My biggest problem with this, is that it isn’t coming from a place of rational scientific evidence. Plastic straws do contribute to environmental damage. But they are a low hanging fruit. Plastic bag and plastic water bottle bands would have such a greater effect. But this is an easy “get” for activist groups and companies that want to look environmentally trendy. It is an easy target which happens to have some significant issues with the disabled community.
If you want to ban plastic straws, what’s missing is a better justification for banning plastic straws, the burden isn’t on everyone else to explain why they can’t do some alternative.
Yes, they often don’t work for the disabled community, so switching the only straw option to something that doesn’t work for everyone is also bad. (certainly less bad, but still would hurt some)
Again, I urge people to read the NPR article I linked.
It does a very good job of detailing the disabled community’s stance on this issue. Including an explanation about straw types.
Maybe it seems weirder to you because of the sequencing. Over here we had a recycling drive (which has intensified in recent years), then a plastic bag surcharge, and now they’re talking about straws. Sound like in the US, in some places at least, that order is different. Like I say, it’s not either or. Eventually somewhere like Seattle is going to have all of them (and probably others).
Eh, those complaints seem somewhat vague and arbitrary.
I mean, there’s literally no reason why you can’t make a straw out of biodegradable plastic that will last perfectly long, and function indentically to a non biodegradable plastic straw.
You can make a straw out of PLA which is not going to break down within a day, and is going to be pretty much identical to any current straw.
Meh. The rhetorical backflip of citing that an issue is “not the worst” and thusly implying that it can safely be ignored. The questions should be “is it bad?” and “is the cure worse for humanity?”
For the East Coast coastal population centers, plastic straws (along with bags) disproportionately effect the already-endangered sea turtle populations who think that they are floating bits of sea grass (and jellyfish). The fact that OTHER kinds of pollution have a much greater impact on more numerous sea life may be factually correct, but kind of beside the point. It’s like arguing that spending money on curing testicular cancer is wasteful because malaria kills more people.
The bigger issues is how many of those straws are thrown away UNUSED (which I will rant about below) and how often they are tossed aside as litter rather than making their way to the landfill. A higher proportion of straws make their way to waterways rather than into a trash bin as compared with other, similarly-sized, plastic trash (also the problem with shopping bags).
And even the straws that are properly disposed of are wasteful: despite being made of recyclable plastic, the vast majority of the planet’s recycling facilities cannot handle the straws; they are filtered out along with bottlecaps and other small objects before reaching the destination and are simply sent to a landfill.
[Note: I’m running on memory here, which is why I don’t have any hard numbers. This is all from a scholarly paper done by the UNC-Wilmington environmental studies department that my daughter was part of and had me proof-read a couple years back. I’ll see if I can get my hands on it, but I imagine that will take longer than this thread’s shelf-life since school is out.]
Meh. I’m sympathetic to the needs of the disabled, but reasonable accommodations can be put into place to handle the bathwater without throwing out the baby.
Yeah, the cornstarch-based straws that I’ve seen recently are pretty cool. They do get “floppy” after about an hour in liquid though.
For the record, I don’t like the whole “banning” thing too much. I much prefer Surfrider’s favored option, which is to have restaurants simply ASK customers if they want a straw rather than tossing a handful of them onto the table.
And it’s that last (common) act that really gets me. I’ve never been a big straw-user as an adult, so if a server tosses a straw at me, it’s simply unused, unwanted waste. In most restaurants the server cannot take it back once it hits the table (health reasons), so whether I say something or not it’s getting thrown away. And as cited earlier, it’s not even getting recycled – it’s going to sit in a landfill for a geological eternity, a small piece of petrochemical energy whose creation polluted the atmosphere for no discernible purpose.
I guess, but I tend to defer to the disabled’ people’s personal experiences.
I think that maybe someone like Elon Musk could maybe make the perfect biodegradable straw rather than deliver an un-necessary child-submarine to Thailand.
We can build it, we have the technology.
I don’t care about straw bans as long as there’s a new solution that does virtually the same thing and doesn’t cost me extra money.
I wouldnt mind the extra expanse if it meant less sea turtles die.
A solution was kickstarted awhile ago!
ITT: We shouldn’t bother with electric cars until we’ve eliminated all coal plants. Electric cars just make people feel good without completely solving the pollution problem, and sometimes you forget to charge your car overnight then end up low on charge while you’re on the road with no time to wait at a charging station.
So California has a “ban” on plastic bags. But you can still buy them in bulk, you can still put your veggies in them at a super market, you just can’t get your groceries or other store items in them for free.
What is to stop stores from selling boxes of plastic straws? I can see people keeping them in their vehicles for use as needed.
I mean presumably, if folks wanted, you could ban that, too.
In a generalized sense, I support this kind of stuff because we need a massive, universal scaling back of the use of plastic, especially non-recyclable, or rarely recyclable, plastic products like straws. It’s certainly not the only issue causing problems with the environment, and straws aren’t even the singular cause of that one particular issue, but working toward correcting that stuff in a general sense is a net good thing for the planet and all the life on it, even if it does cause some growing pains (and in the cases of folks like the disabled, we should absolutely consider “bridge” solutions for them until more environmentally friendly alternatives are readily available that meet their needs).
Straws are an easy rallying cry because they’re such an obvious and (barring the entirely valid disability point) generally entirely unnecessary sort of waste. Highlighting those kinds of waste, making the public at large more conscious of it, helps keep the ball rolling on environmental matters in general. While we certainly haven’t eliminated single-use water bottle sales (hell, apart from a brief blip, we’ve barely even slowed it down), I certainly see more people carting around reusable water bottles now than I did a decade ago, anecdotally.
I mean, on some pretty basic level, individual, consumer-level action can’t totally fix the environment. It’s just not feasible for the average person living in many areas to stop driving, because many areas provide no useful public transit option, and “walkable” housing is often unaffordable for most in downtown areas. Individual consumers aren’t really the ones draining California dry, overall. Most folks can’t afford to install enough solar panels to reduce their dependence on local fossil fuel burning power plants. Industrial scale usage of plastics is an enormous environmental burden, etc.
So, we need collective, government-lead action to stem the tide and put things right. But building support for that is hard, especially on the issues that everyday people can’t even “see” (figuratively or literally).
Stuff like the straws is a foot in the door and a great conversation point to get people thinking more broadly about the sheer volume of plastic we’re dumping into our environment. It’s not the only step we gotta take, but we can absolutely turn into one of outsize usefulness.
I don’t, because I know the properties of PLA.
If I gave you a PLA straw, you wouldn’t know the difference. Hell, PLA straws still take years to breakdown unless you put them in the proper composting situation.
That being said, I also agree with the idea that real science should govern such things, not guestimates by a nine-year-old.
My wife buys plastic bags that will dissolve in our compost pile. What is preventing (other than cost) straws from being made that way? I suppose being in a 46 oz coke for a couple hours is too much for any biodegradable object though. Maybe we should limit soda consumption, oh yea, places are trying to do that.
Isn’t much of the problem the mere shittyness of people who believe throwing stuff away is to hard for them so they just jettison their garbage wherever they want to?
Even if you throw away plastics properly, they still end up in landfill.
Maybe we need to re-think what we do with our waste.
I actually Kickstarted that one. Not shipping til November, I believe. Beats a normal stainless steel straw, since it collapses.
We can’t ban plastic bags because some people can’t hold a real bag.
We can’t tax carbon because there are poor people who can’t afford to drive.
I’m not sympathetic to your argument because it presumes such a ban would mean there was simply no way a disabled person could get a straw after such, which must be false.
Of course when we measure the amount of waste a single package from Amazon creates vs said straw it starts to seem trivial, and reducing waste in general means somebody somewhere is going to be less well off. That’s the whole point, and the “problem” with reducing waste generated by convenience culture is that some people are going to be inconvenienced.
The straws used at Starbucks in Seattle and in my work’s cafeteria have been fully compostable for years now. They work perfectly fine. Plastic straws are a complete waste and aren’t any better.
If there are more things that should be done to help the disabled community, I’m all for it. But that shouldn’t mean completely getting rid of the ban.
I don’t care if it’s a small amount of overall plastic pollution. It’s still a complete unnecessary waste and the sooner we’re done with it, the better.
Same thing with plastic bag bans in Seattle. It’s fine. There are literally no problems now that it’s been in place for years. Grocery stores can still use plastic in some situations like to wrap meat and produce. The world hasn’t ended. There are hundreds of millions or billions fewer plastic bags currently in circulation. That’s a good thing. Hooray progress.