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An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

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Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#151

Post by tgb »

bko wrote: post #86
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…

> 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…

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#152

Post by sjtindell »

jopsen wrote: post #119
legitster wrote: post #34

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 actua…

> 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 e…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#153

Post by tgb »

bombcar wrote: post #110
anamax wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The actual volume stated in the article puts it at more like 0.51 cubic km (18 billion cubic feet), FYI.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#154

Post by WesternEdge »

solveit wrote: post #128
robonerd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We were able to lift entire neighbourhoods in the 19th century but now we can't even build houses...

Coastal commission's head would explode if we tried to lift a neighborhood.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#155

Post by squam »

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…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#156

Post by johnmarcus »

cortesoft wrote: post #92
pg314 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 contr…

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 ju…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#157

Post by gorgoiler »

The topic of landfill sites seems interesting.

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?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#158

Post by lisper »

photochemsyn wrote: post #148
Syonyk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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,…

> slowly break them down all the way to CO2

Sure, let's turn all the plastic into atmospheric CO2. What could go wrong?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#159

Post by throwaway48292 »

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.

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#160

Post by js2 »

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…

We use stainless steel straws in our home.
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