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EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

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Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#151

Post by DoreenMichele »

jacobolus wrote: post #150
DoreenMichele wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing that. It strikes me as a way to decide now to screw people over on this specific detail on the theory that, someday, there will be UBI and everything will work just fine. Someday never seems to come on such promises. I was openly homeless on Hacker News for 5.7 years. Plenty of people here are UBI proponents who argued that I of all people should also be a UBI proponent due to my poverty. Such people w…

Cash transfers to the homeless enough to cover sanitation and other basic needs doesn’t necessarily imply a universal basic income policy. > If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come. I sometimes buy lunch for homeless people in my neighborhood, and have given people blankets and cash before, and donated t…

See, I meant that there are 5 million visitors to HN every month. I run multiple blogs. I do resume work. I do other things.

I've been here nearly a decade. Yet, I still can't make ends meet.

I don't need someone to drive me to work. I don't need someone to hold my hand. I'm not a drug addict or alcoholic.

I am a woman, and sexism is alive and well, so that closes a lot of doors in my face. I'm dirt poor, so a lot of people just assume I'm incompetent and not worth hiring.

Again, I'm extremely tired, moreso existentially than physically. I'm exhausted from saying the same things over and over and over on HN and watching them fall on deaf ears.

I have six years of college. I have a Certificate in GIS.

Stephen Hawking was medically handicapped. He had a real career. Of course, he was male.

I'm quite convinced that classism and sexism are major factors in my intractable poverty. And when I try to talk about such things, no, no one wants to get the memo. They just want to assert they are one of the good guys.

While not helping me.

Because my ongoing problems are not their responsibility and are best handled by a social worker or the government. And it will all get better someday, when we have that mythical beast they call UBI.

I'm a social creature more than a technical one. And I just can't help but feel that if people here really were as committed to resolving such problems as comments here tend to suggest, I would have long ago gotten hooked up with some kind of adequate income in excess of $20k annually.

The fact that I continue to live with intractable poverty makes me feel like it's absolutely all talk and no one genuinely wants to get with the man in the mirror and ask the hard questions.

The status quo works for them. They want it to stay the same.

This is really a conversation I don't want to have. It's not a positive experience for me. It's also not likely to actually make a difference.

A much more likely outcome is that I will eventually be banned if I openly bitch too much in a way that makes people here uncomfortable, as I was from Metafilter, a toxic classist cesspit of a forum that lots of people on HN gush about the wonderfulness of.

Adieu.

Edit: This piece was written before the first paragraph -- asserting that free money wasn't necessarily UBI -- was added to the comment I replied to. I'm too tired to edit the damn thing and make it make sense in light of that additional paragraph being added.

To be clear, my point is that I don't believe the world will become a better place. If five million mostly well-heeled, high-minded people can't manage to help one pathetic, but well-educated person with a work ethic and yadda to resolve their problems, no, they won't really help people who are less "virtuous" than I am.

The world will come up with excuses to blame those in need for their problems. They need to stop drinking. They need to stop using drugs. Etc. ad nauseum.

You know, like we currently do.

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#152

Post by jnurmine »

mips_avatar wrote: post #147
KevinS626 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coke and Pepsi would sooner nuke the EU then allow for plastic bottles to be eliminated. I'm sure between the two of them they produce most of the plastic waste in the world but I'm glad governments are attacking low hanging fruit instead.

In Norway all bottled beverages come in refillable plastic bottles. They’re basically the same as normal bottles but a bit thicker. You pay about 50 cents for the bottle, and every grocery store has a little machine where you return the bottles and get a refund. The whole system works pretty well. I wish the US had something similar.

Same in Finland and Sweden.

Aluminium cans are recycled too, and most glass bottles.

As a side note, where I live all waste is sorted (mixed, plastic, metal, cardboard, paper, clear glass, colored glass, biowaste, batteries, lamps...).

All this might seem like a a waste of money but it is actually beneficial: the municipality creates biogas from biowaste and runs the city buses with it. They produced so much gas that they sold it to neighbouring municipalities at least a few years back.

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#153

Post by jnurmine »

goodJobWalrus wrote: post #2

So what is the best replacement for fast food and takeaway purposes? Bamboo cutlery?

Maybe something like sulapac (www.sulapac.com) which is biodegradable and without plastic of any kind.

For mugs and cups there is Isla packaging from Kotkamills.

Solutions exist, plastic for consumer single use stuff is just plain stupid.

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#154

Post by Mirioron »

Brakenshire wrote: post #145
vimy wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is obviously better for the environment. Except it isn't and plastic is for many uses the best material. Take glass for example. Cons of Glass: It breaks It costs more to ship It is more expensive to recycle Glass takes twice as much energy to produce More pollution is created in the manufacturing, shipping and recycling of glass Glass creates more than 6 times the global warming gases than plastic --------------…

Unless I'm missing something, this seems spurious, what makes you think a ban on single use plastic plates, cups, straws, coffee stirrers and cutlery means people will use glass equivalents? Or rather, to make the comparison valid, single use glass equivalents.

They won't. By and large, people will simply do without these products because the equivalents will be too expensive for most people.

But he's just trying to explain that if people tried to stay at the same level of quality of life then they'd have to switch to technology that isn't advantageous to the environment.

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#155

Post by Mirioron »

sschueller wrote: post #137

I'm going to keep saying it. The issue is trash disposal especially in third world countries. You can't just pile trash on landfills. I'm countries like Switzerland were most trash is incinerated to generate electricity, getting rid of plastic bags has little impact if not increase overall CO2 use since a alternate bag uses way more CO2 to be produced. One stat stated that a woven bag would need to be used 7000 times…

If you look at the EU's own numbers on it they say that 150,000 tons of plastic are tossed into European waters per year. Single use plastics make up about half of that. This is less than 2% of the 8 million tons of plastic tossed into the oceans worldwide.

We're basically trying to fix less than 1% of the problem with this. Considering how much ire this is raising I'm not sure this is a good use of the time of environmentalists.

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#156

Post by Mirioron »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #81
normalperson wrote: post #53

90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from Africa and Asia. First world countries put their garbage, generally speaking, into garbage dumps. This EU rule will do nothing.

First, comments like yours is how nothing ever gets done. Second, you use citation-free statistics that are misleading. How much plastic waste from Asia is from "recycled" US and European ("first world", to use your dog whistle) plastics? edit: to repeat myself, How much plastic waste from Asia is from "recycled" US and European ("first world", to use your dog whistle) plastics? - the research that 90% of the plastic…

>The EU's research on the topic says about 150,000 tonnes of plastic are tossed into European waters every year.

>That is only a small contributor to the global problem, with an estimated eight million tonnes of plastic entering the world's oceans annually. And once there, plastic can travel great distances on ocean currents.

That's 1.875%. Furthermore, single use plastics make up slightly less than half of that amount.

How meaningful is this again?

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45965605

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#157

Post by Mirioron »

ramraj07 wrote: post #71
normalperson wrote: post #53

90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from Africa and Asia. First world countries put their garbage, generally speaking, into garbage dumps. This EU rule will do nothing.

Just coming back from India. They've banned plastic bags and containers in any established store here, at least in the city I went to. Perhaps these countries have started taking more concrete steps than whatever it is thats leading the west?

And it caused quite many problems for them when they made that change.

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#158

Post by Mirioron »

jacobolus wrote: post #131
Agustus wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of banning plastic bags, certain areas have seen an uptick in feces in areas because the homeless were using the bags for defecation and sanitation. The ban he had an impact, detrimental to the point where a first world nation is on track to have preventable disease outbreaks. There are cost benefit analyses that should be done prior to saying that a ban is better than nothing.

Homeless sanitation is not independently sufficient justification to support heaps of littered disposable plastic bags everywhere. There are many other possible ways to address this problem.

And yet none of those will be done, but we'll still continue with the ban. After all, it's the thought that counts.

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#159

Post by Mirioron »

vgoh1 wrote: post #103
normalperson wrote: post #53

90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from Africa and Asia. First world countries put their garbage, generally speaking, into garbage dumps. This EU rule will do nothing.

The laws, technology, and culture associated with green initiatives, are a huge undertaking. When a country leads with these, they make it easier for others to follow.

And it also creates resentment in the people that live in said country, because their quality of life is affected. This could lead to situations where the public won't accept future environmental efforts.

Re: EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

#160

Post by DanBC »

sschueller wrote: post #137

I'm going to keep saying it. The issue is trash disposal especially in third world countries. You can't just pile trash on landfills. I'm countries like Switzerland were most trash is incinerated to generate electricity, getting rid of plastic bags has little impact if not increase overall CO2 use since a alternate bag uses way more CO2 to be produced. One stat stated that a woven bag would need to be used 7000 times…

> The issue is trash disposal especially in third world countries.

It's partly trash. It's also partly clothing, which makes up huge amounts of microplastic. It's also partly industrial equipment such as fishing nets.

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