Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
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.
It was a video of divers pulling a straw out of a sea turtle's nose. It looked very painful for the turtle and started a sympathetic backlash.
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.
Watch the anti plastic straw movement have been a comparative-trivialization by big-pollution. Give us shitty paper straws, and suddenly everybody wants plastic everything again.
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.
The number is apparently correct. Plastic caps/lids make for the 2nd most common item (by count) of SINGLE-USE plastic marine litter. Cigarette buds are number 1 with 19% though, and cotton bud sticks are 3rd with 10%. As a total of the whole (so not just single-use), plastic caps are 5%. Plastic string and cord from fishing makes up over 15% though.
Plastic bottles make up 5% of SUP marine waste, so apparently, people do throw away 2.5 times more caps than bottles. They're also much easier to lose, when not attached.
source (in english, despite the link) from the EU, via google
So, if you reduce the number of bottlecap thrown away from 13% to 5% (as in, the same as bottles), that's a pretty big drop in marine litter. And it's probably a LOT easier than teacher smokers not to be fucking pigs.