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Europe Plans Ban on Plastic Cutlery, Straws and More (cnn.com)
Europe is proposing a ban on single-use plastic items such as cutlery, straws and cotton buds in a bid to clean up the oceans. From a report: The European Commission wants to ban 10 items that make up 70% of all litter in EU waters and on beaches. The list also includes plastic plates and drink stirrers. The draft rules were unveiled Monday but need the approval of all EU member states and the European Parliament. It could take three or four years for the rules to come into force. The legislation is not just about banning plastic products. It also wants to make plastic producers bear the cost of waste management and cleanup efforts, and it proposes that EU states must collect 90% of single-use plastic bottles by 2025 through new recycling programs.
Please don't let this spread to the U.S. I have some problem that makes the touch of metal silverware on my teeth feel like scratching my fingernails on a chalkboard, and I need to request plastic utensils everywhere I go because of that.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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So you do nothing, because others should get their act together first? Why not start with the man in the mirror?
Sig?
Sure it's for safety. They just trust passengers in business more, so no safety issue with giving them metal utensils :)
This is great news. But Europe is already doing a lot to clean up and reduce its plastic use. This is most urgently needed pretty much everywhere else. In particular both in the US and in Asia. The sight of roadsides, fields and beaches littered with tons of plastic waste is ubiquitous in those places - and we all pay the price.
There is no reason for most of current plastic use other than externalizing disposal costs so that everyone bears those.
I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change
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What you're describing doesn't make any sense. You're suggesting that problems shouldn't be tackled unless they're solved in only the most efficient way possible, and if they're not, then they shouldn't be solved at all. That's kinda' nutty.
I don't respond to AC's.
This ban is something that has been happening all over the world in some shape or form. Personally, I have little problem with it. I'm actually happy to see when a restaurant or coffee shop has utensils that are biodegradable. It's a great move.
What I don't like, from the end of this article, is the other part of the EU proposal. Why should the manufacturers be responsible for preventing people from being jackasses and throwing their garbage wherever they please? There are so many analogies to make here, it's not worth it.
People ultimately need to be held responsible for proper disposal and/or recycling of materials and consumables they are consuming. The manufacturer in this case isn't building in some weird feature making it difficult to throw the stirring straw in a garbage can. People just need to start being more responsible and not thinking that someone else will clean up after them.
It's pretty basic. Currently manufacturers are not responsible for the costs of disposing of their products. They can make them as toxic and environmentally problematic as they want because they can offload the costs and problems their products cause after the end of their useful lives on the taxpayer and the environment. If you make manufacturers responsible for paying not only for development, marketing, sales and product support but also for disposal you motivate the manufacturers to come up with new and innovative methods to make their products as easily and cheaply recyclable as possible in order to maximise profits. It's just a way to leverage the inventiveness of private industry and the workings of the free market to solve a very serious problem that results form own activities of companies and I think it will work because industry tends to be good at coming up with clever ways of solving sticky problems if profits are at stake. Now, I'm sure that you, as libertarian, find this idea terribly unjust but the rest of us find it equally unjust that private profit making companies can drown us in plastic garbage, make us pay for the mess and not be in any way responsible for solving that problem. Unfortunately for the manufacturers Europe is a cluster of democracies and the people drowning in plastic garbage are in charge, not the industrialists. I'm pretty sure most Europeans will welcome this measure.
Used to be the case that you could get wooden chip forks.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
This will hurt fast food
Most fast food doesn't require utensils. Burgers, fried chicken, and pizza are all "finger food". Chinese takeout uses wood or bamboo chopsticks, which are biodegradable.
When I get plastic utensils or straws with my order, 90% of the time I throw them out without even using them. I for one welcome the ban. Good riddance.
Try asking a restaurant if they'll give you metal utensils to go. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The biggest logistical problem with all of these idiotic "Let's ban plastic [insert product here]" ideas is that almost invariably there is no adequate alternative. California's grocery bag ban, for example, means that we have to buy trash bags that use several times as much plastic, took several times as much diesel fuel to drive them to the store, and cost a couple of orders of magnitude more money. It is basically a poor tax masquerading as an environmental policy.
This proposed law is no exception to that rule. The problem is not plastic utensils. There are no viable alternatives to plastic utensils that can be made anywhere near that price point, so when you order food to go, expect a significant cutlery surcharge if this goes through. For people who can afford that, it's probably no big deal, though at some point, we've just replaced an excess of plastic waste with an excess of metal waste.
Now if they carve out a broad exception for biodegradable plastics, this law would be fine, but it also wouldn't solve the problem that they claim to be trying to solve (plastic utensils on the beaches) because they still don't degrade that quickly.
But as with all the plastic ban laws, the real, fundamental problem with this particular law is that they're trying to treat the symptom instead of the root cause. When we ask ourselves why these utensils are turning up in streams and rivers, we come up with only three real possibilities:
Notice what all of these have in common? They're all failures of the government to do their f**ing jobs. And instead of solving the real problem, they're trying to find ways to make it everyone else's problem but their own. It's time that we started choosing elected officials who will actually do what we're paying them to do, by requiring their employees to do what we're paying them to do. That's the only real solution. Everything else is just trying to apply a thousand 1" Band-Aids over a missing limb.
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Fuck off.
"The biggest logistical problem with all of these idiotic "Let's ban plastic [insert product here]" ideas is that almost invariably there is no adequate alternative."
Umm... IDK. Paper straws? Some restaurants are experimenting with straws make from pasta, and some are even using "gasp" straw (reeds, actually).
"When we ask ourselves why these utensils are turning up in streams and rivers, we come up with only three real possibilities:"
If one were to actually read up on the subject instead of constructing straw men to knock down, one might find that plastic straws, being extremely lightweight, tend to avoid sweepers, are easily carried into sewers and waterways, and have quite a few other problems.
"They're all failures of the government to do their f**ing jobs."
I thought the mantra was that the government was supposed to do nothing at all and let the "invisible hand" of the "free market" sort things out.
Hard to keep up these days.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
It makes perfect senses. You're not taking into account opportunity cost. Money you spend tackling this problem, is money you don't have available to tackle other problems.
Given a multitude of problems, and limited resources (money) for tackling those problems, you maximize the reduction in problems by applying your resources most efficiently. By tackling the worst but easiest-to-fix problems first, even if that means leaving smaller but more-costly-to-fix problems unresolved.
Your way of thinking is why we waste billions of dollars trying to make air travel safer to prevent a few hundred deaths per year, while over a million people die in car accidents every year. Or why nuclear power is a pariah, when statistically it's the safest power source man has ever invented (yes, safer than renewables). You prioritize tackling the problem which has the greatest emotional impact (i.e. in proportion to news coverage), rather than the problem which will yield the greatest numerical decrease for the smallest expenditure.
Conventional plastics degrade/release the chemicals very very slowly, causing very little actual chemical harm to the environment.
Um, No.
Also, your definition of biodegradable
"Biodegradable" means that the chemicals in the product are released into the environment quickly.
seems a little too conveniently crafted for supporting your thesis.
I think this one is a bit more accurate
It used to be an adult could chastise any child, and the parents would at least be understanding, if not supportive. Today's helicopter, hands-off parents, though, will sue you as soon as you so much look cross-eyed at a misbehaving child.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!