It can prevent cold liquids from hitting sensitive teeth.
I agree, and i do try to make sure my straws will end up in a landfill, and not the ocean.
Yeah, i decline all sorts of single-use stuff. No, i don’t need a fork, chopsticks, a little pouch of soy sauce, a tiny packet of ketchup, or a paper napkin. (We use cloth napkins, that rarely need to be washed more than once a week or two, and get washed as part of a larger load.)
Which is why the packaging industry shifted to plastic decades ago. With lighter loads, trucks burn less fuel. This is true for electric vehicles as well. Plus there is less breakage and loss of product.
With most things environmentally and the planet, we have too many people on the earth to live the lifestyles that we have all culturally accustomed to. Luckily the human population is on a decline, it just may take longer to get there.
I do that too, except this week I’m out of town in a hotel so I need the plastic fork for my take-out food.
Ok, they used actual Mason jars years ago; those are the ones I saved. Now it seems they’ve switched to some other sort of generic glass jars.
I guess we generate way too much plastic refuse to just dump it all into active volcanos.
When coca-cola (or maybe it was Pepsi) switched to plastic bottles, they ran an ad showing a woman driving a station wagon full of kids, with groceries in the back. And as she drove, a bag fell over, and the bottles rolled out, and they bounced around the back of the station wagon as the women was busy dealing with the kids and driving.
The message was clear: these bottles won’t break on your drive home, no matter how hectic that drive is.
The containers can also be redesigned, so that instead of cylindrical glass jars to hold juice, it can be packaged in squarish plastic ones that allow more to be shipped in the same volume.
Don’t know why, but I found this hilarious!
Better to build incinerators, capture the released energy, clean the gasses and put toxic ashes in stable landfills.
Would they, though? ISTM that plenty of merchandise is displayed and purchased unpackaged (hand tools, fresh produce, clothing, books, spools of thread, etc.), and consumers don’t seem to be stampeding away from it to choose plastic-wrapped versions instead.
Of course consumers don’t want to purchase items that are actually damaged, but we don’t demand or prefer that everything be wrapped in plastic to avoid damage. We can manage just fine with a lot less plastic packaging than we currently have, most of which is wrapped for the convenience of the shipper and/or the seller rather than in deference to consumer preferences.
Well, there are many bar shampoos, which save not only on plastic packaging but also on wasteful water weight. There are also some places, like my local hardware store, where you can buy liquid soaps and similar by the fluid ounce using your own refillable containers.
Ultimately, reusing containers and purchasing less-processed versions of products (e.g., dried beans instead of canned, bar soaps instead of liquid, etc.) is always going to be the most sustainable way to go. Trying to find a way to make huge amounts of single-use packaging material more disposable in an environmentally sensitive manner is always going to be less effective than simply reducing the amount of such material that we use in the first place.
That said…
If you really want to win the Eco-Friendly Crunchy Hippie sweepstakes, daylily plants (Hemerocallis fulva) have edible hollow stalks (and flowers, and tubers) that make quite good drinking straws, especially when somewhat dried out. Just make sure to blow through them as you collect them to dislodge anyone that may happen to be living there. 
(No, seriously, they tend to be quite clean and effective, and unbeatable as far as sustainability goes: just throw them in the compost after use.)
Some things are that way, and that’s fine. But, I need something to put my blueberries in, I’m not just carrying them out of the store in my hands. Same with the meat that I purchase, or even the cheese that I buy.
I took @thorny_locust’s example to be more about consumer goods like headphones or electronics that come in thick plastic packaging that requires great effort to open. While I don’t disagree that those are annoying, I also think that they are done that way to reduce theft and shrinkage.
Convenience of the shipper and seller translates into lower cost for the consumer.
Yeah, I’ve used those, I don’t like them and would consider them to be an inferior product. Don’t know about price, they may be cheaper.
I suppose that’s a possibility, but I’ve never seen that service anywhere. I wouldn’t mind refilling my plastic shampoo bottle, assuming that they are using a brand and “flavor” that I like. I would think it’s easier to have a large variety of products if they are all individually packaged than if you have big tanks of them that get pumped out.
At my supermarket, next to the bulk produce and things like dried beans are, is a roll of plastic bags. I suppose I could bring my own.
I do use bar soap, but it comes in a plastic or wax covered paper that is not really biodegradable.
I got nothing against reducing the amount of plastic waste we produce, I just don’t think that we can replace or eliminate all of it, and attempting to do so will actually be counterproductive, both directly in that it requires more resources, and indirectly as people get fatigued about it and start refusing even the low hanging fruit.
Okay, so I don’t have a compost. What difference does it make if I throw one of those in the trash rather than a plastic straw?
I’ll just clean my silicone straws with a pipe clear instead of those daylilies. The straws don’t require frequent cleaning
Not much in terms of weight or volume, but of course the plant stalk decomposes much more rapidly and organically. If it accidentally gets into the ocean, it’s not contributing material to garbage patches or beach refuse and so on.
Hmmmm. What climate do they grow in? How many plants per acre? Would they have to be harvested by hand, or could you mechanize it?
Daylilies grow like weeds in most temperate climates with average rainfall and soil (hence the common nicknames “ditch lilies” and “outhouse lilies”, as well as their ubiquity in corporate landscaping). But I have no idea how one would harvest their stalks commercially.
I’ve heard lots of people complain about those plastic bubbles. I’ve never heard anybody say that they like them. When I complain about them to the stores, they don’t say ‘most people like them’, they say ‘yes, we know, but that’s the only way we can get that product.’
We are, of course, hanging around with different people. Do you have evidence for most consumers liking the plastic bubbles?
Re the stickers: I’m talking about plastic stickers, sometimes advertising something else entirely, sometimes labels on individual items that are already inside an outer package that also has labels on it. If I’m eating an apple, I don’t want to eat a piece of plastic stuck to it. If I’m wearing a shirt, I don’t want to have two or three different pieces of plastic stuck to it, plus a couple of additional tags attached with that annoying bit of white plastic which, if not removed carefully, leaves a bit to jab into your skin or litter your floor.
I would design it the same way they used to design mustard bottles, with an angle of the neck that allows a spoon or knife to reach all the mustard, instead of an angle that makes it impossible to do so. I don’t see why that would cost any more than the current designs.
As has been said previously in this thread: burning plastic releases toxins into the air.
It’s not only small expensive items; for which the theft problem used to be dealt with by keeping them on the wall behind the salesclerks. It’s also multiple cheap things which used to be routinely sold loose or on a cardboard card; many of which are still readily thievable if in a plastic bubble, because the bubbles aren’t all that large; and many of which the stores have told me they’d be happier to continue to sell loose or on a smaller cardboard tag, but they can’t get them that way.
Well, not really. Even if you do recycle plastic into something – plastic boards, carpet, a fleece jacket, a toothbrush, or whatever, eventually that thing ends up in a landfill when it wears out. As already mentioned, the quality degrades when it gets recycled, so it can be recycled maybe a few times at most. At best it’s just delaying when it gets to the landfill.
As an aside, this might be a problem with some modern airliners when they reach the end of their lives, too. An aluminum airplane can be broken up as scrap metal at the end of its useful life. That won’t be the case with the Boeing 787 or Airbus A350, which use a lot of carbon fiber. Maybe the fuel savings from the lighter airplane make up for that; I don’t know.
I would like to be able to do that, but I’m not aware of any service like that near me. I have started buying some cleaning products as small bottles of concentrate which you mix with water in a reusable spray bottle. Then you just have a small glass bottle to toss in the recycling instead of a big plastic one. I figure that’s the next best thing. Grove (available at Target) is one such brand that sells cleaning products in that form.
One thing I hate, hate, hate, is when I order I order something from Doordash/Uber Eats, specifically decline plastic utensils, etc., and when my order arrives is still contains plastic utensils. I think restaurant employees just put them in every take out order out of habit, without even looking at whether or not the customer actually requested them.
Speaking of compost, I’ve seen some plastics recently labeled “Composable*”
*In industrial composting facilities only. Not suitable for backyard composting.
I have always wondered if that was a better solution, or just more greenwashing. Most people probably don’t have an industrial composting facility near them to take them to, but California recently started curbside composable/organic materials collection, and I’m pretty sure they do take plastics labelled as composable.
Yeah, municipal compostables collection is nice work if you can get it. I pay a subscription to a non-municipal composting company to pick up my kitchen scraps every couple weeks (and give me a discount on the garden compost they sell), but I don’t think they take compostable plastics.
I don’t know what you mean by “plastic bubbles.” Are you talking about the plastic that is on items like headphones and the like? Yeah, that stuff’s hard to open sometimes, but, as I said, that’s usually done to prevent theft, not because consumers like them.
I never said they did, so I don’t know why you would ask for evidence of something I never claimed.
I really don’t know what you are talking about here.
Okay, apples and other fruit that you buy in bulk often have a tiny little sticker on them that has their PLU on it. I don’t find it that hard to take them off. What annoyed me was a trend for a while where they were stamping that info on the fruit.
And the amount of plastic waste we are talking about (and is it even plastic, or is it waxy paper?) is miniscule.
When I buy shirts, they sometimes have a bit of tape that holds them into a rolled up shape, is that what you are talking about? I don’t know if you have a different experience, but in mine, we are talking literally about maybe 3 inches of 1/2" tape.
Well, looking and thinking about it, I think that the design is so that you can get as much out by squeezing as possible. If the neck is wider, then squeezing becomes less effective, and leaves more, meaning you have to get out the knife to get it out. Most people are too lazy to do so, so they probably end up wasting more with that design.
Besides, I always store my condiment bottles nozzle down, especially as they get low, which means that there is very, very little left by the time I’m done.
I really don’t know what you mean with these bubbles at this point. Can you give a specific example of a product with this plastic bubble? There is plastic packaging, and I’ll agree that some of it is a pain to open, but there is also quite a bit that isn’t. One of the things about online sales is that they have less concern about theft, so the packages don’t need to have anti-tampering devices.
Delaying getting to the landfill means less stuff gets there. Instead of new plastic being used and discarded it is reused. Also, if we can reduce plastic back basically into the oil it was made from, it seems like it should be indefinitely reusable.
Yeah, making things more durable makes them harder to recycle. It’s a similar problem with wind turbines, where there are enormous carbon fiber blades that can’t be recycled.