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An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

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241–250 of 252 posts

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#241
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#242
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://mel…

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 ch…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#243
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use a straw while driving? Most people do. 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 perspe…

"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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#244
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?

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#245

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 have a friend that owns a cafe. They tried metal straws for exactly the reasons you outline. Problem was: they're expensive and people steal them!

Solution? Exploding metal straws

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#246
post #116
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 untou…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#249

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…

Banning plastic straws is dumb, but I kinda like the sippy cup. You can taste the drink more since it brings it more to your nose.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#250
post #82

The author is conflating two separate issues. Their main point is at the end: > Banning plastic straws is stupid. 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 identifie…

> 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.

"Biodegradable" plastics are a scam, they only break down into smaller parts to eventuelly become microplastic that will accumulate in our bodies.
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