evils.
Plastic gets a bad wrap. But it's a pretty dang efficient material. It takes so little energy and material to make something very functional and resilient. I know that CO2 analyses of the replacements to plastic bags and straws has not been very kind to them.
I find it commendable to encourage people to consumer less stuff, but the war on plastic straws has been a huge step back - it's done relatively little to actually help, but has imposed huge and everyday annoyances on everyone. These should be the exact opposite goals of environmental reforms when there are much lower hanging fruits available.
> but has imposed huge and everyday annoyances on everyone
Not on everyone. I can't remember the last time I used a straw, I manage to drink from a glass or a cup just fine. Is it really a huge annoyance for you? I understand that for some people (e.g. people with Parkinson's or a broken jaw) straws are a necessity, but most people should be able to manage just fine without them.
It's true that there are bigger contributors to plastic pollution, but it's hard to argue that plastic straws in the oceans or nature are a good thing.
We could play this game with almost every product... I am sure there are many things that you use and like to use that I never use, but it isn't fair for me to just say, "Well it isn't important to me so that means it isn't important to anyone". Almost every product we produce, people could 'manage just fine' without... we can always just point to a time before the thing was invented and say, "Look, people managed just fine without computers... they aren't a necessity, let's not waste resources making them" Unless a product has outsized environmental costs relative to other luxury items, I don't think we should get in the habit of having governments pick and choose which items are 'necessity' or 'luxury'.
If we are concerned about plastic waste, let's put a general tax on plastics to reduce their consumption across the board and let the market decide how to do that reduction, instead of picking and choosing which plastic products to ban.
While I don't think people need to justify using straws, I will go ahead and say straws are very important to me. I like cold drinks with ice in them, but I have cold sensitive teeth that hurt when I drink from a cup with ice and no straw. It is way easier to drink in a car with a cup, lid, and straw.
I simply prefer using a straw. Do you want to go through a similar exercise where you justify every single one of your consumption practices?
When they banned plastic straws in the EU, all of the sudden two reusable replacement products appeared on the market: Glass straws and stainless steel straws.
They are such an upgrade to plastic straws that I don't understand why we haven't been using them all along.
I've switched entirely to glass straws, they are a huge upgrade from plastic. No sharp edges like plastic, won't collapse if you want to suck up something firm like a milkshake, takes up less storage since I only need to keep a handful around to cover various sizes. And they look much, much better to boot. Can't say I've had any issues with them clanking on my teeth, but I use straws for sipping, not chewing on.
I don't like the taste of metal straws, so I bought glass ones. They are awesome, but like all glass things, they are incredibly hard and incredibly brittle. If you drop it, it might shatter, it might be fine. I own four, use them regularly, including occasional travel, and have only dropped one.
If that sounds like too much work for you, there are reusable plastic straws available.
Nice try big government, but a tax will only increase prices for end consumers and will disportionately affected poor people while actually doing jack shit to reduce consumption.
Competition will do the work—if my business deals with the tax by raising prices for consumers, your business can instead invest into R&D to figure out how to keep prices steady. Your business wins, and the consumer wins.
I use (used) straws a few times a year when getting a treat like a milkshake. Now every time I get a milkshake, I get either a tooth-chipping metal thing or a limp paper tube that breaks. You can't really drink a milkshake out of a cup, it's bizarre.
I dare you to find a less significant source of pollution in my day to day life that's more inconvenient to ban. Perhaps clothes pegs or shoelaces? The list is short.
I'm convinced that most people's ideas of "environmental action" is self-flagellation. i.e. "if we're all more miserable, it must mean we're sacrificing and making progress for the greater good"
We banned straws because everyone saw that picture of a turtle with a straw through its nose, meanwhile other countries are dumping millions of tons of plastic into the ocean that absolutely dwarfs the pollution plastic straws could ever hope to make. It's like both of your legs have just been cut off, you're bleeding to death, and someone puts a bandaid over a pin prick on your shoulder, and pats themselves on the back for saving you.
Is there a condition that prevents you from drinking milkshake from a cup directly? Or do you often find yourself walking while drinking and want to avoid spilling the drink on yourself?
Hav you ever tried? It just doesn't work very well. A lot of milkshakes begin to split pretty shortly after being made, part of the utility of the straw is to stir it up as you drink. It can be done, the experience is just a lot worse.
And don't forget the whipped cream! There's just not a good way to sip from something with a cream topping without getting am embarrassing face full.
I don’t use straws every day but I like them. They’re not a necessity by any means. No more than this web site, or computers, or reading novels are… But if you have very cool beverage with floating ice, it’s nice not too fight against the ice on your teeth.
We’re in the middle of a climate crisis and the war on plastic straws is emblematic of everything that’s wrong about our policies. We’re looking way to hard at something totally inconsequential.
In a lot of transactions straws are handed out regardless of the customer's desire - ditto for plastic cutlery with takeout/delivery.
For individual businesses the math is against conservatism. Failing to deliver cutlery and getting massive complaints (especially if they lead to politically charged boycotts) is the second most expensive option - the most expensive option is forcing customers to state their preference (and baked in preferences like those submitted by UberEats are small check boxes that users don't see and so restaurants often ignore). The cheapest option is probably just to put a straw jar somewhere on the counter, but then you'll tend to get complaints from employees/franchise owners about theft - while that theft is rare and inexpensive, it is very visible.
This, but for paper receipts! It blows my mind that the default everywhere I go is to print a receipt, then ask me if I want it. I never do. I am not expensing these two slices of pizza. I will not need to deduct this bottle of shampoo when I file my taxes.
And then the merchant prints a receipt for themself! As if the computer that printed the receipt couldn’t just save a record of the purchase to a database!
The miles and miles of receipts that probably get printed and then thrown away probably adds up to something nontrivial, it’d be such an easy win to only print receipts on request.
That's becoming pretty normal in my experience. A lot of places ask first if I want a receipt. And they're not just printing them anyway and keeping them or throwing them away, they just tell the POS system not to print it at all.
IMO the best reason to avoid receipts when you don't need them is because thermal paper is really nasty stuff.
I live in the 3rd biggest food delivery market in absolute terms, with the per capita size being bigger than the top 2. Here UberEats is not a thing and one local player has the majority market share.
> the most expensive option is forcing customers to state their preference (and baked in preferences like those submitted by UberEats are small check boxes that users don't see and so restaurants often ignore)
Every significant player in the food delivery market here has their app work the exact same way: there is a clear, big checkbox for "I don't need cutlery". It's impossible to miss if you've used the app more than once, I'm sure people missed it the very first week it was introduced but now it's standard, everyone knows about it. Check the box? Restaurants don't send cutlery. Simple as that. Want to hear something even crazier? I'm pretty sure the checkbox is checked by default, so if you don't uncheck it, you don't get cutlery (not 100% sure because it may just default to whatever you chose on your last order).
This is just not a problem whatsoever. I'm sure by now it has already saved millions of pieces of plastic.
Plastics are cool materials but at the moment they're mostly made from fossil fuels so you're funding some really bad people by using them.
They'll only use that money to convince gullible people that climate change isn't happening, that every government regulation will magically have exactly the opposite impact, that solar and wind power are scams, that recycling is bad for the planet and that science and democracy have been taken over by idiot hippies that will kill us all because they stupidly hate fossil fuels for no reason.
It is probably not reasonable to select materials with worse ecological footprints than plastic purely out of concern for what people in the plastics supply chain are going to say about climate change.
The whole point is that you don't know if its a worse ecological footprint unless you count all the impacts.
If that impact includes support for some of the worst regimes on earth starting wars and undermining democracy then I think you'll find there's been a recent shift in public attitudes on this issue.
There are people with fossil fuels. They want to make money from their access to fossil fuels. They will strive to do so, and some of them will strive without concern for the collective good. I think those things are clear.
If fossil fuels are burned for energy, that contributes directly to climate change. If those fossil fuels are converted into plastics which are put in landfills, that directly contributes less to climate change. I hope that all of the above is uncontroversial.
Where I get confused is this:
Do you think that reducing demand for plastic will result in less fossil fuels being burned? Do you think that reducing demand for non-burning-uses of fossil fuels will result in so much less production of fossil fuels that the overall price of oil-for-burning will go up?
I'm no economist, but your claim is the exact opposite of how I thought it works. Can you explain?
> Is it the carbon that's the problem or the groups that have prevented a carbon fee being enacted for decades that is the problem?
The carbon. It's definitely the carbon. If we collectively stop having economic incentives to burn fossil fuels, the political side will sort itself out.
We could improve the economics either by having cheaper alternative energy supply like solar power, or more expensive demand like plastics, or imposing an externality like a policeman who comes and slaps you every time you burn 1 BTU of hydrocarbons.
So you recognize that the carbon is bad for us collectively, and you think we'd be fine if the incentives were sorted out. So you're agreeing with me?
But you think the 'politics' is easy once we have renewables or carbon fees imposed via legislation.
Let's all hope that none of those things became very political around 3 decades ago, because that would be bad. And then wed be in a weird catch-22 were we can only do the easy bits once we sort the politics out.
Fossil fuels are complex materials and the refining process breaks crude up into several different compounds, these compounds have different uses with the base materials for most plastics being an, essentially, useless side effect of fuel production. It's less a question of taking a barrel of oil and turning it into a hunk of plastic or a can of fuel. Both are produced in the most efficient processes.
Focusing on plastic bags and straws is such a transparent "something just be done: this is a thing: it must be done" response.
90% of the time, the plastic bag in question is filled with products packed in plastic[1] and half the time, the straw is stuck into a clear plastic cup to show off the frappuccino.
[1]: Fruit and veg aside, why am I expected to buy a new spray bottle for every half litre of kitchen cleaner, say? Why can't I just buy one bottle and spray and then some kind of refill?
> Fruit and veg aside, why am I expected to buy a new spray bottle for every half litre of kitchen cleaner, say? Why can't I just buy one bottle and spray and then some kind of refill?
There's a company (whose name escapes me at the moment) which appears to be aiming for exactly this and is advertising all over the streaming services I watch. Now, clearly their ads aren't doing their job since I can't remember the name, but it's out there.
More prosaically, I've been using the same Dawn dish soap bottle for months now because I bought a giant jug of dish soap at Costco and just refill the little one as needed. I assume it'll be less waste at the end... I just wish the big jug was made out of glass or aluminum instead of plastic.
The heavily advertised commercial refill options want to lock you into their system, so they sell refills made of plastic that only fit into their bottles. It's just pandering to a certain crowd without really helping the problem.
If you search a lot harder, there are some other options. Like for cleaning sprays, there are dry refills that add no plastic and require adding your own liquid, like this one - https://meliorameansbetter.com/collections/homecleaning/prod... - there are others out there, but I've been pretty happy with this product.
I really like that they give full, detailed descriptions of the ingredients. I wish home chemicals had more stringent requirements on ingredient lists, like foods do.
However that's literally just a bar of soap unfortunately, and won't get things the kind of clean I want. I bought one sprayer of caustic bathroom cleaner because they have more resistant sprayer hardware to handle the bleach, and just refill it with cheap bleach or bleach cleaner. The best option would probably be buying bulk dry chlorine at a poll supply store
Oh, agree. For the harsher cleaners I just try to buy large containers of concentrated cleaner from the local hardware store if possible. But for the spray around the house stuff, these types of cleaners are a big step forward from buying a bunch of ugly bottles of mostly water.
Right, but the default position is just small packs in disposable containers. As long as you have to make substantial efforts to so otherwise, like finding a special company or paying for Costco (and getting there, who lives in walking or cycling distance of one?), it will remain what 99.5% of people do.
And it's not even an unreasonable position for those people. Making an enormous effort to just find a bottle of soap is not sustainable.
> the war on plastic straws has been a huge step back
I always find it funny when they give me a huge plastic cup with a plastic lid and then a paper straw. If straws are that big of a problem, get sippy cup style lids and skip all straws.
Starbucks did this, and then people realized that the sippy cup style lids were thicker (to maintain the structure of the sippy part) and actually used more plastic than the old straw/top combo.
Starbucks said that the new plastic lids were more easily recycled because they were larger than straws (which aren't normally picked up by recycling machines) so it was still a net positive. But this goes back to the articles point of "its plastic, and its probably not going to get recycled anyway"
> but the war on plastic straws has been a huge step back
Yeah, the straw is a prime example of bike-shedding.
So much talk and energy spent on something so unimportant.
Everybody can have an opinion about straws.
Worse it makes reasonable people argue against what is intended to be regulation to save the environment. Thus, fracturing what should otherwise be a strong public opinion that we can and must protect the environment.
I think it's wildly optimistic to say there's a strong public opinion we should protect the environment. What people mean when they say they support that, in my opinion, is that we shouldn't cut down some trees far away that don't matter. Stop killing polar bears. But as soon as you tell them they'll pay more taxes, or pay more for lumber, or pay more for every product that used to be plastic, whatever it is, they vehemently vote against it.
The problem of plastics is that you're outputting a significant portion of the carbon that composes it as CO2 as part of the production process. Since that carbon is moved from fossil, solid/liquid reserves into the atmosphere, it shifts the balance towards more carbonic gaz.
While it is efficient as a manufacturing process, typical lifetime is lower than that of more durable material such as the metal or glass it replaces. The very qualities that make it a good manufacturing material makes it a poor(er) long-term use substitute.
It makes sense to use plastic capitalisticaly speaking, and in some cases it also makes sense to manufacture plastic as an affordable solution (I don't drill nearly enough to justify owning a metal), and the smelting process is far from better than manufacturing the equivalent plastic components.
But when manufacturing disposable garbage, as a species, factoring in the environmental cost, it is not efficient at all.
The example of straws is interesting cause the actual substitute to straws is the absence of a straw. No-one actually need a straw. It is a minor convenience with a ridiculous environmental cost.
I think the core problem is that there's a whole raft of things that get bucketed under "environmentally friendly" - for example:
- CO2
- Lifespan of materials
- Ecological impact of material extraction/creation
- Ecological impact of the materials themselves
- Energy cost of transport/etc.
In this case, plastic is concerning because of the lifespan of the materials and the ecological impact of the materials - it may be energetically cheaper to produce & transport a plastic bag as opposed to a paper bag, but presumably the paper bag degrades faster and with fewer side effects.
Plastic that is recycled or even incinerated to produce energy is often better than the alternatives. There are many environmental problems much bigger than plastic that ends up in landfills. I always thought that the problems with straws in particular was that a disproportionate amount ended up in the oceans. But even then I still suspect that it just was a way to distract people who care from the real problem of climate change so that the oil companies can make more money a bit longer.
Edit: no, I didn't read the article before I commented. I did now. I live in Sweden and put all our plastics in the recycle bin (one specifically for plastics). They are building better and bigger sorting and recycling facilities for plastic, but I think about 80% still is incinerated. Which of course releases greenhouse gases. But the plastic we throw away in a week corresponds to less CO2 than one trip back and fourth to work for my wife in our Prius.
They're probably right that throwing out plastic straws is better than throwing them in the recycling, assuming that plastic straws can't be efficiently recycled. That being said, many US recycling utilities typically sort the recycling on shore, and plastics that are too small to be efficiently identified and recycled (such as straws and loose bottle caps) will just be sent to the landfill regardless. How recycling is processed differs a lot across the country, so it's hard to make generalizations.
But that doesn't support their final conclusion about whether plastic straws should be banned. The author doesn't give a reason, but implicitly that they think paper straws suck, and must suck. Which a lot of the ones today do. But it's an odd hill to die on, given that basically all straws before 1960 were made of paper. Their ire should probably be directed at the establishments they frequent for buying cheap and terrible paper straws instead of spending a bit more to get good quality paper straws. Such companies probably want to get you pissed off by paper straws to demand that your government remind the ban so they can go back to using cheaper plastic straws.
Ivory combs are pretty sweet apparently, they're a lot nicer to use than wooden or plastic combs... I'm not seeing much outrage over the fact that we're being forced not to use them in the modern world.
People adjust - paper straws are servicable for most purposes, for things like bubble tea reusable straws are a reasonable investment (if you're having it often).
How many people do you know who have used an ivory comb? Were your grandparents even around when they were debating the ban? I find it hard to believe that people who enjoyed using ivory products 100 years ago would have supported banning them. It’s disingenuous to assume that the ban wasn’t controversial at the time just because nobody today has even heard of everyday items being made from ivory.
People adjusted because better materials came along. That’s the main reason governments were able to ban ivory: there was finally a viable alternative to piano keys and other everyday items made from ivory. Ironically, plastic was the wonder material that replaced ivory in many applications.
Few people remember what the pre-plastic world was like. It wasn’t better. It was hard to cheaply keep things sterile in hospial settings. Food spoiled faster without cheap, airtight storage containers. Everything was heavier or more flammable because wood, paper, or metal were the only comparable substitute materials.
Maybe we should be discussing how we discover the next wonder material that can make plastic obsolete instead of hand waving and saying “people will adjust” if we make it illegal to use and produce.
They weren't working when I used them--the top would gradually moisten, bend, and crack. I noticed the store switched back to plastic straws, so assume others had the same problem.
As another poster mentioned, this is with a plastic cup and lid (unfortunately).
As I mentioned in a sibling comment (specifically talking about bubble tea) metal straws are an excellent and, generally, superior alternative.
People don't pick plastic straws - companies pick plastic straws and they stir up anti-environmental outrage to reinforce their fiscally based decision.
Obligatory reminder of the persons and homes hit by blobs of frozen detritus ejected from airplane toilets mid-flight.
I think one-off examples of accidents are pretty unhelpful for discussions. Bamboo straws are also available alternatives and both those and disposable plastic straws can also cause fatal accidents - bubble tea straws in particular can easily break skin. There are also silicon straws available which might be the best option safety wise - even superior to plastic.
Metal straws don't noticeably increase the danger of drinking - but drinking while running or moving quickly is an action that can always increase the risk of accident - fatal or not.
That’s a trade off people should be able to make for themselves. You are arguing for a world in which the choice would not exist.
Such incidents would increase dramatically if people started using metal straws more frequently: think auto accidents while people are drinking through a metal straw.
As I mentioned - silicon straws are also available which are far safer than the plastic ones.
I, personally, have a metal straw since it looks pretty - but I don't use it all that often while walking... even while using disposable straws I generally didn't drink while walking.
If silicon straws are better, why don’t more people use them? I would posit that they’re not actually better, otherwise we’d see more widespread adoption.
Personally I don't drive so that doesn't really apply to me.
> If silicon straws are better, why don’t more people use them? I would posit that they’re not actually better, otherwise we’d see more widespread adoption.
This is a very poor argument, it's essentially the same as an appeal to the natural "X is older than Y thus X must be better than Y" - in this thread we're discussing straw usage from an American perspective where disposable plastics is the norm - stating that disposable plastics should continue to be the norm because they're currently the norm isn't very interesting. It's similar to the argument that we should never have switched off of leaded gasoline since everyone was fine with using leaded gasoline.
"Personally I don't drive so that doesn't really apply to me."
It would apply to everyone if you got your ban on plastic straws. People would switch to straws that were stiffer and made from alternative materials, sometimes using metal ones. They would be at higher risk of suffering an injury because of a ban.
And you would be at risk, too, because I'm certain that as someone with an internet connection, you frequently ride in a car, or use public transportation, or utilize some other form of transit that goes faster than a walking pace. Those same risks apply to you in those situations if there's an accident and you're drinking through a metal straw.
"...disposable plastics should continue to be the norm because they're currently the norm..."
That is not the argument I made. It is a strawman you raised to avoid answering my question. You were promoting silicon straws as superior, and I raised the question that, if they are so superior, why haven't they supplanted plastic straws?
We got rid of leaded gasoline because it was incompatible with catalytic converters required for tailpipe emissions. It's arguable that we might still be using it if it weren't for the Clean Air regulations. Avgas still contains lead because unleaded fuel is hard on engines, and in applications that require critical reliability, such as aircraft engines, switching to unleaded is a risk we're not willing to accept from a regulatory standpoint.
And more to your point, the car enthusiasts I work with lament the days of leaded gas. They have restored classic cars from the 50's and 60's and they've had to modify their engines to work with unleaded gasoline.
Your desire to paint plastic straws or leaded gas as unalloyed evils is, quite simply, ignorant. Everything involves tradeoffs. Sometimes the tradeoff is pretty clear. But sometimes, it isn't. For you to pretend like it's a simple or easy thing to make the tradeoff choice for everyone on planet earth makes me think you're an idiotic little tyrant, to be quite frank.
I don't see why - we've managed it fine and I've got a terrible memory. I've got a messanger bag and usually just keep a metal straw in it for whenever we want some.
A fair number of people carry around reusable coffee travel mugs and those are far more of a pain in terms of size and weight.
I'd clarify, I'm living in Canada so there might be some cultural differences here.
So you always have your messenger bag on you? Or you always know ahead of time that you're going to bubble tea and bring your messenger bag?
What do you do after you use it? Do you wash it after use or put it in your bag dirty to wash later? Not trying to argue but surprised people actually go through the trouble.
> A fair number of people carry around reusable coffee travel mugs
Yeah but that's usually in order to carry coffee they made at home. Not in case they decide to visit a coffee shop during the day.
I live in NYC and I'm not sure most people who are getting bubble tea knew they were going to get bubble tea when leaving their home.
I indeed always have my messenger bag[1] on me - after using it, assuming I'm not carrying the drink container home with me (or to someplace I can easily rinse it) I'll usually wrap it in a paper napkin - that's pretty rare though, usually by the time I can dispose of the drinking vessel I'm able to wash the straw out.
Reusable bubble tea straws are also small enough that they'll easily fit in most purses - the length might be a bit too much for clutches but if your purse is big enough for a phone chances are the bubble tea straw will fit just fine.
Yeah, I guess as someone who wouldn't always have a bag or purse on me the calculus is different (and for that matter, someone who would forget to wash the straw).
I think that's totally reasonable yea - reusable items aren't environmentally sane for infrequent purchases - if you drink coffee a few times a year it'd be silly to get a travel mug, similar to bubble tea straws. So, on the other hand, if the straw came with a 5cent disposal fee it probably wouldn't significantly impact your purchase.
That's a good idea, a very reasonable way of doing it.
Would be totally fine with an even higher(25cent) disposal fee. Makes no difference to the 4 times a year user, the frequent user gets a reusable straw.
A lot of Canadian grocery stores now have bag taxes - so a 5c fee for a bag to carry your groceries out in. A lot of people just swallow the cost, but it has led to a pretty dramatic increase in reusable bag adoption.
It's not in any way/shape/form more practical to carry more things with me when the alternative is that someone hands me a disposable version of the thing at time of purchase.
Not everyone carries a bag with them -- and even if every single person on earth had a bag it'd STILL be more inconvenient for those people to waste cargo space in the bag with a straw when the alternative of being given a disposable one at time of purchase is available.
I feel like there is a misunderstanding of the word 'impractical' here.
Carrying your own straws is a lot of things -- wise, prepared, ethically-conscious, whatever -- it won't ever be practical ( practical : of or concerned with the actual doing or use of something rather than with theory and ideas. ) until the much more convenient option of being given a disposable straw at purchase time and trashing it at the end of use is no longer available to choose.
- You'd have to know you are getting bubble tea before you leave your apartment (or always carry a metal straw)
- It's deeper than most pockets, and can poke and potentially hurt you when bending over, so you pretty much need a bag (or use a shorter straw that will get lost in your drink).
- You need to somehow clean and dry it after use, and put it back in your bag
> Their ire should probably be directed at the establishments they frequent for buying cheap and terrible paper straws instead of spending a bit more to get good quality paper straws
In our area, biodegradable plastic straws were already a popular option but the plastic ban included them.
The straw is not the main point of the article but to demonstrate a larger point that plastics are better off in a landfil (according to the article).. discussing straws in specific (the title is clickbait), is missing the point
Bamboo straws are actually really nice. But I guess that they're a bit more expensive that paper straws, as we're still seeing the latter in many places.
This article is a great example of how poor use of math can do a disservice to the public. The article says:
> Lost and abandoned fishing gear which is deadly to marine life makes up the majority of large plastic pollution in the oceans
This is one of those statistics that shouldn't even pass the sniff test. Think about all of the millions of ways that humans use plastic across every single industry, job, and area of life. And yet somehow ghost gear is supposed to be greater than all of that put together?! Are fisheries just dumping a hundred nets in the ocean for every one they use or something? The number makes no sense.
And, indeed, the report in question says no such thing. What it does say is:
"12 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year" and "640,000 tonnes of ghost gear enters the ocean every year". So that means ghost gear is only around 5% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean per year. In fact the report itself states that "Ghost gear is estimated to make up 10% of the plastic waste in our oceans".
Of course, that's not alarming enough, so it also goes on to state that "[ghost gear] represents a much higher proportion of large plastics found floating at the surface" and "over 85% of the rubbish on the seafloor on seamounts and ocean ridges, and in the Great Pacific Gyre."
That sounds bad but... it should come as no surprise. Most plastic that ends up in the ocean is trash. Land-based trash plastic that is large or heavy enough to sink is less likely to flow down rivers and end up in the middle of the ocean. It will get broken up by trash processing, sink to the bottom of rivers, or otherwise not make it all the way to the ocean intact. So of course you'll see a disproportionate amount of ghost gear when you look on the seafloor or at large items—ghost gear is large plastic that is deliberately designed to sink in seawater and then is deliberately dragged out into the middle of the ocean and thrown overboard.
If your primary goal is to save animals, then Greenpeace's focus on ghost gear makes sense. But if your goal is to reduce the overall amount of plastic ending up in the ocean (which also saves animals), then ghost gear is only a relatively small fraction of the problem.
Ah, good catch! That does agree with the article, so maybe that's where the claim comes from and not directly from the Greenpeace article.
There's still a difference between "quantity dumped per year" and "total amount measured right now". It seems like ghost gear is not a large fraction of the plastic entering the ocean, but it a large fraction of the accumulated large pieces in the garbage patch. I presume that's because fishing gear is designed to survive in the ocean so takes longer to break down than other plastics.
Humans use metals in colossal quantities, but only a small proportion of that, used to make weapons and ammo, is responsible for the majority of human deaths induced by metal items.
Similarly, fishing gear is specifically produced to lure, trap, catch, and ultimately kill marine life. One abandoned fishing net could be much more deadly than 10x of the same plastic by weight in the form of plastic straws, spoons, and cups.
I don't know if it's indeed so, but I can easily see why it could be so.
I don't think the answer is paper straws and I personally dislike them. They turn slimy from your saliva and usually collapse on themselves before you're done with using it. I normally end up taking multiple just to replace them halfway through drinking.
More companies could go in the direction Starbucks has gone, switching their iced drink cups to "sippy cup" lids to eliminate the need for straws while maintaining a lid all together. But that begs the question, is the sippy cup top more plastic than just a straw and the old lid?
Or why not just use the compostable plastic straws that are readily available rather than trying so hard to make your company look "green" by saving the turtles from straws that never end up in the ocean in the first place.
Seriously, fuck paper straws. They're up there with coke freestyle machines. Absolute trash.
I recently went to a restaurant where the straws were literally straw (or some similar plant stem). They looked nice, held up fine, and had the pleasant taste I associate with wheat straw.
I was with you until the freestyle machine part, they're awesome. Seriously, what's wrong with them? It doesn't prevent you from getting the regular things.
I too, hate the paper straws. They are terrible. The "no straws" campaign is just a feel good thing and really does little.
I agree with both of the existing comments. The flavor isn't quite right (personally, I think there's something funky with the sweetener, but i dunno), especially cherry coke isn't really cherry coke. And the UX is awful; dispense latency is bad, touch screen calibration is usually bad and not really fixable because the display screen is so far back from the touch element that people of different heights are going to press different parts of the screen because that's where they see the screen. You could maybe make the active touch areas a little bigger, but the UI is pretty busy, so that won't be possible for soda selection, but it might help for flavor additives. The accessible buttons might be better than the touchscreen?, but I dunno they're not convenient if you're not in a wheelchair (which is fine, that's what they're for). I also haven't tried the scan a QR code and hope method, because it's slow enough already.
Sadly, I've only seen the Pepsi equivalent once or twice and didn't get to try it.
I just find the consistency to be all over the place from machine to machine. Regular coke never tastes like coke. It's fine if you like adding lime/flavorings/etc but just getting the standard flavor of something is just always off.
My only complaints about the freestyle machines are that they are slower to use and sometimes at busy locations it can create a bottleneck. The second is that it is harder to be precise with the fill level because there is significant latency on the dispense button. Overall I am ambivalent towards them.
Hey now, I like Freestyle machines. Where else am I going to find Cherry Vanilla Coke Zero, Raspberry Peach Mellow Yellow, and Fuze Lemon Tea all on the same fountain?
Can someone please clarify for me why some communities in the West Coast of USA banned plastic straws but not plastic "take-away" cups (that are also used only once)? I want to understand the logic that was used to do this. I've googled around for this, and while people like pmarca mock it, I've never found the original reasoning and logic for this action.
Plastic straws were banned because a video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in it's nostril went viral and the decision was made based on emotions, not analysis. If it had been a plastic cup stuck on it's head, they would have banned cups instead. Too bad it didn't get a plastic tampon applicator stuck in it's nose, because I sure see a ton of them washed up on the beach, seems like a prime target to eliminate.
I have no answer but every time I get a cold drink at starbucks and see the new “no straw” lid (that seems to use as much or more plastic as the old lid + straw) I have the same question. It seems more about the “no straw” trend than about actually reducing plastic.
My pet theory is that the 'no plastic straw' movement was started by someone as a sick joke to see how far people would take a silly idea to feel like they are helping save the environment.
It's a deceptive title, but it comes straight from the blog post. It's not going to teach you about straws (thankfully...are straws that interesting?). It tells you about the sources of plastic waste in general and justifies the most efficacious solutions to avoid plastic pollution. It is a short article focused on common sense, appropriate pictures, and well-chosen data.
I clicked on the link specifically because I thought it might be about straws themselves. I agree straws don’t sound that interesting but I don’t really know much about them and for all I know there’s something interesting about their manufacture, perhaps the difference in sizes, or something else.
OTOH I am already well aware of plastic pollution problem and straws’ relative place in it (both perceived and real).
> If you don't know the exact location where your plastic is recycled, throw it in the regular garbage instead.
Very interesting points they are raising. I reached out to https://recyclebc.ca to find out more about my local recycling org but from what I can find on their website almost all of the end product ends up in BC, Canada or at least North America. Same for the processing which seems to be local. I'll update with what I can find out and correct me if I'm wrong but those people saying everything gets shipped to Asia and dumped into the ocean aren't right, at least not universally. Here in BC at least that doesn't seem to be the case at all. If that's the case I'd really like to know why other places in first world countries aren't doing the same and I'd definitely consider the US a first world country.
I have a friend who is a quadruple amputee. For him straws are pretty good. For the rest of us, the solution to plastic straws is not straws. They aren't necessary.
Of course, it's all bike shedding anyhow. The real problems are big and complex and overwhelming, so we argue about straws instead.
I agree with the message, but some states, the type that ban plastic straws, have made recycling a requirement.
A message not touched on is reducing the amount of plastic that we produce and consume should be a goal, but with attention paid to the secondary effects. For example, if you don’t wrap those peppers in plastic they’ll spoil and that may be worse for the planet than shrink wrap. But what if you cover them in edible wax instead? Whats the footprint of each decision?
Sometimes plastic will win out and other times we are being wasteful. In SE Asia, when you buy a single drink from the convenience store, it comes within a plastic bag, and you always get a straw. A plastic bag and plastic straw for a drink in a plastic bottle.
> But what if you cover them in edible wax instead? Whats the footprint of each decision?
"states that ban plastic straws" generally use something biodegradable instead.
The policy, IMO, is pretty simple to figure out. The reason plastic is used everywhere is because plastic is uber cheap. Those peppers are wrapped in plastic because it adds less than a penny per unit and gives them a much better shelf life.
So, the simple solution isn't an outright ban of plastics, but rather a plastic tax. And what's the easiest way to impose that? Via a fossil fuel oil tax.
This would allow companies producing these products to evaluate their individual cost benefits of wrapping everything in plastic.
The rub is, this would have to be a global tax. Otherwise, we'll just be outsourcing our pollution problems. You'd also have to increase shipping taxes to a point where local manufacturing is the better financial option so bad actor companies don't simply manufacture in a nation with no oil tax.
Unfortunately, I think anything else is just posturing that will fall short. If businesses don't feel a squeeze, they won't change behavior. And the only squeeze they feel is financial.
> Unfortunately, I think anything else is just posturing that will fall short.
No, please don't go that fundamentalist route. The "all or nothing" approach won't lead us anywhere. Steady meaningful steps is the key. Build awareness, tackle one problem at a time, improve one aspect at a time, and you'll be able to bring people with you, allow them to adjust, business to be created, etc.
You can't be perfect over night. If you try, it won't happen, not today, not tomorrow, and not 10 or 30 years from now. If you do it steadily step-by-step, you'll at least have a chance.
It's not an all or nothing thing. But rather a "meaningful vs unmeaningful" sort of thing. The smallest meaningful thing we could do to impact waste production is a tax in one city or nation.
Meaningless things are things like banning plastic straws, awareness things, or even to a large extent funding day long excursions to the beach to pick up trash. Those are things more similar to urinating into a hurricane.
It's not a fundamentalist thing. Rather, it's an Amdahl's law thing. The politically and socially popular actions have almost no real effect on climate change or waste production. The problem is we are mad at the wrong people. We blame individuals for waste when the amount of waste an individual produces is a TINY fraction of the waste generated by corporations. Further, a lot of that waste for a citizen is unavoidable. I can't help the fact that every item of food I eat has been wrapped in plastic, bundled in plastic, and then is shipped from halfway across the global only for the grocery store or restaurant to unceremoniously throw away that plastic garbage.
Frankly, we won't reduce our climate impact through good feeling programs and broken corporate promises. We NEED laws that impose monetary losses on businesses for waste production to change anything.
"[...] zero plastic thrown in a garbage can in the United States enters the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre", in bold letters.
But then later in the article, it admits that about 50% of US plastics (it is unclear whether is all of them or only the ones meant to be recycled) were shipped "to Indonesia and Vietnam, which proceeded to improperly dump over 80% of it."
So, it does go into the ocean in the end, whether the fault of the US or any other country, the point is that your plastic straw has a big chance of finding its way to the sea.
> your plastic straw has a big chance of finding its way to the sea
IF you put it in a recycling bin. Here is a quick breakdown:
- Black bin (trash): Goes to a landfill where it is regulated by the EPA and stored in containment and the off-gas is harvested for energy
- Blue bin (recycling): Gets shipped by boat across an ocean to a third world country where it is dumped because that is the most profitable thing to do and it is no longer subject to regulatory oversight that it actually gets recycled
Trash goes into what is called, waste transfer stations, see [1], where there's an effort to salvage recyclables from regular trash as well, what you do with the black/blue bins is basically helping them do their work (and this is good).
Let's say then, that all this plastic goes into the "plastic that could be recycled" bin, of which we actually DO recycle 3.1 million tons of it (as stated in the article) out of 35.7 million tons (total).
But then it goes to say "We used to send half of this to China until they banned it [...]", and it is not clear either this is half of the recycled chunk, or the total amount of plastic that gets thrown away. It wouldn't make sense for it to be the recycled chunk, as ... we are recycling it, right? But then, it could, maybe, as it could be sent to those countries for "recycling" and they then "improperly dump it" (as also stated in the article).
People are intercepting plastic from our waste stream and re-directing it to other countries that dump it into the ocean? Well I see your problem right there!
The idea that we would not ban that and instead ban drinking straws because of that is even more absurd than the nonsense that I thought was in play.
> there's an effort to salvage recyclables from regular trash as well, what you do with the black/blue bins is basically helping them do their work
This is a very metropolitan thing and not the norm. Waste Management in San Francisco for example has spent a ton of money on fancy machines and people to hand sort.
A lot of "recycling" gets diverted to landfill domestically, too. How much depends, but lots of stuff is sorted out as unrecyclable, unidentifiable, or just plain unprofitable. Probably including most straws and other small items placed in recycling.
While true, I'd rather play it safe and put my plastic in the trash bin. Helpful mnemonic: The blue bin is blue like the ocean that plastic will end up in.
These are both correct. Trash in a US garbage can usually ends up in a landfill. Recycling is often sent overseas, where it ends up in a different Gyre. Either way, a plastic straw (according to the article) doesn't enter in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre if thrown into the trash or sent to recycling, it ends up in a landfill if trash, or a different gyre if sent overseas. Lesson learned: sometimes throwing stuff away is better. And don't litter, it goes without saying.
The point being made in the article is that plastic thrown into garbage cans in the US end up securely held in the sealed landfills as described,while plastics sent for recycling in the US end up getting exported and ultimately improperly dumped.
The author is saying that you should put plastics in the garbage rather than in the recycling.
That’s why I disagree with the article’s conclusion that getting rid of plastic straws is “stupid”. There are alternatives, some better than others at their job of fluid delivery to your face parts, but most doing a better job of not polluting.
I thought it was pretty clear, if you put the straw in the garbage can it will not enter the garbage patch, it goes to the landfill. If you put it in the recycling bin it has a good chance of entering the garbage patch.
I do not understand why more restaurants do not have metal straws
They already have silverware and a whole process for cleaning it and whatnot. Why not just also invest in metal straws and re-use ? It seems like it would be cheaper than even plastic straws long term. And of course less waste.
I've been given a metal straw at a restaurant. My immediate thought: how do I know this is clean on the inside? I can't see in there, it could be full of mold. I just drank from the glass instead, because I'm an able-bodied adult.
Many commercial dishwashers might be specialized for certain dishes, so adding a straw washing machine would be a significant expense. In addition, I've heard that many commercial dishwashers require the dishes to be scrubbed beforehand (see https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/620/types-of-commerci...), and straws are quite difficult to scrub.
Given that most restaurants that go through a lot of straws want to provide the option for takeout anyway (for which you can't use metal straws), it makes sense that most restaurants don't bother.
Don't a lot of restaurants just employ dish washers and not use commercial dishwashers? They are super fast and easy to clean with a brush designed for them
Ironic that this does the same thing it complains about.
It 'solves' a tiny non-problem (US based plastic straw disposal) while actively damaging the bigger cause.
Apparently America can't recycle and the solution to that is to just give up? If Americans can't be trusted to recycle then I have no faith in them regulating landfills or any basic government function that doesn't involve blowing people up.
Maybe they should try recycling? Like actually doing it? Not intentionally messing it up like a grumpy teenager trying to get out of doing chores?
I think that problem is not that America can't recyle but that nobody CAN recycle. Making new plastic is so cheap and superior to recycling, it does not make sense to recycle in general.
We should try to use more easily recyclable materials (steel, aluminium?) for some stuff we made of plastic now (bottles? car parts? ... ) but it cost a lot more. Try to compary stainless steel straw and plastic straw :-(
Went to McDonald's today to get a milkshake, they only have paper straws here since 2019 iirc. Anyways the milkshake itself doesn't but I assume our saliva "softens" the paper straw so much that after a couple of minutes I had to turn the straw around to use the other end otherwise I just can't get the milkshake through lol if that make sense. I'm thinking about getting 2 straws next time.
Personally, part of the enjoyable expereince of drinking a milkshake is drinking it through a straw. Drinking a milkshake like a regular drink gives me no pleasure.
I suppose if they ever went to paper straws where I live, i would just have to order a personal metal reusable straw.
> I suppose if they ever went to paper straws where I live, i would just have to order a personal metal reusable straw.
I suppose that's the sound of the system working.
Certainly I note use fewer plastic bags since they started charging for them, though I have also thrown away quite a few broken, much, much thicker, bags and bought a lot more small bin bags since then.
But neither the straw or bag are anywhere near a major contributor to plastic use, though I can see plastic bags certainly were a major litter source and are much less often found in hedges now.
I like my milkshakes thick enough that they need a spoon.
I prefer liquid drinks without a straw, but I find that most of my friends and family prefer straws. And not paper straws. Don't know a single person who likes paper straws.
My wife works for Starbucks and when they were pushing the sippy lids, many customers would ask for straws to go with the sippy cup lid.
Man I remember being a kid and drinking a McDonald's shake through a straw. It was so frustrating. My cheeks would be sucked in like a 60 year old actress with really bad plastic surgery and even then I'd just get a little bit.
Jack In The Box had wide, strong, blue straws when I was a kid, and they made drinking shakes easy. Now they have regular, small, thin-walled straws that does the same thing you're describing :-/
I'm just thinking about to keep a reusable metal straw around. Cleaning is a pita, you need the special brush but honestly it's still better than the paper straws. But maybe it's just McDonald's? Maybe the other fast food joints use something else, like a different kind of paper
What do they end up containing in the long run, after all the other material has been eaten or biodegraded? If we come back to a landfill site in two hundred years time is it going to contain a particular type of mineral? Will it just be trash still?
On what kinds of timescales does it metamorphose significantly, and into what kinds of material?
A a glance, it seems to make sense that burying straws/garbage in a landfill is better than throwing it in the ocean but chemically, plastic decomposes significantly faster when exposed to UV/sunlight. It also seems as though ocean organisms are more able to consume plastic & oil.
It sounds crazy, but could it be that trash in the ocean is actually a better option?
Theoretically possible, but we should want a lot more data to support that conclusion. There seems to be data that suggests that at least certain types of plastics have a deleterious effect on humans, and probably other animals as well. As long as the ecological effects of plastic aren't completely understood, it's probably better for it to wind up in landfills than in the food chain. After all, plastics are derived from petroleum which came from underground to begin with.
Why do we want it to decompose? It's made of carbon, so if it sits underground in a place where it doesn't break down, isn't that effectively sequestered carbon? Decomposing it into CO2 and releasing it into the global carbon cycle seems counter-productive. What's the actual benefit of doing that?
There is basically no UV on most of the oceans volume.
I don't know where we stand better chance of getting a plastic consuming bacteria. (Do we even want that?) But the rate of natural decomposition of plastic on the ocean or underground is probably similar.
This article is focused on the US, and recommends:
- To fix the exporting of plastics to countries that don’t properly process it.
- While this hasn’t been fixed, change your personal behavior to not recycle plastics so it goes to a landfill instead.
Correct?
If you live elsewhere, you should do this analysis yourself. I live in the UK, which apparently exports plastics to Turkey, Netherlands, and a bunch of other countries. So I guess it’s fine to recycle here?
Some percentage of our trash stream gets incinerated to generate electricity (then metals etc. are recovered and the remains go into a landfill). I can never find solid stats on what percentage but the claims sound like it's the majority of the trash stream.
But we also live so close to the coast that straws and any other litter in the wrong places can easily wash into storm sewers then eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
I believe the OP meant plastic straws. I live in Poland and haven't seen plastic straw in a while - all replaced by paper and other natural material straws. I don't feel it's stupid, but I might be missing something.
It's also a surprise to me that US uses recycle bins to just ship the contents overseas. How stupid that is? Why not actually recycle it?
Trying to find out how much recycling gets diverted to landfills anyway. I'm in a relatively interior region where shipping abroad seems prohibitive, and local recycling facilities clearly do not seem to have capacity to process recycling properly. Still going through the rigamarole of sorting and occasionally cleaning my recyclables even though it seems excessivly wasteful.
> If there is one country I don't want the US to follow, that's germany.
Yeah, it'd suck if the US had higher life expectancy, more political stability, better civil rights, better healthcare, lower unemployment, lower inflation, lower crime.....
Yeah, an occupied nation with no sovereignty. Who has to beg for oil and gas from russia and when we tell them to jump, they ask "how high". Vast swathes of the US has higher life expectancy, healthcare, lower unemployement, lower inflation, lower crime than germany. And germany is the leader of censorship in europe. Certainly not a beacon of civil rights.
The united states is a continental nation with infinite resources. Germany is a tiny european country the size of new mexico. Good luck to germany. They are going to need it.
Funny how we are so much worse than germany and yet most people around the world wants to move to the US?
"The U.S. continues to be the most desired destination country for potential migrants, as it has since Gallup started tracking these patterns a decade ago. One in five potential migrants (21%) -- or about 147 million adults worldwide -- name the U.S. as their desired future residence. Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and Saudi Arabia appeal to at least 25 million adults each."
If you reverse-search the second image you can find a 2018 article that gives a bit more detail [1]. It does describe the Pasig River as "Manila's most important and heavily polluted waterways".
"Globally: One and only one solution exists to curbing the deluge of oceanic plastics. The international community has to get the Philippines and similar countries enough money to have proper garbage collection."
What would this look like? I'm guessing it's more than just giving them a fleet of trucks and landfill equipment.
Ideally, we would have funding for chemical recycling of plastics which would make a circular plastic economy. I don't know if this is actually a viable solution at scale but it's the dream.
I wonder if that would financially work out and not just make it so expensive to ship our recycling over there to no longer make sense, causing us to ship the stuff to the next cheap country throwing it into the ocean again.
It all depends on laws/incentives, landfill locally would surely be cheaper than shipping around the world for recycling/"recycling". So we would need to invent the process and pass a law that encourages or forces its use.
Eventually, you go through all of the countries like this so that you have to deal with your own shit rather than shipping of to someone else. This would be the ideal thing would it not?
Interesting but what exactly is the point of this and who is it for? The continued focus on something as myopic as drinking straws and proposed "solutions" to the straw problem that depend on individual choices is actually insane given the point we are at in the battle against climate catastrophe.
Instead of spending a bunch of money to ship stuff to Asia, then spending a bunch of money to upgrade their waste management facilities, why don't we just have our waste management companies toss unusable plastic from recycling into their landfill next door?
They're extremely cheap to make and very light yet strong.
A plastic jar is going to weigh like 10% of what a glass jar the same size weighs and it won't shatter if you drop it. That's a pretty big advantage when you're shipping a tractor trailer full of jars of spaghetti sauce or something.
Weight is also a proxy for how much energy it took to make a product. If you only use your metal or glass straw / jar / etc that weighs 5x what a plastic one does a single time, you aren’t saving anything. Yes the metal one can be recycled, but do you think the recycle rate on those is high enough amongst the general pubic for them to come out ahead environmentally?
My family keeps our own compostable straws in the car. We typically don't ask for straws, lids, bags, etc. There are cases where you may forget, or can't avoid it, but overall it has decreased our yearly plastic use.
What would 50 years matter? Fossils are found in ground that are 10s of millions of years old. (I suspect the time until a landfill is disturbed is likely to be somewhere between those two extremes, but who knows.)
If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place.
The author is recommending a half measure based on the assumption that the US cannot fix its own problems. They are also implying a false equivalency: banning single use plastics is not the same as recycling plastic. A more equivalent comparison might be the tradeoffs between plastic bottles for soda, water, or oils and glass or metal containers. It is also true that plastic straws are a much smaller problem then other usages of plastic such as bottles or event fishing gear and even bags.
Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with reducing plastic usage. Doing so is smart and will be important for the health and well being of future generations -- human and nonhuman -- of life on earth.