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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.
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.
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! --
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.
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...