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Taiwan To Ban Plastic Straws, Cups and Shopping Bags By 2030 (channelnewsasia.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Taiwan is planning a blanket ban on single-use plastic items including straws, cups and shopping bags by 2030, officials said Thursday, with restaurants facing new restrictions from next year. It is the latest push by Taiwan to cut waste and pollution after introducing a recycling programme and charges for plastic bags. The island's eco-drive has also extended to limiting the use of incense at temples and festivals to protect public health. Its new plan will force major chain restaurants to stop providing plastic straws for in-store use from 2019, a requirement that will expand to all dining outlets in 2020. Consumers will have to pay extra for all straws, plastic shopping bags, disposable utensils and beverage cups from 2025, ahead of a full ban on the single-use items five years later, according to the road map from the government's Environmental Protection Administration (EPA).
Taiwan about to pass us up in the US for common sense stuff. Really, I always wonder at the crazy waste of 10 napkins for one burger and junk like that... who needs it?
There's also paper straws.
I really don't like them and they feel weird on your lips, but they work.
I lived in Taiwan for 2 years. This makes me both sad and hopeful. Hopeful because that island REALLY needs to focus on pollution. It's a country whose economy is built around manufacturing, and the factories dump tons of emissions into the air. I had a necktie I would show people when I came home. It was a nice charcoal grey tie. I'd then show them the back of the tie (the part that spent its life against my body, less exposed to the air), and it was royal blue. Bags and cups obviously don't contribute to air pollution, but the incense they mentioned definitely can (everything is extremely hazy during Ghost Month), and there is generally a lot of pollution of all forms, which you expect in such a densely populated area.
On the flip side, I loved the street vendors that served drinks. They would make your drink, pour it into a 700cc plastic cup, then use a head press to melt a thin plastic lid to it (think slightly thicker Saran Wrap). You could throw 5 or 6 of them in a plastic bag and not worry about them spilling. When you are ready to drink it, jab the disposable plastic straw through the lid and drink up. It was a genius system, and I will miss it dearly. I don't know what will become of those drink stands (seriously one every other corner throughout every city I lived in).
You say this in jest, but really that is an ambitious schedule for Taiwan. As I mentioned in another comment, there are drink stands on every other street corner who sell drinks in 700cc plastic cups. They have big, expensive heat presses that seal a lid on top of it so you can carry it in a plastic bag and later puncture that lid with the included plastic straw. This move completely destroys their business model, and they have invested heavily in the equipment.
It's a slightly different culture there. It's not that there are multi-use versions of straws, but that they give them out for everything. If you go to a 7-11 and get a 20oz bottle of coke, they give you a straw. Buy two of them, they give you two straws. It's essentially unheard of in a restaurant to have a drink without a straw also given to you even though the reusable cups can be drank from without a straw.
I'm not certain how fast food places will change for this, as their lids make it impossible to drink without a straw, and the cups are flimsy without lids.
One thing I can state, the shopping bags that they charge for there are of a much higher quality than the ones you get in the states. This may be that they start making higher quality cups that don't bend as easily for in restaurant use, or even start having reusable cups in McDonald's.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
They have had tech to make full vegetable fiber straws for at least a decade now, and all of the EU is converting to bio-plastics, so it's not difficult.
As you scale up production, the prices drop. If you remove the artificial subsides for plastic disposal of non-recyclable materials, you can easily switch, using this thing we like to call "capitalist markets".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Most drinks are refrigerated anyway -- putting ice in them is wasteful anyway and dilutes the taste.
Waste is when you do something with your property that you don't like - not when somebody else does something with their property that you don't like.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Yeah, but that's ludicrously expensive compared to making bioplastics in the first place.
I'm not convinced of that. Maybe little solar powered robots. We don't have to have it done fast either. If it takes a century for robots to clean it up, that would be reasonable. As long as removal of trash is faster than adding of trash. (that last part is the hard part, I think)
Why make more work cleaning up a problem at the end when you can spend that money preventing the problem occurring?
Problem is already here. Even if we stopped making it worse today, the problem would still be with us and likely wouldn't go away on its own.
Ocean scrubbing with robots as the "solution" is a lame and incredibly expensive idea that involves non-existent fantasy tech.
Harsh. Have you never watched a pool robot? It's not an idea based on a fantasy, it's not even MY idea. Would it scale? Well that's an engineering problem. I don't think we have enough information to even know if it would work or not.
Not possible, not practical to prevent plastics entering the water system
Oh everything is possible. We could have a militant faction of GreenPeace running PT Boats and sinking violators. Eventually out-of-date barge operations would be have their fleet at the bottom of the ocean. They can either go bankrupt or fix their shit. (I'm not suggesting that as a first option as it is overly extreme)
As for plastics entering the waters system through other means. I never claimed that it was necessary to have zero trash. But it logically is possible to reduce the amount that enters. A net zero should even be possible, where we remove (or debris degrades) at a rate as fast or faster than the amount that enters.
This wouldn't fix the ocean plastics issue.
Bioplastics primarily addresses the fossil fuel issue. It does not (as I have explained) address the ocean plastic issue. But people selling that crap love to conflate the two issues.
It would make it worse, since the price of oil would fall, making plastics cheaper.
I can't think of any examples where we aren't making things out of plastic because it is too expensive today. On the supply-demand curve we may be at maximum demand and could keep feeding supply in to meet it. The material costs could go down if demand for oil were no there, but in some ways our plastic industry is subsidized by the much larger oil industry. Much of the plastic we use comes from the less valuable by-products, rather than the higher profit petroleum products.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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