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An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

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Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#201

Post by newaccount74 »

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…

When they banned plastic straws in the EU, all of the sudden two reusable replacement products appeared on the market: Glass straws and stainless steel straws.

They are such an upgrade to plastic straws that I don't understand why we haven't been using them all along.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#202

Post by kwhitefoot »

kube-system wrote: post #111
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…

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

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#204

Post by jackjeff »

pg314 wrote: post #74
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 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 don’t use straws every day but I like them. They’re not a necessity by any means. No more than this web site, or computers, or reading novels are… But if you have very cool beverage with floating ice, it’s nice not too fight against the ice on your teeth.

We’re in the middle of a climate crisis and the war on plastic straws is emblematic of everything that’s wrong about our policies. We’re looking way to hard at something totally inconsequential.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#205

Post by imgabe »

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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#206

Post by strken »

pg314 wrote: post #74
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 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.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#207

Post by evandijk70 »

newaccount74 wrote: post #201
cortesoft wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When they banned plastic straws in the EU, all of the sudden two reusable replacement products appeared on the market: Glass straws and stainless steel straws. They are such an upgrade to plastic straws that I don't understand why we haven't been using them all along.

I live in the EU, and I have never seen a glass or stainless steel straw.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#208

Post by hef19898 »

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,…

Once, a couple of years ago, I had a job at chemical company. They produced additives, stuff you add to, e.g., plastics to improve certain characteristics. One thing they experimented with was additives that helped to break down plastics into molecules you also find naturally. In my best layman's term, below micro-plastics and something that is found in the environment anyway and will just become part of the natural cycle. In tests, they managed to achieve that (based on legal limits for plastics in soil samples, within a year in the ground. meaning, any plastic concentrations dropped below legal limits and detectability. Quite nice. Not sure what happened to that, being a new product it wasn't cheap to produce (yet). Not sure if it was even suitable for most use cases.

Re: An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

#210

Post by newaccount74 »

evandijk70 wrote: post #207
newaccount74 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they banned plastic straws in the EU, all of the sudden two reusable replacement products appeared on the market: Glass straws and stainless steel straws. They are such an upgrade to plastic straws that I don't understand why we haven't been using them all along.

I live in the EU, and I have never seen a glass or stainless steel straw.

In Austria they sometimes sell them in supermarkets (in the special offer section of discounters like Hofer/Aldi).

You can get them in kitchenware stores (expensive ones from WMF, or cheap ones from Sewa), and even Ikea sells them.

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