The important ones are not just important but typically a great deal more difficult to accomplish. I will reference the NYT article (it was a quiz) which stated that the most effective consumer-end changes that could be made, to combat climate change specifically, were not flying on airplanes and not eating animal products. Less plastic waste was not going to affect climate change.
However, low-hanging fruit is still fruit.
I am not confident on landfills staying in perfect condition for hundreds of years. And no, we don’t have infinite room for landfills, particularly nearby large population centers. Trucking plastic garbage to landfills hundreds of km away is not a solution.
Reducing the production of single use plastics is a good solution. And this includes plastic bags, straws, containers and more.
Much single use plastic can be replaced with alternatives.
I"m including plastic straws in the category of single use plastic consumer products that should be replaced with alternatives. I’m not saying that we should ONLY be working on eliminating plastic straws. That indeed would be silly.
Perhaps the most important cost is political capital. When you go after things that people use in their daily lives, you reduce their willingness to make more sacrifices in the future. Keep pushing them, and you get a backlash that undoes all your efforts and then some. If those things you went after are a small part of the problem, you just killed your ability to tackle the big problems.
Activists should learn that peopple have a limit as to how far they will be pushed, so you need to be far more selective about the pushing you do. Winning the battle for straws at the expense of public support for more important initiatives is stupid.
What, as opposed to trucking it to a port, loading it on a ship, and sending it to be ‘recycled’ in Asia where much of it winds up in rivers and ultimately the ocean? Come on. If we can do that, we can open new landfills here. And ‘hundreds of kilometers’? Where? What’s the farthest land fill from a population center now? What’s the average trucking distance now, and how does that compare to shipping it to Asia?
Recycling failures and workarounds are responsible for a lot of the plastic trash in the ocean. If the stuff had just been put in landfills, it would never have made it to the ocean.
Also, plastic sequesters carbon.
Does anyone remember why we went to plastic bags in the first place? Part of the reason was to stop outbreaks of E-Coli. Reusing bags that you put meat, fruits and vegetables into is a good way to spread bacteria. So of course at my grocery store they have to put all meat, vegetables and fruits into separate plastic bags before they go into my cloth tote. Fine work, people.
In my city they’ve now banned all plastic cutlery. Come to Edmonton, and experience the joy of putting a cardboard spoon in your mouth. It’s gross.
We reuse every single-use bag we get. Between dog poop pickup, garbage can lining and cat box cleaning they all get used. Or did. Now we’re running out, so I had to buy dedicated poop bags and dedicated garbage bags for the garbages.
Guess what? I weighed one of the single use bags and the commercial replacement we now have to buy, and the commercial garbage bags are almost 10X heavier, meaning 10X more plastic per use. Excellent work, environmentalists.
Excluded middle.
The alternative I favour is to not create the single use plastic in the first place that ends up in the landfill. I am trying to make that as clear as possible, but people keep missing that. Sigh.
I was able to find cheap plastic bags that are very thin and weigh about the same as the grocery bags they replace. And i only discard as many as i need to line the cat-box trash. And my neighbors are discarding fewer plastic bags.
It’s a minor nuisance for me, but my guess is that it does lead to less plastic waste. Of course, it’s been replaced with paper bag waste, which might not be any greener. But maybe it is. So i guess I’ve become a slightly grumpy supporter of the ban.
(I still oppose the plastic straw ban, because there’s really not a good replacement for plastic straws, imho. Also, plastic straws have to represent at least an order of magnitude less plastic than the bags. How many straws does anyone actually use, anyway?)
I don’t know if it’s the farthest (I suspect not), but Portland trucks its garbage 180 miles (300 km) to landfills in eastern Oregon.
That carbon was already sequestered before it was pumped to the surface and made into straws, toys, clamshell containers, packing peanuts, etc. Sequestering plastic in landfills does nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
What’s the deal with these scented pellets that claim to make your clothes smell nice for long periods? I bought some at the dollar store while bored during Covid. I would have guessed that this was some chemical-heavy liquid. But it seems to be mainly plastic micro beads. They don’t dissolve in the washer AFAIK. Is this stuff as environmentally bad as it seems?
Also, every ethnic grocery store seems to have tons of plastic bags. Not complaining.
I kind of like the wooden cutlery sone places have.
There is research into plastics more easily broken down by specific bacteria. This is the future, not banning useful items.
Plastic-eating bacteria are real, and exist today. It’s not some guess at what might happen.
They aren’t currently very common or important. But evolution works quickly on bacteria. I expect to see issues in my lifetime regarding plastic decaying in conditions where no one wanted it to decay.
Of course they are real. But not widely used, practical at any temperature or environment (e.g. ocean), or available for every type of plastic. This will change with time.
You could be right about unwanted decay too.
An estimated 500 million plastic straws are used in the United States alone. PER DAY.
That’s 182 billion in a year. At .42 gram/straw, that’s 76 million kilograms (168 million pounds) of plastic straws in a year.
Yes, there are more plastics being thrown away every year from other uses. That’s why moving away from plastic straws is not the ONLY THING WE SHOULD DO.
People are currently using 1.2 million plastic bottles PER MINUTE. 91% of these are thrown away after a single use. This is not remotely sustainable.
100 billion plastic bags thrown away in the USA alone, made from 12 million barrels of crude oil. This is not remotely sustainable.
Cite? There are only about 300 million PEOPLE in the US. This suggests the average person uses two plastic straws every day. That seems implausible.
It’s a commonly cited figure, which may be an over-estimate. It’s hard to get a firm number - some have said it’s as low as 125 million per day.
One would have to get a handle on the entire straw manufacturing and distribution network to get a proper estimate, I suppose.
Perhaps we could just settle on “a shitload thrown away every day.”
The number comes from a 9 year old who estimated it based on some calls he made.
News outlets went ahead and ran with it for years, without ever bothering to verify it themselves.
Argument from incredulity. In a country of 300 million people, ANYTHING that gets used by everyone results in big scary numbers. For example, in 2018 the average American bought 7 pairs of shoes. Seems high to me, but that’s from National Geographic. If everyone does this, that’s 2.1 billion pairs of shoes per year! Shoes have a very high percentage of plastic in them. As much as 90%, or 11 plastic bottles. So shoes use up the equivalent of 23.1 billion plastic bottles. The average bottle is 8-10 grams, so we’re talking about roughly 200 billion grams of plastic waste. If the average straw is .5 grams, that’s the equivalent of 400 billion plastic straws, just for shoes!
Or going by weight, it’s 200 million kg. Almost three times the amount used for straws according to your number, which seems high in the first place.
You know those blister packs that pills come in? Those and pill vials account for 100,000 TONNES of plastic waste each year. And they aren’t recyclable.
Now add up the thousands of ther things we use plastic for. About 36 million tonnes per year. Plastic straws make up 1/500th of the plastic produced each year.
We need to reduce single use plastics in many areas, not just straws. Your cites just reinforce that. How many times do I have to repeat this before it sinks in?
I use about 20 straws a year. When i used to commute every day, it might have been 100 straws a year. I may be guilty of falsely extrapolating my experience. Maybe the average American uses 500 straws a year, even though i find that dumbfounding.
But there’s more plastic waste in a single order of takeout Chinese for my family of three than in my annual use of straws. I’m sorry, but it’s just too small an amount for me to get excited about. And it’s a great deal of value for that tiny amount of plastic.
I remain convinced that the only reason anyone thought to remove plastic straws is because of a charismatic photo of a sea turtle with a straw in its nose. I would reduce plastic use far more if, i dunno, we got rid of those plastic armor packages that protect tiny purchase from shoplifting. Or if someone developed a more environmentally sound takeout package. Lots of effort poured into useless changes makes people feel like they are doing something good while they don’t make any real changes. People going out and buying a fancy metal straw and a set of brushes that they rarely use are using more resources, not fewer.
Rather than banning some types of plastic bags, we should be charged for taking a new bag home from the market. That actually encourages reuse, instead of just diverting the waste stream from plastic to paper. We could do what Germany does, and explicitly tax packaging, based on a realistic cost of disposal. That law led to the invention of origami cardboard, which was a huge environmental savings over the masses of styrofoam it replaced. There is lots of environmental regulation i support.
Well, you can assert it, but that doesn’t mean it’s proven or true. Putting single use plastics in landfills seems like a perfectly good idea, amd a hell of a lot better than what we are doing now, which is often shipping them across the world in fuel-consuming trucks and ships, only to be dumped in the ocean at the destination.
You can thank recycling advocates who mandated recycling for items which had no secondary recycled goods market. A lot of it wound up being stored in huge warehouses hoping to find a market, only to either eventually be shipped overseas or shipped to a landfill.
And you need to contend with the envionmental and public health consequences of doing away with those bags. As I pointed out above, our household single-use plastic usage has gone UP since the ban, because the commercial bags we are forced to buy are thicker and heavier. As for straws, we just ordered a few thousand from Amazon, because paper straws SUCK. Or rather, they don’t after a while. And they feel terrible in your mouth.
The problem I have with a lot of environmental policy is that it seems to be often driven by a crisis (sometimes manufactured or exaggeratrd) followed by a media frenzy, followed by terrible laws passed in haste. In fact, the rise of plastic bag use came in part to reduce the spread of E.Coli, but also to fix another environmental panic of the time, this time the cutting down of trees to make the wood for paper bags. I seem to recall that McDonalds went to styrofoam packaging instead of paper for that reason at the time, plus the polystyrene had good insulating properties which kept the burgers warm longer and therefore required less time undermheat lamps as orders were being prepared. Environment FTW!
Does anyone else here remember ‘the garbage crisis’ of 1987? It was another panic set off by environmentalists when a garbage barge (The ‘Mobro 4000’) couldn’t get permission to dock, and it was turned into metaphor for landfill issues in general. We were told that there was a crisis in space for landfills, and that drastic action had to be taken immediately or we’d all be swimming in garbage. That was 35 years ago.
It wasn’t true. It was ginned up hysteria to sell legislation. Yet today there are atill articles being published about the ‘imminent landfill crisis’. I guess if you call an annual crisis, one day you’re bound to be correct.
That’s what happened here in my city. The hysteria over the Mobro 4000 caused our city council to mandate recycling. They had hundreds of thousands of ‘blue boxes’ manufactured (each containing as much plastic as 2800 straws), and all recyclaables had to be sorted and put out separately. Except they had no market for recyclables sorted that way, so no one would buy it. So the stuff filled giant quonset warehouses. When the warehouses filled up, the stuff went to a landfill anyway. One gigantic waste for the environment, giant cost to the people, and extra hassle.
We eventually started shipping our stuff to Asia, but it was so mixed together with unrecyclable material that the stuff was just dumped into rivers, then ultimately rejected completely. That caused the city to come ip with a new plan, scrap all the blie boxes and give each resident three carts: one for plastic and paper, one for compostable material and one to store food scraps for the week that you are supposed to put in your kitchen, but yuck. So several hundred thousand of each cart, probably 50 lbs of plastic or so between them. As for the blue boxes, I suppose they had to be recycled.
All of that takes energy, often more than simply making new stuff.
And also:
So no, it’s not at all clear that banning single use plastics is the best option. Single use plastics may in fact be the least bad option when you factor in all the costs and risks, at peast in some applications.
And that’s why I keep saying over and over and over that single use plastics need to be dealt with. Not just straws.
HELLO! Is this thing on?
You know, straws have always been a cheap single use item. But i wonder if anyone sells straws made of straw. I bet that would work better than paper, although they are brittle and might be hard to ship.