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An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)

397 points by worldvoyageur 4y ago

MarkLowenstein 4y ago
It's a deceptive title, but it comes straight from the blog post. It's not going to teach you about straws (thankfully...are straws that interesting?). It tells you about the sources of plastic waste in general and justifies the most efficacious solutions to avoid plastic pollution. It is a short article focused on common sense, appropriate pictures, and well-chosen data.
- gumby 4y ago
  > thankfully...are straws that interesting? I clicked on the link specifically because I thought it might be about straws themselves. I agree straws don’t sound that interesting but I don’t really know much about them and for all I know there’s something interesting about their manufacture, perhaps the difference in sizes, or something else. OTOH I am already well aware of plastic pollution problem and straws’ relative place in it (both perceived and real).
  - xtat 4y ago
    same
twobitshifter 4y ago
I agree with the message, but some states, the type that ban plastic straws, have made recycling a requirement. A message not touched on is reducing the amount of plastic that we produce and consume should be a goal, but with attention paid to the secondary effects. For example, if you don’t wrap those peppers in plastic they’ll spoil and that may be worse for the planet than shrink wrap. But what if you cover them in edible wax instead? Whats the footprint of each decision? Sometimes plastic will win out and other times we are being wasteful. In SE Asia, when you buy a single drink from the convenience store, it comes within a plastic bag, and you always get a straw. A plastic bag and plastic straw for a drink in a plastic bottle.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > But what if you cover them in edible wax instead? Whats the footprint of each decision? "states that ban plastic straws" generally use something biodegradable instead. The policy, IMO, is pretty simple to figure out. The reason plastic is used everywhere is because plastic is uber cheap. Those peppers are wrapped in plastic because it adds less than a penny per unit and gives them a much better shelf life. So, the simple solution isn't an outright ban of plastics, but rather a plastic tax. And what's the easiest way to impose that? Via a fossil fuel oil tax. This would allow companies producing these products to evaluate their individual cost benefits of wrapping everything in plastic. The rub is, this would have to be a global tax. Otherwise, we'll just be outsourcing our pollution problems. You'd also have to increase shipping taxes to a point where local manufacturing is the better financial option so bad actor companies don't simply manufacture in a nation with no oil tax. Unfortunately, I think anything else is just posturing that will fall short. If businesses don't feel a squeeze, they won't change behavior. And the only squeeze they feel is financial.
  - wildmanx 4y ago
    > Unfortunately, I think anything else is just posturing that will fall short. No, please don't go that fundamentalist route. The "all or nothing" approach won't lead us anywhere. Steady meaningful steps is the key. Build awareness, tackle one problem at a time, improve one aspect at a time, and you'll be able to bring people with you, allow them to adjust, business to be created, etc. You can't be perfect over night. If you try, it won't happen, not today, not tomorrow, and not 10 or 30 years from now. If you do it steadily step-by-step, you'll at least have a chance.
    - cogman10 4y ago
      It's not an all or nothing thing. But rather a "meaningful vs unmeaningful" sort of thing. The smallest meaningful thing we could do to impact waste production is a tax in one city or nation. Meaningless things are things like banning plastic straws, awareness things, or even to a large extent funding day long excursions to the beach to pick up trash. Those are things more similar to urinating into a hurricane. It's not a fundamentalist thing. Rather, it's an Amdahl's law thing. The politically and socially popular actions have almost no real effect on climate change or waste production. The problem is we are mad at the wrong people. We blame individuals for waste when the amount of waste an individual produces is a TINY fraction of the waste generated by corporations. Further, a lot of that waste for a citizen is unavoidable. I can't help the fact that every item of food I eat has been wrapped in plastic, bundled in plastic, and then is shipped from halfway across the global only for the grocery store or restaurant to unceremoniously throw away that plastic garbage. Frankly, we won't reduce our climate impact through good feeling programs and broken corporate promises. We NEED laws that impose monetary losses on businesses for waste production to change anything.
aeternum 4y ago
A a glance, it seems to make sense that burying straws/garbage in a landfill is better than throwing it in the ocean but chemically, plastic decomposes significantly faster when exposed to UV/sunlight. It also seems as though ocean organisms are more able to consume plastic & oil. It sounds crazy, but could it be that trash in the ocean is actually a better option?
- changoplatanero 4y ago
  if it is buried in a landfill is there less chance that it will end up in the body of an animal and work it's way up the food chain?
- loudmax 4y ago
  Theoretically possible, but we should want a lot more data to support that conclusion. There seems to be data that suggests that at least certain types of plastics have a deleterious effect on humans, and probably other animals as well. As long as the ecological effects of plastic aren't completely understood, it's probably better for it to wind up in landfills than in the food chain. After all, plastics are derived from petroleum which came from underground to begin with.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  There is basically no UV on most of the oceans volume. I don't know where we stand better chance of getting a plastic consuming bacteria. (Do we even want that?) But the rate of natural decomposition of plastic on the ocean or underground is probably similar.
- slavik81 4y ago
  Why do we want it to decompose? It's made of carbon, so if it sits underground in a place where it doesn't break down, isn't that effectively sequestered carbon? Decomposing it into CO2 and releasing it into the global carbon cycle seems counter-productive. What's the actual benefit of doing that?
  - aeternum 4y ago
    Hmm good point, it is basically a long hydrocarbon.
drewg123 4y ago
If you want to save the oceans, ban plastic fishing equipment, as nets and other gear is the biggest plastic polluter in the oceans: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
- jjcm 4y ago
  What material would you recommend instead?
  - drewg123 4y ago
    Hemp, or anything else non-toxic and biodegradable.
  - chillingeffect 4y ago
    Also: we don't need to eat seafood.
- munificent 4y ago
  This article is a great example of how poor use of math can do a disservice to the public. The article says: > Lost and abandoned fishing gear which is deadly to marine life makes up the majority of large plastic pollution in the oceans This is one of those statistics that shouldn't even pass the sniff test. Think about all of the millions of ways that humans use plastic across every single industry, job, and area of life. And yet somehow ghost gear is supposed to be greater than all of that put together?! Are fisheries just dumping a hundred nets in the ocean for every one they use or something? The number makes no sense. And, indeed, the report in question says no such thing. What it does say is: "12 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year" and "640,000 tonnes of ghost gear enters the ocean every year". So that means ghost gear is only around 5% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean per year. In fact the report itself states that "Ghost gear is estimated to make up 10% of the plastic waste in our oceans". Of course, that's not alarming enough, so it also goes on to state that "[ghost gear] represents a much higher proportion of large plastics found floating at the surface" and "over 85% of the rubbish on the seafloor on seamounts and ocean ridges, and in the Great Pacific Gyre." That sounds bad but... it should come as no surprise. Most plastic that ends up in the ocean is trash. Land-based trash plastic that is large or heavy enough to sink is less likely to flow down rivers and end up in the middle of the ocean. It will get broken up by trash processing, sink to the bottom of rivers, or otherwise not make it all the way to the ocean intact. So of course you'll see a disproportionate amount of ghost gear when you look on the seafloor or at large items—ghost gear is large plastic that is deliberately designed to sink in seawater and then is deliberately dragged out into the middle of the ocean and thrown overboard. If your primary goal is to save animals, then Greenpeace's focus on ghost gear makes sense. But if your goal is to reduce the overall amount of plastic ending up in the ocean (which also saves animals), then ghost gear is only a relatively small fraction of the problem.
p1mrx 4y ago
The Pasig River in Manila doesn't seem to look nearly as bad as the author claims: https://www.google.com/maps/@14.5674227,121.0375559,3a,90y,77.8h,72.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sloMcVo1GS9fu0WjnCQ5pPQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@14.5674227,121.0375559,3a,90y,7...
- Symbiote 4y ago
  That particular river was cleaned up in 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_of_the_Pasig_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_of_the_Pasig_Ri... There are plenty of (older?) pictures of it covered in plastic online. I don't think there's any reason to doubt the author's picture.
  - hk__2 4y ago
    You can also see it on Google Street view as it has some imagery from 2014.
    - rootsudo 4y ago
      It's still pretty bad, but it's a river, it depends where you look - the image depicated is near Tondo or the mouth where it enters Manila Bay.
- hk__2 4y ago
  If you reverse-search the second image you can find a 2018 article that gives a bit more detail [1]. It does describe the Pasig River as "Manila's most important and heavily polluted waterways". [1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5806619/Manila-trash-bin-waterway-choked-plastic.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5806619/Manila...
wildmanx 4y ago
> And anything that goes into the landfill does not get into the ocean. That's just not true. All plastic eventually ends up in the ocean. The "it's all decomposed in 50 years" is a myth. There was a pretty convincing article about all of that here on HN a while back.
- mike_d 4y ago
  How would a plastic straw in a sealed landfill in Kansas ever make it to the ocean? Have you ever been to a modern landfill? Plastics are not evil creatures that grow legs and night and burrow out looking for the closest body of water.
- quietbritishjim 4y ago
  What would 50 years matter? Fossils are found in ground that are 10s of millions of years old. (I suspect the time until a landfill is disturbed is likely to be somewhere between those two extremes, but who knows.)
dylan604 4y ago
"Globally: One and only one solution exists to curbing the deluge of oceanic plastics. The international community has to get the Philippines and similar countries enough money to have proper garbage collection." What would this look like? I'm guessing it's more than just giving them a fleet of trucks and landfill equipment.
- archarios 4y ago
  Ideally, we would have funding for chemical recycling of plastics which would make a circular plastic economy. I don't know if this is actually a viable solution at scale but it's the dream.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    I wonder if that would financially work out and not just make it so expensive to ship our recycling over there to no longer make sense, causing us to ship the stuff to the next cheap country throwing it into the ocean again.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Eventually, you go through all of the countries like this so that you have to deal with your own shit rather than shipping of to someone else. This would be the ideal thing would it not?
    - throwaway48292 4y ago
      It all depends on laws/incentives, landfill locally would surely be cheaper than shipping around the world for recycling/"recycling". So we would need to invent the process and pass a law that encourages or forces its use.
reactspa 4y ago
Can someone please clarify for me why some communities in the West Coast of USA banned plastic straws but not plastic "take-away" cups (that are also used only once)? I want to understand the logic that was used to do this. I've googled around for this, and while people like pmarca mock it, I've never found the original reasoning and logic for this action.
- elliekelly 4y ago
  I have no answer but every time I get a cold drink at starbucks and see the new “no straw” lid (that seems to use as much or more plastic as the old lid + straw) I have the same question. It seems more about the “no straw” trend than about actually reducing plastic.
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    My pet theory is that the 'no plastic straw' movement was started by someone as a sick joke to see how far people would take a silly idea to feel like they are helping save the environment.
- buildsjets 4y ago
  Plastic straws were banned because a video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in it's nostril went viral and the decision was made based on emotions, not analysis. If it had been a plastic cup stuck on it's head, they would have banned cups instead. Too bad it didn't get a plastic tampon applicator stuck in it's nose, because I sure see a ton of them washed up on the beach, seems like a prime target to eliminate.
haunter 4y ago
Went to McDonald's today to get a milkshake, they only have paper straws here since 2019 iirc. Anyways the milkshake itself doesn't but I assume our saliva "softens" the paper straw so much that after a couple of minutes I had to turn the straw around to use the other end otherwise I just can't get the milkshake through lol if that make sense. I'm thinking about getting 2 straws next time.
- McNutty 4y ago
  Personally I just drink from the cup. I never use a straw when drinking at home, I don't magically require one when not at home.
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    Personally, part of the enjoyable expereince of drinking a milkshake is drinking it through a straw. Drinking a milkshake like a regular drink gives me no pleasure. I suppose if they ever went to paper straws where I live, i would just have to order a personal metal reusable straw.
    - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      > I suppose if they ever went to paper straws where I live, i would just have to order a personal metal reusable straw. I suppose that's the sound of the system working. Certainly I note use fewer plastic bags since they started charging for them, though I have also thrown away quite a few broken, much, much thicker, bags and bought a lot more small bin bags since then. But neither the straw or bag are anywhere near a major contributor to plastic use, though I can see plastic bags certainly were a major litter source and are much less often found in hedges now.
    - troyvit 4y ago
      Man I remember being a kid and drinking a McDonald's shake through a straw. It was so frustrating. My cheeks would be sucked in like a 60 year old actress with really bad plastic surgery and even then I'd just get a little bit.
moralestapia 4y ago
Weird, first it says, "[...] zero plastic thrown in a garbage can in the United States enters the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre", in bold letters. But then later in the article, it admits that about 50% of US plastics (it is unclear whether is all of them or only the ones meant to be recycled) were shipped "to Indonesia and Vietnam, which proceeded to improperly dump over 80% of it." So, it does go into the ocean in the end, whether the fault of the US or any other country, the point is that your plastic straw has a big chance of finding its way to the sea.
- animal_spirits 4y ago
  Garbage can -> landfill recycling can -> overseas countries -> ocean
- dmd 4y ago
  I think you rather missed the point of the article.
- janj 4y ago
  I thought it was pretty clear, if you put the straw in the garbage can it will not enter the garbage patch, it goes to the landfill. If you put it in the recycling bin it has a good chance of entering the garbage patch.
- McNutty 4y ago
  The point being made in the article is that plastic thrown into garbage cans in the US end up securely held in the sealed landfills as described,while plastics sent for recycling in the US end up getting exported and ultimately improperly dumped. The author is saying that you should put plastics in the garbage rather than in the recycling.
- mike_d 4y ago
  > your plastic straw has a big chance of finding its way to the sea IF you put it in a recycling bin. Here is a quick breakdown: - Black bin (trash): Goes to a landfill where it is regulated by the EPA and stored in containment and the off-gas is harvested for energy - Blue bin (recycling): Gets shipped by boat across an ocean to a third world country where it is dumped because that is the most profitable thing to do and it is no longer subject to regulatory oversight that it actually gets recycled
legitster 4y ago
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 actually help, but has imposed huge and everyday annoyances on everyone. These should be the exact opposite goals of environmental reforms when there are much lower hanging fruits available.
- bonestamp2 4y ago
  > the war on plastic straws has been a huge step back I always find it funny when they give me a huge plastic cup with a plastic lid and then a paper straw. If straws are that big of a problem, get sippy cup style lids and skip all straws.
  - dr_orpheus 4y ago
    Starbucks did this, and then people realized that the sippy cup style lids were thicker (to maintain the structure of the sippy part) and actually used more plastic than the old straw/top combo. Starbucks said that the new plastic lids were more easily recycled because they were larger than straws (which aren't normally picked up by recycling machines) so it was still a net positive. But this goes back to the articles point of "its plastic, and its probably not going to get recycled anyway" https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/23/starbucks-straws-ban-2020-environment https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/23/starbucks-s...
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Plastics are cool materials but at the moment they're mostly made from fossil fuels so you're funding some really bad people by using them. They'll only use that money to convince gullible people that climate change isn't happening, that every government regulation will magically have exactly the opposite impact, that solar and wind power are scams, that recycling is bad for the planet and that science and democracy have been taken over by idiot hippies that will kill us all because they stupidly hate fossil fuels for no reason. That's a heavy price to pay.
jnmandal 4y ago
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 landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place. The author is recommending a half measure based on the assumption that the US cannot fix its own problems. They are also implying a false equivalency: banning single use plastics is not the same as recycling plastic. A more equivalent comparison might be the tradeoffs between plastic bottles for soda, water, or oils and glass or metal containers. It is also true that plastic straws are a much smaller problem then other usages of plastic such as bottles or event fishing gear and even bags. Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with reducing plastic usage. Doing so is smart and will be important for the health and well being of future generations -- human and nonhuman -- of life on earth.
- alfor 4y ago
  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 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    > 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 untouched forestland, because it spreads so well on the wind. > ...and advance technology as fast as we can. It's an interesting gamble, certainly - solving the problems created by our current technological development path by pushing further down that development path. It's just not one I expect to work. You don't generally solve problems by "doing more of what made them in the first place."
JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
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 lid all together. But that begs the question, is the sippy cup top more plastic than just a straw and the old lid? Or why not just use the compostable plastic straws that are readily available rather than trying so hard to make your company look "green" by saving the turtles from straws that never end up in the ocean in the first place. Seriously, fuck paper straws. They're up there with coke freestyle machines. Absolute trash.
- hammock 4y ago
  Did you read the article?
- vel0city 4y ago
  Hey now, I like Freestyle machines. Where else am I going to find Cherry Vanilla Coke Zero, Raspberry Peach Mellow Yellow, and Fuze Lemon Tea all on the same fountain?
- chrisdhal 4y ago
  I was with you until the freestyle machine part, they're awesome. Seriously, what's wrong with them? It doesn't prevent you from getting the regular things. I too, hate the paper straws. They are terrible. The "no straws" campaign is just a feel good thing and really does little.
  - JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
    I just find the consistency to be all over the place from machine to machine. Regular coke never tastes like coke. It's fine if you like adding lime/flavorings/etc but just getting the standard flavor of something is just always off.
  - throwaway48375 4y ago
northband 4y ago
My family keeps our own compostable straws in the car. We typically don't ask for straws, lids, bags, etc. There are cases where you may forget, or can't avoid it, but overall it has decreased our yearly plastic use.
barbazoo 4y ago
> If you don't know the exact location where your plastic is recycled, throw it in the regular garbage instead. Very interesting points they are raising. I reached out to https://recyclebc.ca https://recyclebc.ca to find out more about my local recycling org but from what I can find on their website almost all of the end product ends up in BC, Canada or at least North America. Same for the processing which seems to be local. I'll update with what I can find out and correct me if I'm wrong but those people saying everything gets shipped to Asia and dumped into the ocean aren't right, at least not universally. Here in BC at least that doesn't seem to be the case at all. If that's the case I'd really like to know why other places in first world countries aren't doing the same and I'd definitely consider the US a first world country.
LeanderK 4y ago
> And banning straws is just plain stupid. Why? We don't have them anymore in germany. People move on and new solutions get invented. Seeing a plastic straw is weird to me.
- thfuran 4y ago
  I don't think it is especially stupid in and of itself but is it an efficient use of government effort?
- qiskit 4y ago
  > Why? We don't have them anymore in germany. Even more reason to use plastic straws. If there is one country I don't want the US to follow, that's germany. > People move on and new solutions get invented. Like toxic paper straws? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241276 > Seeing a plastic straw is weird to me. What's weird about them?
  - cgrealy 4y ago
    > If there is one country I don't want the US to follow, that's germany. Yeah, it'd suck if the US had higher life expectancy, more political stability, better civil rights, better healthcare, lower unemployment, lower inflation, lower crime..... What a nightmare scenario!
    - qiskit 4y ago
      Yeah, an occupied nation with no sovereignty. Who has to beg for oil and gas from russia and when we tell them to jump, they ask "how high". Vast swathes of the US has higher life expectancy, healthcare, lower unemployement, lower inflation, lower crime than germany. And germany is the leader of censorship in europe. Certainly not a beacon of civil rights. As for inflation... https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/economy/german-inflation-industry-recession/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/economy/german-inflation-indu... The united states is a continental nation with infinite resources. Germany is a tiny european country the size of new mexico. Good luck to germany. They are going to need it. Funny how we are so much worse than germany and yet most people around the world wants to move to the US? "The U.S. continues to be the most desired destination country for potential migrants, as it has since Gallup started tracking these patterns a decade ago. One in five potential migrants (21%) -- or about 147 million adults worldwide -- name the U.S. as their desired future residence. Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and Saudi Arabia appeal to at least 25 million adults each." https://news.gallup.com/poll/211883/number-potential-migrants-worldwide-tops-700-million.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/211883/number-potential-migrant...
andjd 4y ago
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 identified and recycled (such as straws and loose bottle caps) will just be sent to the landfill regardless. How recycling is processed differs a lot across the country, so it's hard to make generalizations. But that doesn't support their final conclusion about whether plastic straws should be banned. The author doesn't give a reason, but implicitly that they think paper straws suck, and must suck. Which a lot of the ones today do. But it's an odd hill to die on, given that basically all straws before 1960 were made of paper. 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. Such companies probably want to get you pissed off by paper straws to demand that your government remind the ban so they can go back to using cheaper plastic straws.
- legitster 4y ago
  > 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.
  - f1refly 4y ago
    "Biodegradable" plastics are a scam, they only break down into smaller parts to eventuelly become microplastic that will accumulate in our bodies.
- anamax 4y ago
  > But it's an odd hill to die on, given that basically all straws before 1960 were made of paper. The fact that all pre-1960 straws were paper does not imply that paper straws, let alone paper straws today, do not suck.
mattacular 4y ago
Interesting but what exactly is the point of this and who is it for? The continued focus on something as myopic as drinking straws and proposed "solutions" to the straw problem that depend on individual choices is actually insane given the point we are at in the battle against climate catastrophe.
Fricken 4y ago
I have a friend who is a quadruple amputee. For him straws are pretty good. For the rest of us, the solution to plastic straws is not straws. They aren't necessary. Of course, it's all bike shedding anyhow. The real problems are big and complex and overwhelming, so we argue about straws instead.
Melatonic 4y ago
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.
- telotortium 4y ago
  Many commercial dishwashers might be specialized for certain dishes, so adding a straw washing machine would be a significant expense. In addition, I've heard that many commercial dishwashers require the dishes to be scrubbed beforehand (see https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/620/types-of-commercial-dishwashers.html#:~:text=Dishes%20must%20be%20scrubbed%20before%20using%20the%20machine https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/620/types-of-commerci...), and straws are quite difficult to scrub. Given that most restaurants that go through a lot of straws want to provide the option for takeout anyway (for which you can't use metal straws), it makes sense that most restaurants don't bother.
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    Don't a lot of restaurants just employ dish washers and not use commercial dishwashers? They are super fast and easy to clean with a brush designed for them
- floren 4y ago
  I've been given a metal straw at a restaurant. My immediate thought: how do I know this is clean on the inside? I can't see in there, it could be full of mold. I just drank from the glass instead, because I'm an able-bodied adult.
- cgrealy 4y ago
  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!
  - asdf123lkjh 4y ago
gorgoiler 4y ago
The topic of landfill sites seems interesting. What do they end up containing in the long run, after all the other material has been eaten or biodegraded? If we come back to a landfill site in two hundred years time is it going to contain a particular type of mineral? Will it just be trash still? On what kinds of timescales does it metamorphose significantly, and into what kinds of material?
dirtyid 4y ago
Trying to find out how much recycling gets diverted to landfills anyway. I'm in a relatively interior region where shipping abroad seems prohibitive, and local recycling facilities clearly do not seem to have capacity to process recycling properly. Still going through the rigamarole of sorting and occasionally cleaning my recyclables even though it seems excessivly wasteful.
ja27 4y ago
Some percentage of our trash stream gets incinerated to generate electricity (then metals etc. are recovered and the remains go into a landfill). I can never find solid stats on what percentage but the claims sound like it's the majority of the trash stream. But we also live so close to the coast that straws and any other litter in the wrong places can easily wash into storm sewers then eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
daxfohl 4y ago
Instead of spending a bunch of money to ship stuff to Asia, then spending a bunch of money to upgrade their waste management facilities, why don't we just have our waste management companies toss unusable plastic from recycling into their landfill next door?
notorandit 4y ago
The continuous economic growth dream is what is causing all of this. Stop it first and you will see a starting point for the realm solution.
eterevsky 4y ago
Small addition: I live in Switzerland, and our straws don't go into the landfill, they are burned to produce electricity.
alimov 4y ago
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?
- imgabe 4y ago
  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.
  - themeiguoren 4y ago
    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?
MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
Reminder that a 9 year old came up with the number of 500 million straws, which would amount to every person using 1.6 a day: https://reason.com/2018/01/26/a-list-of-the-500-million-news-orgs-that/ https://reason.com/2018/01/26/a-list-of-the-500-million-news...
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
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?
- jiri 4y ago
  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 :-(
jarek83 4y ago
> 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?
pahbloo 4y ago
Not the kind of garbage collection I expected a discussion on HN about.
acnops 4y ago
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?

397 points by worldvoyageur 4y ago

It's a deceptive title, but it comes straight from the blog post. It's not going to teach you about straws (thankfully...are straws that interesting?). It tells you about the sources of plastic waste in general and justifies the most efficacious solutions to avoid plastic pollution. It is a short article focused on common sense, appropriate pictures, and well-chosen data.

gumby 4y ago
> thankfully...are straws that interesting? I clicked on the link specifically because I thought it might be about straws themselves. I agree straws don’t sound that interesting but I don’t really know much about them and for all I know there’s something interesting about their manufacture, perhaps the difference in sizes, or something else. OTOH I am already well aware of plastic pollution problem and straws’ relative place in it (both perceived and real).
- xtat 4y ago
  same

twobitshifter 4y ago

I agree with the message, but some states, the type that ban plastic straws, have made recycling a requirement. A message not touched on is reducing the amount of plastic that we produce and consume should be a goal, but with attention paid to the secondary effects. For example, if you don’t wrap those peppers in plastic they’ll spoil and that may be worse for the planet than shrink wrap. But what if you cover them in edible wax instead? Whats the footprint of each decision? Sometimes plastic will win out and other times we are being wasteful. In SE Asia, when you buy a single drink from the convenience store, it comes within a plastic bag, and you always get a straw. A plastic bag and plastic straw for a drink in a plastic bottle.

cogman10 4y ago
> But what if you cover them in edible wax instead? Whats the footprint of each decision? "states that ban plastic straws" generally use something biodegradable instead. The policy, IMO, is pretty simple to figure out. The reason plastic is used everywhere is because plastic is uber cheap. Those peppers are wrapped in plastic because it adds less than a penny per unit and gives them a much better shelf life. So, the simple solution isn't an outright ban of plastics, but rather a plastic tax. And what's the easiest way to impose that? Via a fossil fuel oil tax. This would allow companies producing these products to evaluate their individual cost benefits of wrapping everything in plastic. The rub is, this would have to be a global tax. Otherwise, we'll just be outsourcing our pollution problems. You'd also have to increase shipping taxes to a point where local manufacturing is the better financial option so bad actor companies don't simply manufacture in a nation with no oil tax. Unfortunately, I think anything else is just posturing that will fall short. If businesses don't feel a squeeze, they won't change behavior. And the only squeeze they feel is financial.
- wildmanx 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, I think anything else is just posturing that will fall short. No, please don't go that fundamentalist route. The "all or nothing" approach won't lead us anywhere. Steady meaningful steps is the key. Build awareness, tackle one problem at a time, improve one aspect at a time, and you'll be able to bring people with you, allow them to adjust, business to be created, etc. You can't be perfect over night. If you try, it won't happen, not today, not tomorrow, and not 10 or 30 years from now. If you do it steadily step-by-step, you'll at least have a chance.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    It's not an all or nothing thing. But rather a "meaningful vs unmeaningful" sort of thing. The smallest meaningful thing we could do to impact waste production is a tax in one city or nation. Meaningless things are things like banning plastic straws, awareness things, or even to a large extent funding day long excursions to the beach to pick up trash. Those are things more similar to urinating into a hurricane. It's not a fundamentalist thing. Rather, it's an Amdahl's law thing. The politically and socially popular actions have almost no real effect on climate change or waste production. The problem is we are mad at the wrong people. We blame individuals for waste when the amount of waste an individual produces is a TINY fraction of the waste generated by corporations. Further, a lot of that waste for a citizen is unavoidable. I can't help the fact that every item of food I eat has been wrapped in plastic, bundled in plastic, and then is shipped from halfway across the global only for the grocery store or restaurant to unceremoniously throw away that plastic garbage. Frankly, we won't reduce our climate impact through good feeling programs and broken corporate promises. We NEED laws that impose monetary losses on businesses for waste production to change anything.

aeternum 4y ago

A a glance, it seems to make sense that burying straws/garbage in a landfill is better than throwing it in the ocean but chemically, plastic decomposes significantly faster when exposed to UV/sunlight. It also seems as though ocean organisms are more able to consume plastic & oil. It sounds crazy, but could it be that trash in the ocean is actually a better option?

changoplatanero 4y ago
if it is buried in a landfill is there less chance that it will end up in the body of an animal and work it's way up the food chain?
loudmax 4y ago
Theoretically possible, but we should want a lot more data to support that conclusion. There seems to be data that suggests that at least certain types of plastics have a deleterious effect on humans, and probably other animals as well. As long as the ecological effects of plastic aren't completely understood, it's probably better for it to wind up in landfills than in the food chain. After all, plastics are derived from petroleum which came from underground to begin with.
marcosdumay 4y ago
There is basically no UV on most of the oceans volume. I don't know where we stand better chance of getting a plastic consuming bacteria. (Do we even want that?) But the rate of natural decomposition of plastic on the ocean or underground is probably similar.
slavik81 4y ago
Why do we want it to decompose? It's made of carbon, so if it sits underground in a place where it doesn't break down, isn't that effectively sequestered carbon? Decomposing it into CO2 and releasing it into the global carbon cycle seems counter-productive. What's the actual benefit of doing that?
- aeternum 4y ago
  Hmm good point, it is basically a long hydrocarbon.

drewg123 4y ago

If you want to save the oceans, ban plastic fishing equipment, as nets and other gear is the biggest plastic polluter in the oceans: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...

jjcm 4y ago
What material would you recommend instead?
- drewg123 4y ago
  Hemp, or anything else non-toxic and biodegradable.
- chillingeffect 4y ago
  Also: we don't need to eat seafood.
munificent 4y ago
This article is a great example of how poor use of math can do a disservice to the public. The article says: > Lost and abandoned fishing gear which is deadly to marine life makes up the majority of large plastic pollution in the oceans This is one of those statistics that shouldn't even pass the sniff test. Think about all of the millions of ways that humans use plastic across every single industry, job, and area of life. And yet somehow ghost gear is supposed to be greater than all of that put together?! Are fisheries just dumping a hundred nets in the ocean for every one they use or something? The number makes no sense. And, indeed, the report in question says no such thing. What it does say is: "12 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year" and "640,000 tonnes of ghost gear enters the ocean every year". So that means ghost gear is only around 5% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean per year. In fact the report itself states that "Ghost gear is estimated to make up 10% of the plastic waste in our oceans". Of course, that's not alarming enough, so it also goes on to state that "[ghost gear] represents a much higher proportion of large plastics found floating at the surface" and "over 85% of the rubbish on the seafloor on seamounts and ocean ridges, and in the Great Pacific Gyre." That sounds bad but... it should come as no surprise. Most plastic that ends up in the ocean is trash. Land-based trash plastic that is large or heavy enough to sink is less likely to flow down rivers and end up in the middle of the ocean. It will get broken up by trash processing, sink to the bottom of rivers, or otherwise not make it all the way to the ocean intact. So of course you'll see a disproportionate amount of ghost gear when you look on the seafloor or at large items—ghost gear is large plastic that is deliberately designed to sink in seawater and then is deliberately dragged out into the middle of the ocean and thrown overboard. If your primary goal is to save animals, then Greenpeace's focus on ghost gear makes sense. But if your goal is to reduce the overall amount of plastic ending up in the ocean (which also saves animals), then ghost gear is only a relatively small fraction of the problem.

p1mrx 4y ago

The Pasig River in Manila doesn't seem to look nearly as bad as the author claims: https://www.google.com/maps/@14.5674227,121.0375559,3a,90y,77.8h,72.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sloMcVo1GS9fu0WjnCQ5pPQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@14.5674227,121.0375559,3a,90y,7...

Symbiote 4y ago
That particular river was cleaned up in 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_of_the_Pasig_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_of_the_Pasig_Ri... There are plenty of (older?) pictures of it covered in plastic online. I don't think there's any reason to doubt the author's picture.
- hk__2 4y ago
  You can also see it on Google Street view as it has some imagery from 2014.
  - rootsudo 4y ago
    It's still pretty bad, but it's a river, it depends where you look - the image depicated is near Tondo or the mouth where it enters Manila Bay.
hk__2 4y ago
If you reverse-search the second image you can find a 2018 article that gives a bit more detail [1]. It does describe the Pasig River as "Manila's most important and heavily polluted waterways". [1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5806619/Manila-trash-bin-waterway-choked-plastic.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5806619/Manila...

wildmanx 4y ago

> And anything that goes into the landfill does not get into the ocean. That's just not true. All plastic eventually ends up in the ocean. The "it's all decomposed in 50 years" is a myth. There was a pretty convincing article about all of that here on HN a while back.

mike_d 4y ago
How would a plastic straw in a sealed landfill in Kansas ever make it to the ocean? Have you ever been to a modern landfill? Plastics are not evil creatures that grow legs and night and burrow out looking for the closest body of water.
quietbritishjim 4y ago
What would 50 years matter? Fossils are found in ground that are 10s of millions of years old. (I suspect the time until a landfill is disturbed is likely to be somewhere between those two extremes, but who knows.)

dylan604 4y ago

"Globally: One and only one solution exists to curbing the deluge of oceanic plastics. The international community has to get the Philippines and similar countries enough money to have proper garbage collection." What would this look like? I'm guessing it's more than just giving them a fleet of trucks and landfill equipment.

archarios 4y ago
Ideally, we would have funding for chemical recycling of plastics which would make a circular plastic economy. I don't know if this is actually a viable solution at scale but it's the dream.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  I wonder if that would financially work out and not just make it so expensive to ship our recycling over there to no longer make sense, causing us to ship the stuff to the next cheap country throwing it into the ocean again.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Eventually, you go through all of the countries like this so that you have to deal with your own shit rather than shipping of to someone else. This would be the ideal thing would it not?
  - throwaway48292 4y ago
    It all depends on laws/incentives, landfill locally would surely be cheaper than shipping around the world for recycling/"recycling". So we would need to invent the process and pass a law that encourages or forces its use.

reactspa 4y ago

Can someone please clarify for me why some communities in the West Coast of USA banned plastic straws but not plastic "take-away" cups (that are also used only once)? I want to understand the logic that was used to do this. I've googled around for this, and while people like pmarca mock it, I've never found the original reasoning and logic for this action.

elliekelly 4y ago
I have no answer but every time I get a cold drink at starbucks and see the new “no straw” lid (that seems to use as much or more plastic as the old lid + straw) I have the same question. It seems more about the “no straw” trend than about actually reducing plastic.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  My pet theory is that the 'no plastic straw' movement was started by someone as a sick joke to see how far people would take a silly idea to feel like they are helping save the environment.
buildsjets 4y ago
Plastic straws were banned because a video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in it's nostril went viral and the decision was made based on emotions, not analysis. If it had been a plastic cup stuck on it's head, they would have banned cups instead. Too bad it didn't get a plastic tampon applicator stuck in it's nose, because I sure see a ton of them washed up on the beach, seems like a prime target to eliminate.

haunter 4y ago

Went to McDonald's today to get a milkshake, they only have paper straws here since 2019 iirc. Anyways the milkshake itself doesn't but I assume our saliva "softens" the paper straw so much that after a couple of minutes I had to turn the straw around to use the other end otherwise I just can't get the milkshake through lol if that make sense. I'm thinking about getting 2 straws next time.

McNutty 4y ago
Personally I just drink from the cup. I never use a straw when drinking at home, I don't magically require one when not at home.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  Personally, part of the enjoyable expereince of drinking a milkshake is drinking it through a straw. Drinking a milkshake like a regular drink gives me no pleasure. I suppose if they ever went to paper straws where I live, i would just have to order a personal metal reusable straw.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    > I suppose if they ever went to paper straws where I live, i would just have to order a personal metal reusable straw. I suppose that's the sound of the system working. Certainly I note use fewer plastic bags since they started charging for them, though I have also thrown away quite a few broken, much, much thicker, bags and bought a lot more small bin bags since then. But neither the straw or bag are anywhere near a major contributor to plastic use, though I can see plastic bags certainly were a major litter source and are much less often found in hedges now.
  - troyvit 4y ago
    Man I remember being a kid and drinking a McDonald's shake through a straw. It was so frustrating. My cheeks would be sucked in like a 60 year old actress with really bad plastic surgery and even then I'd just get a little bit.

moralestapia 4y ago

Weird, first it says, "[...] zero plastic thrown in a garbage can in the United States enters the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre", in bold letters. But then later in the article, it admits that about 50% of US plastics (it is unclear whether is all of them or only the ones meant to be recycled) were shipped "to Indonesia and Vietnam, which proceeded to improperly dump over 80% of it." So, it does go into the ocean in the end, whether the fault of the US or any other country, the point is that your plastic straw has a big chance of finding its way to the sea.

animal_spirits 4y ago
Garbage can -> landfill recycling can -> overseas countries -> ocean
dmd 4y ago
I think you rather missed the point of the article.
janj 4y ago
I thought it was pretty clear, if you put the straw in the garbage can it will not enter the garbage patch, it goes to the landfill. If you put it in the recycling bin it has a good chance of entering the garbage patch.
McNutty 4y ago
The point being made in the article is that plastic thrown into garbage cans in the US end up securely held in the sealed landfills as described,while plastics sent for recycling in the US end up getting exported and ultimately improperly dumped. The author is saying that you should put plastics in the garbage rather than in the recycling.
mike_d 4y ago
> your plastic straw has a big chance of finding its way to the sea IF you put it in a recycling bin. Here is a quick breakdown: - Black bin (trash): Goes to a landfill where it is regulated by the EPA and stored in containment and the off-gas is harvested for energy - Blue bin (recycling): Gets shipped by boat across an ocean to a third world country where it is dumped because that is the most profitable thing to do and it is no longer subject to regulatory oversight that it actually gets recycled

legitster 4y ago

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 actually help, but has imposed huge and everyday annoyances on everyone. These should be the exact opposite goals of environmental reforms when there are much lower hanging fruits available.

bonestamp2 4y ago
> the war on plastic straws has been a huge step back I always find it funny when they give me a huge plastic cup with a plastic lid and then a paper straw. If straws are that big of a problem, get sippy cup style lids and skip all straws.
- dr_orpheus 4y ago
  Starbucks did this, and then people realized that the sippy cup style lids were thicker (to maintain the structure of the sippy part) and actually used more plastic than the old straw/top combo. Starbucks said that the new plastic lids were more easily recycled because they were larger than straws (which aren't normally picked up by recycling machines) so it was still a net positive. But this goes back to the articles point of "its plastic, and its probably not going to get recycled anyway" https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/23/starbucks-straws-ban-2020-environment https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/23/starbucks-s...
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Plastics are cool materials but at the moment they're mostly made from fossil fuels so you're funding some really bad people by using them. They'll only use that money to convince gullible people that climate change isn't happening, that every government regulation will magically have exactly the opposite impact, that solar and wind power are scams, that recycling is bad for the planet and that science and democracy have been taken over by idiot hippies that will kill us all because they stupidly hate fossil fuels for no reason. That's a heavy price to pay.

jnmandal 4y ago

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 landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place. The author is recommending a half measure based on the assumption that the US cannot fix its own problems. They are also implying a false equivalency: banning single use plastics is not the same as recycling plastic. A more equivalent comparison might be the tradeoffs between plastic bottles for soda, water, or oils and glass or metal containers. It is also true that plastic straws are a much smaller problem then other usages of plastic such as bottles or event fishing gear and even bags. Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with reducing plastic usage. Doing so is smart and will be important for the health and well being of future generations -- human and nonhuman -- of life on earth.

alfor 4y ago
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 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > 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 untouched forestland, because it spreads so well on the wind. > ...and advance technology as fast as we can. It's an interesting gamble, certainly - solving the problems created by our current technological development path by pushing further down that development path. It's just not one I expect to work. You don't generally solve problems by "doing more of what made them in the first place."

JoshGlazebrook 4y ago

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 lid all together. But that begs the question, is the sippy cup top more plastic than just a straw and the old lid? Or why not just use the compostable plastic straws that are readily available rather than trying so hard to make your company look "green" by saving the turtles from straws that never end up in the ocean in the first place. Seriously, fuck paper straws. They're up there with coke freestyle machines. Absolute trash.

hammock 4y ago
Did you read the article?
vel0city 4y ago
Hey now, I like Freestyle machines. Where else am I going to find Cherry Vanilla Coke Zero, Raspberry Peach Mellow Yellow, and Fuze Lemon Tea all on the same fountain?
chrisdhal 4y ago
I was with you until the freestyle machine part, they're awesome. Seriously, what's wrong with them? It doesn't prevent you from getting the regular things. I too, hate the paper straws. They are terrible. The "no straws" campaign is just a feel good thing and really does little.
- JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
  I just find the consistency to be all over the place from machine to machine. Regular coke never tastes like coke. It's fine if you like adding lime/flavorings/etc but just getting the standard flavor of something is just always off.
- throwaway48375 4y ago

northband 4y ago

My family keeps our own compostable straws in the car. We typically don't ask for straws, lids, bags, etc. There are cases where you may forget, or can't avoid it, but overall it has decreased our yearly plastic use.

barbazoo 4y ago

> If you don't know the exact location where your plastic is recycled, throw it in the regular garbage instead. Very interesting points they are raising. I reached out to https://recyclebc.ca https://recyclebc.ca to find out more about my local recycling org but from what I can find on their website almost all of the end product ends up in BC, Canada or at least North America. Same for the processing which seems to be local. I'll update with what I can find out and correct me if I'm wrong but those people saying everything gets shipped to Asia and dumped into the ocean aren't right, at least not universally. Here in BC at least that doesn't seem to be the case at all. If that's the case I'd really like to know why other places in first world countries aren't doing the same and I'd definitely consider the US a first world country.

LeanderK 4y ago

> And banning straws is just plain stupid. Why? We don't have them anymore in germany. People move on and new solutions get invented. Seeing a plastic straw is weird to me.

thfuran 4y ago
I don't think it is especially stupid in and of itself but is it an efficient use of government effort?
qiskit 4y ago
> Why? We don't have them anymore in germany. Even more reason to use plastic straws. If there is one country I don't want the US to follow, that's germany. > People move on and new solutions get invented. Like toxic paper straws? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241276 > Seeing a plastic straw is weird to me. What's weird about them?
- cgrealy 4y ago
  > If there is one country I don't want the US to follow, that's germany. Yeah, it'd suck if the US had higher life expectancy, more political stability, better civil rights, better healthcare, lower unemployment, lower inflation, lower crime..... What a nightmare scenario!
  - qiskit 4y ago
    Yeah, an occupied nation with no sovereignty. Who has to beg for oil and gas from russia and when we tell them to jump, they ask "how high". Vast swathes of the US has higher life expectancy, healthcare, lower unemployement, lower inflation, lower crime than germany. And germany is the leader of censorship in europe. Certainly not a beacon of civil rights. As for inflation... https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/economy/german-inflation-industry-recession/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/economy/german-inflation-indu... The united states is a continental nation with infinite resources. Germany is a tiny european country the size of new mexico. Good luck to germany. They are going to need it. Funny how we are so much worse than germany and yet most people around the world wants to move to the US? "The U.S. continues to be the most desired destination country for potential migrants, as it has since Gallup started tracking these patterns a decade ago. One in five potential migrants (21%) -- or about 147 million adults worldwide -- name the U.S. as their desired future residence. Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and Saudi Arabia appeal to at least 25 million adults each." https://news.gallup.com/poll/211883/number-potential-migrants-worldwide-tops-700-million.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/211883/number-potential-migrant...

andjd 4y ago

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 identified and recycled (such as straws and loose bottle caps) will just be sent to the landfill regardless. How recycling is processed differs a lot across the country, so it's hard to make generalizations. But that doesn't support their final conclusion about whether plastic straws should be banned. The author doesn't give a reason, but implicitly that they think paper straws suck, and must suck. Which a lot of the ones today do. But it's an odd hill to die on, given that basically all straws before 1960 were made of paper. 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. Such companies probably want to get you pissed off by paper straws to demand that your government remind the ban so they can go back to using cheaper plastic straws.

legitster 4y ago
> 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.
- f1refly 4y ago
  "Biodegradable" plastics are a scam, they only break down into smaller parts to eventuelly become microplastic that will accumulate in our bodies.
anamax 4y ago
> But it's an odd hill to die on, given that basically all straws before 1960 were made of paper. The fact that all pre-1960 straws were paper does not imply that paper straws, let alone paper straws today, do not suck.

mattacular 4y ago

Interesting but what exactly is the point of this and who is it for? The continued focus on something as myopic as drinking straws and proposed "solutions" to the straw problem that depend on individual choices is actually insane given the point we are at in the battle against climate catastrophe.

Fricken 4y ago

I have a friend who is a quadruple amputee. For him straws are pretty good. For the rest of us, the solution to plastic straws is not straws. They aren't necessary. Of course, it's all bike shedding anyhow. The real problems are big and complex and overwhelming, so we argue about straws instead.

Melatonic 4y ago

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.

telotortium 4y ago
Many commercial dishwashers might be specialized for certain dishes, so adding a straw washing machine would be a significant expense. In addition, I've heard that many commercial dishwashers require the dishes to be scrubbed beforehand (see https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/620/types-of-commercial-dishwashers.html#:~:text=Dishes%20must%20be%20scrubbed%20before%20using%20the%20machine https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/620/types-of-commerci...), and straws are quite difficult to scrub. Given that most restaurants that go through a lot of straws want to provide the option for takeout anyway (for which you can't use metal straws), it makes sense that most restaurants don't bother.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Don't a lot of restaurants just employ dish washers and not use commercial dishwashers? They are super fast and easy to clean with a brush designed for them
floren 4y ago
I've been given a metal straw at a restaurant. My immediate thought: how do I know this is clean on the inside? I can't see in there, it could be full of mold. I just drank from the glass instead, because I'm an able-bodied adult.
cgrealy 4y ago
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!
- asdf123lkjh 4y ago

gorgoiler 4y ago

The topic of landfill sites seems interesting. What do they end up containing in the long run, after all the other material has been eaten or biodegraded? If we come back to a landfill site in two hundred years time is it going to contain a particular type of mineral? Will it just be trash still? On what kinds of timescales does it metamorphose significantly, and into what kinds of material?

dirtyid 4y ago

Trying to find out how much recycling gets diverted to landfills anyway. I'm in a relatively interior region where shipping abroad seems prohibitive, and local recycling facilities clearly do not seem to have capacity to process recycling properly. Still going through the rigamarole of sorting and occasionally cleaning my recyclables even though it seems excessivly wasteful.

ja27 4y ago

Some percentage of our trash stream gets incinerated to generate electricity (then metals etc. are recovered and the remains go into a landfill). I can never find solid stats on what percentage but the claims sound like it's the majority of the trash stream. But we also live so close to the coast that straws and any other litter in the wrong places can easily wash into storm sewers then eventually the Gulf of Mexico.

daxfohl 4y ago

Instead of spending a bunch of money to ship stuff to Asia, then spending a bunch of money to upgrade their waste management facilities, why don't we just have our waste management companies toss unusable plastic from recycling into their landfill next door?

notorandit 4y ago

The continuous economic growth dream is what is causing all of this. Stop it first and you will see a starting point for the realm solution.

eterevsky 4y ago

Small addition: I live in Switzerland, and our straws don't go into the landfill, they are burned to produce electricity.

alimov 4y ago

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?

imgabe 4y ago
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.
- themeiguoren 4y ago
  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?

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago

Reminder that a 9 year old came up with the number of 500 million straws, which would amount to every person using 1.6 a day: https://reason.com/2018/01/26/a-list-of-the-500-million-news-orgs-that/ https://reason.com/2018/01/26/a-list-of-the-500-million-news...

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

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?

jiri 4y ago
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 :-(

jarek83 4y ago

> 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?

pahbloo 4y ago

Not the kind of garbage collection I expected a discussion on HN about.

acnops 4y ago

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?