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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
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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.
It's considerably cleaner than plastic and would make all the quacks stop complaining about Bispheno A.
It just sinks to the bottom of the ocean and can turn back into sand through erosion.
So you do nothing, because others should get their act together first? Why not start with the man in the mirror?
Sig?
People just need to start being more responsible
And how would we achieve that ?
"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.
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.
And Victoria continues to dump raw sewage into the ocean, as it has done for decades.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
Good to know that the govt has its priorities right and is focusing on banning plastic straws!
In economy, you always start with the activity that has the highest marginal product. That way you maximize your output for a given amount of inputs. If you're serious about environment, you start with the worst offenders. Even if Europe paid for the cleaning up Asia or Africa, that would probably be still the most beneficial scenario.
Ezekiel 23:20
If you really want to do the right thing by Mother Nature, ban disposable diapers.
#DeleteChrome
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.
The amount of waste generated per person in US and other developed nations is shocking and with countries like China and India fast catching up, similar lifestyle is not sustainable globally. Even with all the progress in recycling, lot of it slips out and ends up in our food chain.
The use of plastics especially for disposable items is irresponsible. I wish these were not so cheap and the real cost of disposal and ecological impact was factored in their price. Trying to convince the public for more environmentally responsible behaviour is an exercise in futility and people always take the easy way. Money is the only thing that seems to have real impact these days.
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.
Okay, I get it, no throwaway items. But what about q-tips?
Are we supposed to reuse them? Or will they start making them of bamboo?
Genuine Q-tips are made with paper shafts, not plastic.
Parts of Europe still does loads of dumping of their garbage in the oceans.
Likewise, 5 nations are responsible for 60% of all garbage in the ocean.
It turns out that five countries are the leading contributors to this crisis. And all are in Asia. In a recent report, Ocean Conservancy claims that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are spewing out as much as 60 percent of the plastic waste that enters the world’s seas.
America stopped decades ago, so instead, we have had it going to China and other nations. That also needs to stop. ALL OF IT. Far better for America to recycle, bury, or burn it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ice. it's because the drinks are 90% ice instead of liquid, and it's annoying to drink from a glass full of ice.
I actually use a straw quite a bit at home. That said, it's not a disposable straw, it's a thick plastic that I wash and re-use.
This is the one part of the proposal that concerns me. I'm not worried that restaurants will make me eat with my fingers, I know that they'll just use reusable cutlery, but I am worried that they'll expect me to drink their 90% ice beverages without a straw rather than provide a reusable one.
ask for a drink with less ice.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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
I read recently that the vast majority of plastic come from rivers in Asia and Africa. Why do this in Europe?
Better question: Why not do this in Europe? God forbid the local environment gets a bit nicer. How horrible that would be.
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.
What in the fuck does that even mean? You don't think that using less plastic is a good idea if you somehow get emails related to it?
I don't respond to AC's.
Who's declaring "problem solved"? That's some bizarre straw man argument you're making up, AC.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What's a K-cup? (Seriously, yes, I know.) I just use an electric kettle and a Bodum press, makes better coffee than silly little Keurig machines. And is 100% washable, unlike the tiny passages in a drip machine, so there's no place for biofilm to grow.
"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!
I've worked with a food truck that does aome of the festival circuit in the midwest, where single-use plastic utensils are either heavily shunned or banned outright.
They looked at getting disposable wooden spoons for their dishes that require a spoon, and found it was cheaper to buy cheap stainless steel spoons and just hope that they come back.
Most of them do come back. They get washed and reused. The others (hopefully) get recycled in one of the many dozens of recycling bins, or maybe saved by the patron for their own reuse.
It is not as absurd as you think it is.
Kid-proof tablet..
It's pretty basic. Currently manufacturers are not responsible for the costs of disposing of their products.
They aren't the ones disposing of their products, so it seems reasonable that they aren't responsible for consumers who dispose of them inappropriately.
They can make them as toxic and environmentally problematic as they want
I think a spate of people dying from using toxic plastic forks would be noticed and something would be done. They notice toxic shellfish outbreaks, and toxic salad greens.
unjust but the rest of us find it equally unjust that private profit making companies can drown us in plastic garbage,
If you are drowning in plastic garbage, talk to your neighbors. They're the ones disposing of things incorrectly.
You are the one making zero sense since any euro invested can only support that one activity you're talking about. You can't invest the same resource into multiple activities.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
1) Most of the plastic in the oceans is from China, India and third world countries where rivers are often used for garbage disposal. Our concern for the environment is completely alien to some cultures.*
2) Straws can't be washed so they have to be disposable
3) Straws are small, there mass is negligible, same with plastic grocery bags. As a percentage of your yearly waste I doubt they make 0.5%
4) Be very suspicious of anyone pushing these bans. They are likely virtue signalling and care more about appearing to be doing something than actually doing it.
*To be fair though do to our significantly higher wealth and consumption means our damage to the environment is many times more.
No, they really aren't. Only a small percentage of people are so lazy that they'll just toss trash out on the streets; most people do not.
Most of the trash you see blowing around is there because the garbage collection process has become too automated as a cost-cutting measure. A person drives by, and a machine grabs the can, turns it upside down, and dumps it into the truck. When this happens, stuff often falls out, and it ends up on the street, because there's no longer a second person on the truck to pick up what gets left behind.
It has nothing to do with humans being lazy and everything to do with humans being cheapskates who are unwilling to pay for the people needed to properly maintain our sanitation system. And instead of fixing that, they keep finding new ways to blame the garbage for not getting picked up. That's just absurd, and it will never end, because there will always be some other type of trash to use as a scapegoat for their problems.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Yes, they really are. If by small percentage you mean around 10 to 15%, I can agree.
I have the luxury of walking to and from work, about six minutes one-way. As I walk, I pick up any trash that isn't too far out of the way. Nearly all of it is fast food and junk food wrappers. A small portion is packaging for home-made lunches (ie. sandwich bags). I find the occasional failed exam/assignment and debt collection messages. I honestly can't think of a time that I came across anything that didn't fit into these categories and I've never found anything that was household garbage that escaped the system that moves it to the landfill.
The problem with plastic is that it hangs around for centuries. Which is plenty of time for it to migrate into the seas. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, there is already more plastic in the seas than fish.
Plastic for single use applications, packaging, and even in textiles (where it is already well on its way to being tiny fibers that can't be controlled) should be curtailed ASAP. The long-term goal should be to drastically reduce all uses of plastic in favour of stuff that can biodegrade once discarded.
As of 2017, 60% of ocean plastic pollution was generated by China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka, in that order, with China vastly outdoing the others. No EU country is within the top 20, which would indicate a very minuscule amount of plastic waste leaking into the oceans. If European governments want to waste a massive amount of resources to worry about this, the pollution generated is going to be more overall, not less.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I thought that was why the 18th birthday was such a big deal. Then, when I turned 18 (in 1977) nothing different happened. I guess my nerdiness is an incurable ailment.
I must admit I'm entirely fucking bewildered by the number of people that seem to need to drink out of a straw.
At least there are now adult sippy cups available, and the branding on them is clever too - 'sports bottle' almost sounds mature.
In Getmany I went to apublic place, bought a beer in a plastic cup. Paid 1 eur extra and got that back when i gave back my plastic cup. Yes that will be harder than just throwing it wherever you feel like. Even harder than throwing it into a bin.
Throwing things into a bin does not work as we are trying that now.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.