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EU To Ban Plastic Plates, Cups, and Cutlery by 2021; Will Require Plastic Bottles Be Made of 25% Recycled Content By 2025 (fastcompany.com)
The European Union has decided to ban plastic consumer items including plates, cutlery and straws as of 2021 to help clean up oceans. The prohibition on single-use plastics approved by the European Parliament this week in Strasbourg, France, also applies to beverage cups, food containers and cotton bud sticks. A report adds: The new legislation also states that by 2025, plastic bottles should be made of 25 percent recycled content. The new legislation also sets an admirable target of recycling 90 percent of plastic bottles by 2029 -- as well as a goal of making them out of 30 percent recycled material by 2030. Parliament originally rolled out its plan at the end of 2018 and have now made good on the ambition directive.
Way to focus on the things that really matter
Order all dishes and cutlery be made by manual labor. That'll be good for job creation too.
Every country is about to turn into Paris riots.
I want my stuff made of new virgin plastic. I dont want dirty crap. God damn euro weenys. Always whining.
WIth the number of desperate slashdotters out there, plastic bottles don't stay virgin very long.
Regional recycling centers that have recycling facilities at site, so they don't have to truck garbage all over the world to accomplish recycling. China is no longer taking it, other countries either. EU has to build these plants first.
Start now. It's a jobs program. This is a need that until we get rid of plastic disposable products entirely, we all share. It has to go somewhere, you might as well have somewhere be local. 0-emissions plastic recycling plants are possible.
Consumer waste from developed countries makes up a very small percentage of plastic waste in the ocean. While it's still a good move on principle, the EU's decision isn't going to fix the problem.
I'm old enough to remember that this move to plastic was driven by "good intentions" back in the 70s because all the products were destroying the trees because of the demand on paper, pulp and wood products. Plastic after all was RECYCLABLE... except nobody bothered and now that China won't do the recycling the governments don't care to spend the money on infrastructure when they can use it to pay off their political cronies at inflated rates.
This emotionalist and irrational (yes, irrational) response to a problem could easily be handled by better pollution monitoring, regulation and better recycling. But that would require a government that actually did its job and not just run to ban things because it makes them feel better to assuage a 12 year old's shoddy science fair paper.
airport restaurants now? Cool.
Well at least it makes a little more sense than banning just plastic straws like California? Not being able to get a plastic straw when drinking out of a plastic cup with a plastic lid is just silly. Especially when waxed paper cups work as a much better alternative to plastic than the stupid flimsy paper straws we're supposed to use instead.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Poor, poor, Euros. Powerless, impotent, pressed into doing the service of faceless bureaucrats.
No one is going to give you dangerous weapons and encourage knife crime. You will be given wooden knife-like objects and learn to like it.
Seeing the stream of articles about what the EU is doing, maybe Brexit has a point after all. Do open borders and free trade have to come with this baggage?
Exactly. Clearcutting forests for disposable utensils is as dumb as making it from non-biodegradeable plastics that then wind up polluting the ecosystem (even inside our foods) for as long as human civilization lasts.
The OP (Republican?) wants to pretend there is no benefit in learning from previous mistakes as time goes forward. That's their ideology in a nutshell.
Plastic is not the problem. True.
Not recycling is. Since it will mean not taking away the trash and not replenishing your stock. So soon you will sit in your own excrements, like a very VERY primitivr lifeform.
So to get what you want, while still recycling, you need to put dead animals underground for a few million years.
Who have been part of a food chain, whose lowest lifeforms eat plastic.
Deal?
Here at Microsoft, we have BioWare. Apparently it's not just the name of a game, it's all the name of biodegradable "plastic" utensils, which we're told to dispose of in the compost bin. Other places are using a corn-derived plastic substitute that is biodegradable.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
When I was a kid I was told that paper bags were the root of all evil, and it was a great environmental achievement that grocery stores switched to using plastic.
Now its all paper bags and straws again. If you wonder why there are skeptics, well, this kind of shit is why.
Is this actually about the environment or is it just corporations cutting costs and patting themselves on the back afterwards?
do not originate from places affected by this ban. such a ban will essentially 'save' only a single cubic meter of the entire fucking ocean (1.5E18 cubic meters total), as virtually all the plastic bits in it originate from asia (china, india, etc).. not from 'the west' (europe, north america)
I don't understand... how do you get your plastic to play Fortnite?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Who is Bruno? The guy from Popeye?
Maybe one of his porcine brides escaped? Pooooor red state babydick.
Can anyone tell me why these things aren't being mass produced with bamboo? There's so much we could make out of bamboo and it grows so readily in so many places, yet it's so underutilized.
1. From all possible things, you knowingly chose one with one of the smallest amounts [A] of "doing something".
2. There are well-known things where you can do much larger amounts [B] with the same effort/cost.
3. So you delinerately chose, NOT to do [B-A=C] amount of "something".
4. To use your own argument: It is better to do something [A+C=B], than to do nothing [A+0=A]. I other words: [B>A]
QED
Because the Baltic is full of garbage.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If it wasn't that plastic one time bags can be seen on every street corner. I would argue against this because my house always reuse's them at least once.
Unlike the bigot pussies(liberal AC's), I do read suggestions from opposing parties with an open mind, and a lot of times I can see the merit in the idea. In this case, I fully support the new law.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
One angry libtard here.
I agree in principle that we should not needlessly waste oil or produce trash. But an outright ban has a habit of giving you unforeseen consequences in corner cases. We have market-based regulations available that produce the desired outcome at a lower cost. Place a Pigouvian Tax on manufacturing these items. Bonus: you can marginally lower some other tax or decrease deficits.
That would be Bluto. He said Bruno.
https://www.ufz.de/export/data...
So this is going to have how much of an effect ? If you want to spend money to fix a problem fine but try and put it to use where it will actually do some good.
You can still make "plastic" plates cups and cutlery that are derived from:
seaweed (in fact the basic science for this has been known for a decade) - this composts naturally, and is usually coated with a thin film that is not water soluble, but will eventually biodegrade if exposed to sunlight (will take longer if kept in landfills)
vegetable fibers (we've used these in entire countries, and at most major universities - anyplace that you see the compost bin says "university plates, utensils and food containers are compostable") - made in large scale, these are fairly close to the costs of plastic.
The early ones from around the 1990s melted too fast, the 2000s were a bit better, but the 2020 version is fairly good - the only exception is if you leave it in your hot (not warm, hot) drink for more than an hour. Why are you taking up a seat for that long? Use a biodegradable ceramic or metal or glass container if you're taking that long, slacker!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Seriously. Want to fix plastic in the oceans? Simply enforce litter laws, and actually monitor that that garbage hauler the city pays doesn't simply dump the trash as sea.
But those measures would cost the government money. Why do that when you can instead cost your subjects freedom?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm Canadian, we are the worst polluters in the world. 23 tons per person of green house gas*. Trump's America is only 19 tons. My plastic plates and utensils waste might not even be an entire kg in a year. Also in most of the western world we don't use our rivers as garbage dumps. The great plastic patch in the pacific isn't because people are using plastic bags it's because people are just dumping shit in their rivers. So seriously what fucking problem are these greens trying to solve? You want to solve global warming, get Canadian's to live in cities that are walkable. A person in London, England will with the same income as me will produce nearly 1/3rd the green house gas as me because they don't drive everywhere and their house shares a few walls with their neighbours.
*the Canadian government has elected not to count environmental sources in our green house gas emissions. Due to mind mindbogglingly stupid management of our forests where we planted a single species of inbred trees on clear cut land. We now have large areas of dead and rotting trees that are causing our forest to be net contributors to green house gas emissions.
Why so mad?
This will last about two years and then the rebellion will occur as people will be fed up with the shit that they have to put up with. No plastic. What are you going to use glass? Aluminum? Paper and kill more trees?
This is the dumbest generation in the history of humanity. We are devolving by listening to the children who with their 25 years of life or 300 months or living believe that they are smarted when in fact they are the most ignorant. If you have to search the Internet you simply don't know shit. Yet, this generation feels that searching the Internet is an indication of being smart.
I want my stuff made of new virgin plastic.
There are several bioplastics made from starch or cellulose that are good substitutes for petro-plastics in many applications. The biggest drawback is cost. We need more R&D to bring the price down.
Some of the starch-based plastics are edible. Where I work we bought a big box of bioplastic packing peanuts. We soon had an infestation of mice in our warehouse. They were munching down on the peanuts, and had chewed through the cardboard boxes they came in. That was over a year ago, and the warehouse still smells like mouse poop.
That Titanic orchestra is playing its ass off.
Drink the mountain dew, eat the bottle!
Shades of Willy Wonka!
Little known fact: not all tree knots are assholes!
#DeleteFacebook
Want to fix plastic in the oceans? Simply enforce litter laws
Good luck. Nearly all the plastic in the Pacific come from Asian countries that have no cultural tradition of caring about things like litter. More than half of the plastic comes from a single country: China. And most of that enters the sea from a single river. That is why schemes to clean up the ocean are so misguided. It would make much more sense to just clean up the Changjiang (Yangtze) River.
Nothing better than a beer in a paper cup!
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
These measures do a grand total of about zero to plastic waste in oceans. About 90% of it comes from major Asian and African rivers. Most of the rest is from the various coastal nations on the same continents. Which in turn overwhelmingly come in large part from single use packaging of single portion perishables which don't even exist in wealthier countries. Packaging which notably in turn is responsible for massive reduction of human death and suffering from various poisonings due to perishables actually perishing due to bad packaging, or portions being bigger than single portion which means perishing due to lack of refrigeration.
Essentially all plastic in EU is already either recycled or burned. What little ends up in waterways is usually the stuff that people from non-European cultures such as tourists just discard as they are used to. And numbers we're talking about are utterly irrelevant. This is not US with its "dirty plastics" issues, most EU states already recycle "clean" plastic and burn the "dirty" one. Those that don't will have to implement it shortly, as China no longer accepts dirty plastics as "recyclable".
This is nothing but virtue signalling by politicians aimed at wealthy urbanites that will have no meaningful impact on plastic garbage problem in oceans, but will severely inconvenience a lot of poor people in EU, who actually rely on cheap packaging and cutlery to stay cheap, as they cannot afford more expensive packaging without taking a meaningful hit to their already low quality of life.
Bill got caught lying 12-25 times repeatedly stating "Blood plasma is sterile" and then later that "The Chinese Govt does not directly censor Chinese citizens" and other absolute bullshit head-in-ass retard-level lies. You're not trustworthy.
You are not a source of information that anyone should or even could trust, knowing your dishonest history. Sorry. That's what accountability means when you get caught lying repeatedly, over and over, even after directly corrected.
You're nothing but a liar, Bill.
THis will without doubt, fuolly and certainly cure thed problem. Plastics will disappear from th eoceans overnight, never to plague thte world again.....
Oh...hold on..... No it won't. Because the EU isn't the problem, and the USA isn't the problem.
This won't remotely put a dent in the problem. Because the countries that are the problem don't give a damn other than being really happy that other countries are being blamed for what they are doing.
Virtue signalling that accomplishes nothing. Billy said it best: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
^ Solve the problem, kill these lying GOP faggots one by one. The only solution Nazi Republican faggots understand is a bullet to their lying obese inbred faggot faces. No quarter, kill them all as God intended of lying faggots.
Nobody will miss them.
There is plastic that is made from wood. And paper gets soggy.
Just use fucking re-usable cutlery. What's the fucking problem anyway? Nobody on the planet needs single-use cutlery.
I don't know about the EU, as I don't live there, but here in the USA I see plenty of Joe Blow pieces of shit littering on a regular basis. The mayor of my city even ran on a campaign a few years back of enforcing litter laws and whatnot. When I tried to call and report littering that I had seen I got laughed off the phone line. Each offense is supposed to be a $500 fine, which you'd think the municipal government would be tripping over themselves to collect, but nope. Around here it definitely isn't an immigrant problem, it's a jackass problem.
Cutting brownies is impossible without plastic knives.
Yep, I love this idea. Plastic has creeped into everything. My mom recently told me when she was a kid, there were few fast food places, but you could stop by certain places with delis. The delis would give you a glass to go plate... I take it you'd recycle the glass later.
Plastic straws/knives/plates/etc. make up a tiny portion of plastic waste. Europe (and the US) make up a tiny portion of ocean plastic waste. Almost all is from Asia and Africa.
So the net change to this is near zero. This is all virtue signaling and will have no real change to pollution.
Meanwhile, it will inconvenience hundreds of millions of people.
Absolute bovine excrement.
Ban all plastic based paint and synthetic rubber tires, those are a major source of plastic pollution.
yep as "Shanghai" Bill is a known liar his point that plastic spoons are not as good as Metal spoons for digging ditches is irrelevant.
you a knob mate.
They banned plastic stuff in my part of California, and I have to tell you, nothing has changed except less wasted plastic. When you go to a restaurant or fast food, instead of dropping a straw in front of you that you ignore and ends up in the trash, you have to actually say, "I'll take a straw, please" (and the please is only required if you happened to have been raised right, which leaves out Trump voters, but to be honest, we leave out Trump voters generally here in California). It's absolutely no big deal and life goes on. So don't be such goddamn drama queens about it. You would think not automatically getting a straw is like being put in chains and forced to do manual labor for the collective. You'll live, you fat bastards, and you shouldn't be shoving that fast food down your neck anyway. Go home and cook yourself some vegetables.
Anyway, the biodegradable paper straws are far superior for snorting coke. Less waste all around.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I would recommend that the countries doing something about it adapt the customs: Countries who do not have a regulation are penalized at the frontier. We really need another motivation for governments: If they do nothing, their economy suffers. We do not have time to wait for China. Let us charge them for doing nothing. This is compensation for the damages they do to the environment which is shared by the whole humanity.
should ban kinder supprice eggs also!
they are so full of plastic and crap...
I thought that this is only a problem of third world countries. In Germany at least people talk when other people throw some trash in the streets. In Dominican Republic people do it all the time and ignore requests to stop it. There shall be a law but it does not seem to be enforced. This is a huge problem because of lack of education about the environment. People get sick because of this, but they do not know. I have been taught in school from grade 5, and a neighbor has gifted me a book about the destruction of the environment at age 9. It helps to talk to people, because if more of us do it, there will be a change.
Then...
Frexit
Grexit
Itexit
Spexit
etc...
Would those not work great?
IMHO, stanless steel straws would be a much better choice. Or safe glass ones for restaurants that have a higher class of clients who can be expected to not be retards and blame themselves if they are.
Or bamboo ones. That would actually be great. They could even be made to last for many uses!
Use glass.
It can be recycled infinitely, and if you want you can reuse the bottles and plates.
All better now, AC? Got it off your chest? I don't have to prove anything to anyone. I am certainly not desperate enough to need to be believed to give up my anonymity - especially to the likes of you. You don't have to believe me. Your lack of belief doesn't make what I said any less true.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This will last about two years and then the rebellion will occur as people will be fed up with the shit that they have to put up with.
Oh, you delicate little AC snowflake you. Heaven forbid you have to use paper or glass or aluminum.
I don't respond to AC's.
Meanwhile, it will inconvenience hundreds of millions of people.
Well, that's certainly the most important thing, isn't it? "Convenience". You must be American. I've only heard Americans spouting, "I don't want to help save our environment because it will inconvenience me." Jesus Christ, that's a level of selfishness that you must be proud of.
I don't respond to AC's.
Well said. It feels good to know there is at least one other rational person.
NOTHING! Yay!
Bring on the excuses... It's too hard, too expensive, doesn't do enough, goes too far, inconveniences me personally, or, my favorite, doesn't matter anyway.
May your children all die in a hot, resource scarce world...
Where will you get red Solo cups? Perhaps you can import them...
And most of that enters the sea from a single river.
*sigh*. Another person who read the headline rather than the report. I hate to break it to you but no where near that ... little ... plastic enters the oceans through rivers. Now do yourself a favour, find the news article with the headline you looked up and actually read the report behind it. Look at the conclusions, then look at the study (notice how it was a study of only plastic that goes into rivers), and then look at the references to find a link to how much plastic actually goes in the ocean through rivers.
All the while remember, Indians shit on the street, then go outside and shit in your own street smug in the reality that it's India's fault.
EU To Ban Plastic Plates, Cups, and Cutlery by 2021; Will Require Plastic Bottles Be Made of 25% Recycled Content By 2025
EU Ravaged By Rapidly Spreading Diseases In Hospitals, Prisons, And Other Institutions Washing And Reusing Cutlery And Dishware
The EU is second to none in the race for the Darwin Award.
Was that perhaps because the China took all the rubbish from western countries until quite recently?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
That because related numbers in US while significantly worse than in most of EU, are also quite irrelevant, especially because if the trash annoys you, it's probably not in the waterways but on the streets. Which in turn means it's going to get cleaned off the streets and burned. So it's not going into the oceans.
What will be cheaper, the replacement for disposable dishes and cutlery plus the cost of transitioning to them, or cleaning up the trash?
Have we considered that it might be cheaper to let it all gather in that one part of the Pacific where it all seems to be ending up anyhow, and just sweep it up?
Maybe it isn't. Maybe it would be worse to do it that way regardless. I don't know, which is why the question needs to be asked and answered.
In 2025 the world bans bureaucracy
The trash in the streets might get picked up by concerned citizens, the city certainly isn't sending round work crews except on the most heavily trafficked roads. Most of the time though it gets washed into the storm drainage system, which eventually flows to a river.
Your lack of belief doesn't make what I said any less true.
You did that all on your own. What you said was false. Old growth sequesters more carbon than new growth. If only you knew what you were talking about, you might have something to add to this conversation, but you don't, so why not STFU?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I work at a landfill. Plastic plates, cups and cutlery aren't even on the radar. Now, plastic bags, plastic wrap, and chip/crisps/cookie/biscuit bags...ban those if you really want to have a positive effect on the environment.
R&D isn't magic. You cannot create plastic from sunlight for free, using oil is the closest you will ever come.
And I never really understood that type of environmentalism. Biofuel, bioplastics; Lets use 5 barrels of oil to produce some product out of plants, that we can currently create using 1 barrel of oil if we just chemically modify the oil.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.