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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.
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.
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.
And yet they're happier than we are... funny about that! (Finland is the happiest country in the world.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
Relative to cargo ships (emission equivalent of 50,000,000 cars) and maritime waste due to environmental policies of certain leading export countries, this is relatively unimportant.
Instead, perhaps we could focus on reducing our practice of shipping raw materials via cargo ships to countries without environmental regulations or labor laws. Currently, these countries manufacture many of our goods at a much lower cost - by dumping waste into the ocean, employing children, and using components that are known by the state of California to cause cancer.
Then they burn even more oil to ship the finished product back to our country.
Here's an extremely understated introduction to the problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (all the statistics cited are from the International Maritime Organization, and are substantially lower than what is now (12 years ago) known: https://www.theguardian.com/en... )
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! --
As someone who owns a managed forest, I must point out that a) wood is a renewable resource and b) growing saplings fix a lot more CO2 from the atmosphere than mature trees do. So please, all the stuff you want to make out of wood and paper products - please do!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Have you ever actually seen a recycling bin that was sorted correctly? I haven't.
I see you've never been to Japan.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
In sulfur, dust/soot, yes. CO2, nope!
... and the sulfur, dust, and soot don't matter, because they quickly settle onto the surface of the ocean. The ocean already contains trillions of tons of sulfur. The amount added by cargo ships is negligible, and not harmful anyway. These pollutants are only harmful if you inhale them, or if they settle on leaves or exposed metal. Terrestrial sources are a problem, oceanic sources are not.
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.
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.
Complete fabrication. It's well documented that approximately 90% of garbage is sourced from major Asian and African rivers.
Since we're talking about EU policy, here's a citation from German national broadcaster on the topic:
https://www.dw.com/en/almost-a...
Most plastic is not truly recycled (i.e. turned into the same material that it was), it is downcycled (i.e. turned into lower-grade plastic). Downcycled plastic extends the life of the plastic and is a lot better than just sticking it in landfill / oceans, but it still eventually ends up there. Truly recycling plastic requires a lot of energy (more than creating new plastic from oil, even from plant oil) and so is difficult to make an economic case for.
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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.
The science behind paper has improved tremendously in the past 40 years. Enough that paper is actually a sustainable renewable resource, when coupled with sustainably managed forests. And North America is full of sustainably managed forests - the trees we use for paper grow quickly, are replaced quickly (we often overplant, so one tree cut down will be replaced by more than one sapling later on).
We've stopped using old growth forests for stuff like paper decades ago now.
Everything made of paper includes some amount of recycled paper in it, and it composts well. And it degrades very quickly. Heck, we stopped having to deal with the nasty unbleached recycled paper decades ago too.
About the only place that uses virgin fiber is toilet paper. And that stuff is basically degraded by the time it reaches the sewer treatment plant. But again, that's from trees in a sustainably manged forest so wipe away.
40 years ago, you're right, paper was a killer - acid rain, deforestation, etc. But 30 years ago the industry started changing, and 20 years ago we've had sustainably managed forests (a rare collaboration between industry and environmentalists) and we've been good ever since. We still overplant trees for the purpose so there is always more trees than we need (good to plan for future , uh, growth)
As someone who owns a managed forest,
Do you really?
I must point out that a) wood is a renewable resource
So what are you doing to maintain the soil?
and b) growing saplings fix a lot more CO2 from the atmosphere than mature trees do.
What? No, it most certainly does not. Old trees store carbon more rapidly than young trees. (And while we're here, they don't absorb more CO2 as atmospheric CO2 concentration rises, either.
I don't think you're managing a goddamned thing. You certainly don't know what you're talking about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"