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.

Comments

Flying?

[Roger W Moore]

Will this apply to flights as well? I thought that plastic utensils there were generally regarded as a safety feature, not just a cheap convenience.

Re:Flying?

[Anonymous Coward]

This legislation does not seem to ban chopsticks of any type, so flight companies are safe. The passengers will just have to learn to eat 'right'.

Re:Flying?

[arth1]

I've noticed in the past few years that I get metal cutlery on flights. The knives have blunt tips.

Here in the US, knives and forks are always blunt. I grew up with forks with sharp tines that you could spear peas with, but when I moved, I discovered that Americans have never seen or heard of sharp tined forks, and used forks like if they were spoons, upside down. And knives - well, even steak knives are blunt, they're just serrated. Which, of course, steak knives shouldn't be. None of them could possibly sharpen a pencil, even.
I think it's partially a liability thing - if someone hurts themselves with sharp cutlery, there will be lawsuits. And partially Americans being exceptionally yellow, I mean risk-averse.

Re:Manufacturers bear brunt of responsible cleanup

[Brett Buck]

"Biodegradable" means that the chemicals in the product are released into the environment quickly. And paper and wood products are *loaded* with processing chemicals, paper being particularly egregious. Biodegradable plastic is even worse.

      Conventional plastics degrade/release the chemicals very very slowly, causing very little actual chemical harm to the environment.

So what this would/will do is make things *look* better more quickly, while flooding the environment with chemicals that would never have been there otherwise.

Hey Europe

[93 Escort Wagon]

If you really want to do the right thing by Mother Nature, ban disposable diapers.

Re:Hey Europe

[Zarhan]

No need to ban all of them - just those with plastic absorption gels and similar components.

At least in Finland and Sweden there are disposable diapers that are made 100% of paper (I know because I've used both brands for my kid). Essentially biodegradable - and also works very well as fuel for waste-to-energy plant.

Comparing to reusable nappies - running your washing machine at 60 or 90C to properly wash them just doesn't seem all that efficient, compared to the industrial scale process where trees get first converted to paper to nappies and then burned for energy after use. No, I have not ran the numbers.

So you can keep the convenience of disposable nappies without the downsides of plastics.

BYO Shopping Bags ... BYO Flatware

[laughingskeptic]

Cheap bulk stainless flatware is $0.50 a part or less. I can see this being just like shopping bags where you either show up with your own flatware or buy flatware when doing things like eating at food trucks. We would have flatware in our desks at the office and scattered in our cars. Another minor greening irritation.

Re:Please no

[HiThere]

Bamboo might be a reasonable alternative, but the problem with these blanket condemnations of plastic is that often the alternatives are worse. That wouldn't be true of bamboo knives or forks, but I'm not sure about bamboo straws. Paper straws (possibly made from bamboo) are good, but tend to be too flimsy for many purposes. A straw as good as a plastic straw would be likely to require a lot of extra processing.

OTOH, there are various biodegradable plastics that would be reasonable for straws. They don't recycle with other plastics, but they compost.

Probably the best answer is to develop some pelagic bacteria to eat common plastics. Unfortunately, the easier processes would result in a release of carbon dioxide, so you'd want to use a photo-synthesizing bacterium as your base type, to build carbohydrates out of it...but they are less inclined to go in for things like plastics.

N.B.: Current biodegradable plastics also release CO2 when being degraded, but they are built from modern plants, and so there is (nearly) zero net CO2.

Re:Wouldn't the solution be

[ceoyoyo]

The government is failing to clean up after me....

Even if every plastic utensil made it into a landfill somewhere, that's still not really a great solution. Most business won't even notice a disposable plastic ban. A few will, and they might have to come up with creative solutions. Heavens.

The best thing to help the poor people you're worried about would be to make fast food so expensive they couldn't possibly afford it, and do something about the grocery situation in big US cities. But if McDonalds really can't come up with anything other than charging an arm and a leg for metal cutlery, the poor will just bring their own. The rich, unfortunately, probably won't.

Re:Wouldn't the solution be

[dgatwood]

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.

I missed this in my earlier reply. This sounds like the street sweepers aren't working very well, which is a design problem. If they aren't picking up straws, they also aren't picking up a significant percentage of any number of other things—candy wrappers, grass, leaves, etc.—all of which contributes to clogging storm drains and other infrastructure problems. A better solution, then, would be to build street sweepers that actually leave the streets clean of debris, rather than blaming the debris for having the audacity to not get swept up.

Re:Please no

[HiThere]

Well, you've denigrated the main mass use of straws, but there are other uses. E.g. my wife used them to make single use musical instruments to demonstrate acoustic principles. For some instruments she only used paper straws, and for others she only used plastic. It had to do with the different characteristics of the reed she created within the straw by selective cuts.

If you check around you will find that there are a large number of specialty straws designed for special purposes. My wife checked carefully, because she was always re-purposing them to make, e.g., a miniature carousel (which takes 4 different kinds of straws with precisely related widths).