Plastic straw pollution doesn’t have a measurable impact on the environment.
The entire thing about banning plastic straws comes from some high schooler using back-of-a-napkin math to guess how many straws are in the ocean in what was clearly a successful attempt at starting a science fair project the night before it was due. Some news station picked it up, and then a bunch of science-illiterates ran away with it.
You can’t determine the impact of pollution by count. Straws are tiny and weigh almost nothing. If you skip buying one pair of sneakers in your life, then you’ve successfully reduced your plastic use by almost a lifetime of plastic straws.
Removing plastic straws is probably the single least impactful way to reduce plastic pollution. It’s pure virtue signaling: it’s about presenting an image of being environmentally conscious while doing effectively nothing to help the environment.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly controversial, perhaps just not widely known.
I think it’s more of the same strategy from polluters - privatise profits and socialise detriments.
If a government says to plastic producers “what can we do to help you minimise use of plastic” answers like “make straws and shopping bags illegal” are of course in their favor. They don’t cost producers anything to implement, and they make consumers feel like they’ve already done the “hard work” of solving plastic waste.
Of course a much better approach would be to tax products that include any kind of plastic, as that would have a meaningful impact but would ultimately cost producers as they pivot to other materials.
The European Commission estimated that plastic caps and lids represented around 13 per cent of plastic marine litter caught in the nets of fishing vessels between 2011 and 2017.
I don’t understand where this number comes from, but it seems suspicious. Does the mean people properly throw the bottle away and just say, “meh, I’ll go out of my way to throw the just the cap into the ocean” or does the bottle “breakdown” (into microplastics) at a different rate than the cap? If so, then having them tethered won’t change anything, right? Or maybe this is just some “feel good number” to make government officials feel like “their making meaningful change”, without actually changing anything.
Plastic straw pollution doesn’t have a measurable impact on the environment.
The entire thing about banning plastic straws comes from some high schooler using back-of-a-napkin math to guess how many straws are in the ocean in what was clearly a successful attempt at starting a science fair project the night before it was due. Some news station picked it up, and then a bunch of science-illiterates ran away with it.
You can’t determine the impact of pollution by count. Straws are tiny and weigh almost nothing. If you skip buying one pair of sneakers in your life, then you’ve successfully reduced your plastic use by almost a lifetime of plastic straws.
Removing plastic straws is probably the single least impactful way to reduce plastic pollution. It’s pure virtue signaling: it’s about presenting an image of being environmentally conscious while doing effectively nothing to help the environment.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly controversial, perhaps just not widely known.
I think it’s more of the same strategy from polluters - privatise profits and socialise detriments.
If a government says to plastic producers “what can we do to help you minimise use of plastic” answers like “make straws and shopping bags illegal” are of course in their favor. They don’t cost producers anything to implement, and they make consumers feel like they’ve already done the “hard work” of solving plastic waste.
Of course a much better approach would be to tax products that include any kind of plastic, as that would have a meaningful impact but would ultimately cost producers as they pivot to other materials.
I’d like to up you one on this and include the EU law requiring soda caps are tethered to bottles.
From the link:
I don’t understand where this number comes from, but it seems suspicious. Does the mean people properly throw the bottle away and just say, “meh, I’ll go out of my way to throw the just the cap into the ocean” or does the bottle “breakdown” (into microplastics) at a different rate than the cap? If so, then having them tethered won’t change anything, right? Or maybe this is just some “feel good number” to make government officials feel like “their making meaningful change”, without actually changing anything.