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An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

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Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#101

Post by antisthenes »

anamax wrote: post #93
bko wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 th…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#102

Post by Melatonic »

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#103

Post by Syonyk »

jnmandal wrote: post #56

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 landf…

> 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...).

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#104

Post by robonerd »

dvtrn wrote: post #100
thaumasiotes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also... > 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.

Boston as well, iirc. And parts of Chicago (a city that was built ontop of an actual swamp)

Related; In mid 19th century, Entire neighborhoods of Chicago were lifted up on jackscrews to raise the street above the swamp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#105

Post by throwaway48375 »

chrisdhal wrote: post #77
JoshGlazebrook wrote: post #58

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…

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.

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#106

Post by ZeroGravitas »

jholman wrote: post #80
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm confused. 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 contri…

I'm not making a claim about the price of oil for burning rising though.

I'm saying the money spent on noncombusted fossil fuels funds climate change denial just as much as the burned stuff does.

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?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#107

Post by robonerd »

Syonyk wrote: post #103
jnmandal wrote: post #56

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 landf…

> 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 be…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#108

Post by dvtrn »

robonerd wrote: post #104
dvtrn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boston as well, iirc. And parts of Chicago (a city that was built ontop of an actual swamp)

Related; In mid 19th century, Entire neighborhoods of Chicago were lifted up on jackscrews to raise the street above the swamp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Yep! I love my city for a lot of reasons but stuff like this are some of my favorite bits of Chicagoland trivia.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#109

Post by dylan604 »

barbazoo wrote: post #54
archarios wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#110

Post by bombcar »

anamax wrote: post #93
bko wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 th…

> 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.

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