I don’t use any kind of beer straw.
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I think it is mentioned already but there may be benefit from the straw ban since it is a “simple” way to raise awareness and allows virtually anybody to feel like they have done something for the environment.
In WWII there were scrap metal drives in which households donated old pots and pans to the war effort. The idea was that the scrap metal would be melted down and then used in building new airplanes, ships, weapons, etc. IIRC very little of the scrap metal was actually of sufficient quality to be re-used in any meaningful way, but those drives were a way to make everybody feel they were contributing to the war effort. The analogy is far from perfect, but there is probably some sort of benefit like this from a straw ban.
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Look I hope hope that is true
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Grunch.
Paper straws suck but one of the places i go to that banned plastic straws and replaced them with paper also gave a sippy cup option. Which i like fine.
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I thought this was because they import others, like ours, waist plastic.
It might still be th difference between voting R or staying home.
Back in the UK this week. Can confirm paper straws are the nut low. Except for maybe the way they put all fruit and vegetables at the grocery store in plastic here, jfc. There are so many bigger impact things we can do, IMO banning straws just maybe makes us feel better without having much actual impact. Sort of like recycling.
… Yeah carbon taxes will fix the straw problem… or they won’t if it isn’t actually using all that much carbon on a macro level.
We need carbon taxes ASAP. The biggest problems that are the easiest to solve (in terms of $$$) are all easily 100,000,000x bigger than plastic straws. This is like paying off debt… you start with the highest interest rate stuff first and work your way down. Plastic straws are bad for the environment, but in a global macro context I refuse to actually care about them while cruise ships & fast fashion are still a thing.
Single use plastics as a category matters. The straw is obviously much less plastic than the rest of the cup. That sippy cup top exists to make us feel better about the fact that we just used a nontrivial amount of plastic on getting Starbucks… and I’m confident that when Starbucks is paying more for the cup because of carbon taxes than they are for the drink they’ll find some ingenious way to sell us drinks that uses way less carbon.
I agree with OP. Plastic straws are horrendous and do a fair amount of harm to environmental causes. We should be dismantling massive corporations that pollute instead of doing this dumb shit
I have like 10-12 reusable cloth bags. I imagine most people have several. There’s no fucking way we’re taking 1200 trips to the store before we lose them or they get covered in meat juice and thrown out. And I use grocery store bags as my garbage and poop bags so shrug.
Probably not 1200 but easy 200 to 300 each. And if you take out the insert at the bottom you can wash them if they get gross. But we do take our meat in plastic bags so we dont gunk up our cloth bags as that seems like a health issue.
I’ve just stopped using straws even when places offer them. I’ve discovered I prefer the taste of most liquid w/o a straw. The only place I miss it is in the car, assuming it’s not one of those strawless lids.
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Does plastic production actually generate a material amount of carbon emissions relative to manufacturing a paper straw? It seems like they should be similar.
Thread is convincing me that the straw ban is good. Most people will get over it. A few loudmouths will still be clamoring to put lead back in gasoline. This is exactly like light bulbs. And it will lead to more reduction in single use plastic other than straws, not less.
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If you have already cloth bags at home and went to the store without one you are actually better of taking a plastic one at the store and use as garbage bag afterwards. The resources(cotton, water etc…) that are going into a cloth bag are huge and you actually have to use the cloth bag around 100 times to make up for that otherwise a cloth bag is just as bad as using plastic bags.
Looking this up it seems the heavier plastic reusable bags might be the best and payoff in just a handful of uses.
I either re-use the plastic bags or give them to my ex to use for cat poo. She gets much more excited about a giant bag full of plastic bags than flowers.
I use them to store books I never read
Selfishly, I’m less concerned about the oceans filling up with plastic than I am with digesting microplastics at the seafood buffet…but since the two go hand in hand I’m pro ban. (But I never use straws anymore anyway because I’m an adult)
I looked that up and saw those (saw the 131 and 7100 numbers) and aside from those just being too far apart to make sense of without a deeper look, “environmentally friendly” is obvious complex. Cotton is renewable. Water is not destroyed in the process, and energy can be and is increasingly renewable. A cotton back industry is probably already far more sustainable than a plastic bag industry and, if not, it surely can be. The plastics are accumulating and will be around for a long time. A plastic straw takes 200 years to decompose.