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An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

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Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#211

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#212

Post by dmurray »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #106
jholman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#213

Post by jiri »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #211

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 sho…

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 :-(

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#214

Post by Retric »

lisper wrote: post #195
Retric wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the plastics started from atmospheric CO2 in the first place, noting.

But plastics are not made from atmospheric CO2, they are made from fossil hydrocarbons, i.e. from oil.

Not all plastics are made from fossil fuels, and photochemsyn was suggesting: “making plastics from biomass carbon sources or from direct air capture”

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#215

Post by jarek83 »

> banning straws is just plain stupid

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?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#216

Post by Reason077 »

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,…

> "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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#217

Post by themeiguoren »

imgabe wrote: post #205
alimov wrote: post #203

What is the quality of plastics that can we can’t seem to find a replacement for? Or is it just a cost tho g at this point?

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?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#218

Post by themeiguoren »

munk-a wrote: post #81
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…

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…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#219

Post by throwaway290 »

strken wrote: post #206
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…

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.

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?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#220

Post by kube-system »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #202
kube-system wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. See https://bellona.no/assets/Avfall-Rapport-5.pdf

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.

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