I recently visited China, to meet my wife’s extended family.
Let me tell you, the sheer amount of single-use plastics that are consumed by any individual throughout a regular day in a metropolitan environment, is absolutely and mind-numbingly depressing.
Given that there are 1.3b people there, and that no matter how much we in the US/AU/EU reduce/reuse/recycle - we will never be able to truly offset that sheer amount of plastic pollution produced.
Now I’m not saying this to be a doomer, but more-so to say that individuals can’t enact sufficient change to save this planet, we need Government and corporate incentives to shift towards sustainable alternatives, and punitive policies to disincentivise plastic production globally.
plastic waste per capita: the US is at top(if we exclude small island nations)
plastic waste in absolute terms: the US is not far behind China, with India at a distant third place.the reduction is plastic waste generation in China is far more than that of US1.
so, what I mean to say is that more people ≠ more pollution. but I do agree that the problem is to be tackled with active participation of the government, which won’t be there because of muh economy.
[1]: By 2016, China’s overall plastic waste production had fallen to 21.60 million tons, a reduction of nearly 28 million tons (for comparison, U.S. production fell less than 4 tons during the same time period). Moreover, despite being one of the largest overall producers of plastic waste, China’s per capita production of plastic waste was one of the lowest in the world in 2016 at 15.6 kilograms a year per person.
Nice!!
o instance de vc e do brasil? tem contente do português?
Ist das eine deutsche Instanz? Ist dir Deutsch gerecht?
haha, it is indeed an instance by a German hosted in Germany, but is a general-purpose instance.
Lots of places in the US won’t recycle the supposedly “recyclable” plastics, it ends up in a landfill regardless of what you do. I remember all the educational initiatives about the importance of recycling when I was a kid. Turns out it was all just propaganda to make us feel responsible for problems caused by corporations.
Oh man that’s a drop in the bucket compared to medical/industrial/commercial plastic waste lol.
I did the ambulance thing for a bit. CPR calls, the back of the ambulance, despite being covered in fluids, looked like a recycling center. And none of it gets recycled, obviously, all just gets red bagged or containered. Everything is individually wrapped, and for obvious reasons, but I’d have days where I could match my family’s plastic use for the week or more in 12 hours.
One day doing, even just residential construction produces more plastic waste than an entire family of 4 for a month I would reckon.
Though in that particular scenario, while it feels wasteful, for an average person is exceedingly rare. The only paramedic supply I’ve had used on me in my lifetime was when my car got rear ended badly and they gave me a blanket because I just conversationally mentioned it was kind of cold while they were checking in with me. Going for a dental cleaning or a physical there’ll be some single use plastics to be sure, but again, only like 3 times a year usually.
Are you advocating reusing syringes?
No, I’m saying as a species, we’re fucked.
That much, everyone can agree on.
Given that there are 1.3b people there
The majority of Chinese residents don’t live in metro zones, work office jobs, and eat fast food, though.
Also, very common to find reusable metal straws (and cups and utensils) outside the US. Korea and Japan both overwhelmingly favor washable utensils, as do cities south of the US border (I stopped seeing disposables once I got outside Mexico City proper and I never saw them in Jamaica or Cozemel outside the airport/seaport). There are zero disposables in Havana. The very idea is alien to them.
Something like 60%+ of China is urban. The majority definitely live in urban areas.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/278566/urban-and-rural-population-of-china/
Pft! Facts are sooooo 2019!
Also fuck bamboo straws and other paper straws filled with PFAS. just use a normal straw or none at all
Maybe beverages could be served in containers that don’t require a straw. I wouldn’t mind being served a can or a bottle instead a cardboard cup.
The main issue is drinks with ice. But maybe we could add a retainer on top of the glass to hold the ice so we can sip directly from the cup.
My teeth make pretty good retainers. It seems like a weird nostalgia thing. There must be far more pop consumed in a bottle than in a fast food cup, and I’ve never seen anyone put a straw in a bottle (except on tv).
The cold is a bit too much on my teeth unfortunately.
Weirdly, in south eat Asia they often give you straws in bottles. I don’t know why.
That’s true in my experience in SEA too, but it felt like a status thing.
They used to do straws in glass bottles, back when glass bottles for soda were a big thing. Maybe it’s a sanitary thing?
It was sold as reducing cavities, but really just for money.
In some countries canned drinks are known to be unsanitary. Rodents would pee on cans and someone would rinse/wash the top (hopefully). You’d buy a can and get a straw because they don’t scrub the little notch. You’d see yellow.
EVERYONE uses straws for health reasons.
https://www.thekitchn.com/sanitizing-cans-infectious-disease-23058657
Just sip directly. Why does ice present a challenge?
Or you know, food grade stainless steel straws. No bad chemicals, doesn’t turn to mush (unless exposed to temperatures of 1,400 to 1,530 °C) and fully recyclable. Some people say they are hard to wash but ive never had a problem i just stick em vertical into the silverware holder of my dishwasher and it’s always gotten all the way through the straw clean.
They are cheap to produce as well. Not plastic cheap maybe but businesses could easily replace plastic straws with them without going bankrupt or anything. Easy model is just have em as an optional extra so once people already have 8 they can just use their own lol
temperatures of 1,400 to 1,530 °C
Well, that rules out drinking McDonald’s coffee with one then.
Hey! I’m old enough to get that reference!
I think id prefer a glass straw to metal, but i get thats not something fast food could do easily.
Main issue with that is shipping, of course the government could give them subsidies to cut the costs
What’s the day to day with a metal straw like?
At home it’s simple but going to the mall with a metal straw in my pocket sounds uncomfortableI usually just keep them in the center console of my car the ones I bought came with a little nice bamboo bag thing to keep them in. So I only keep them in my pocket when I know I’m going to use them and I haven’t found them to be particularly annoying in the pocket personally could always just hang the bag off a belt loop if it really bothered me though
Just look at Every Day Carry (EDC) channels on Youtube and you will feel like a small pocket straw is fine.
I use my own metal straw and it works great
We have those at home too and they’re the only straws I use. They just feel premium in a way.
There is a learning curve with metal straws, if you only used plastic / paper. I hit my teeth so often with the metal one when I first got it.
Ours have little silicone bits on the end to use as a mouthpiece to prevent that. We also have some silicone straws which work fine.
Silicone is a type of plastic (kind of)
One piece of silicon that will last thousands of uses vs entire straw of single use plastic each time.
Yeah, you’re definitely correct that it’s better than single use plastics, but silicone has the potential to leach into liquids.
And to be clear, single use plastic straws have more of a risk of leaching than silicone. Stainless steel does not have this risk.
Yeah, silicone is in a weird spot where it’s kinda a plastic and kinda rubber.
But that’s less important because they aren’t single use. You’re going to use them time and again.
Same reason I never felt bad about buying the “single use” plastic grocery bags from Aldi that they’ve discontinued - I still have ones from my first visit to an Aldi that I continue to reuse.
Sounds like Germ City to me tbh. Straws are bad enough already without nooks and crannies
Idk about theirs, but my silicone bits are removable. You take them off before you wash them.
Despite very limited usage, metal straws have caused major injuries including fatalities. Turns out having a metal stick pointed at all sorts of sensitive soft tissue is a risk.
Meanwhile, if using your own straw with a restaurants disposable cup, hardly helps since the cup is still being waste. If using it with reusable cups, it won’t save you from any sanitation issues, since the drink is right in contact with the container. It may be useful for sanitation reasons with a can, but again, the can is disposable. Even if you recycle it, the coating on the inside and the paint on the outside probably are about as much as the plastic straw you spared.
Turns out having a metal stick pointed at all sorts of sensitive soft tissue is a risk.
What about forks?
Either is a risk if actively walking. Straw is more likely to be used on the move. I get self conscious about even carrying forks or knives on stairs.
So the risk is about as high as holding a fork while walking, which is pretty much negligible?
Well, no, just I’m personally apprehensive. I can’t find a story about someone getting killed while using a fork, I can find that about metal straws. I’d personally favor just drinking straight from a cup with my mouth, or a reusable flexible straw if the beverage were something like a milkshake.
Don’t forget about reporting bias. You’re more likely to find stories about Metal straw deaths because metal straws are not common. So when it does happen it’s considered news, just like how you’re going to see reports about almost every single EV fire and yet hundreds of cars Catch Fire every day and you almost never hear about that. Hell you’ve probably driven by a standard gasoline engine fire more than once in your life and thought very little of it
I was recently served a long macaroni as a straw in a restaurant. It was honestly amazing how well it worked! At no point it was mushy and there’s nothing in it that I wouldn’t eat with my pasta dish anyway.
They are good for some drinks but not great for others in my experience. They do get soggy after a few hours and start to dissolve a bit into the drink so if you use them at home and refill a few times over an evening they aren’t great. They also react with some fizzy drinks and cause them to bubble over.
There’s something about having a lot of money that makes you hate mother nature. It’s weird.
Feels like to them, mother nature and environment is a hindrance to their convenience
I think once you unlocked all the luxuries that the world has to offer, the temptation gets the better of you eventually. I don’t condone it, but I also can’t say I wouldn’t live a bit more wasteful if I had all the money in the world
Taylor Swifts private jet/boat circling the globe to pick up her boyfriend
How else do you go on a cruise while flying your jet? Checkmate, working class!
The jet is so large it actually has its own smaller jets inside to travel from the mansion to the wave pool.
Something something, Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift going on a cruise?
tailor swift docking her boat
I’d dock her boat in a heartbeat
notice how they wrote billionaire and not Taylor, very good
Implicitly includes Taylor though, she’s not off the hook
Just all the others are also on the hook now
Maybe if we make her feel bad about it she will give away enough to just be a millionaire
Then there would be 2,639 billionaires instead of 2,640 billionaires.
Sure it does, but we should ask why she became the meme and not any of the other billionaires, who are overwhelmingly white men.
It’s like when I pointed out to my kid that the Karen meme is pretty sexist, they pointed out that there’s also Ken. And I asked them, in all the meme compilations they watch, how many Kens are there for every ten Karens? They said, “maybe 2 or 3.” I pointed out that that imbalance is the problem, and they were like, “oooohh yeah.”
A 10 year old gets this when it’s explained to them simply. Anyone who pretends they don’t get this is covering for something they don’t want to admit.
I didn’t make that meme myself but I debated changing it to something Taylor Swift related for a moment, but then I thought that horse was pretty much dead already so I just left it as it is. She’s certainly not the only one doing this sort of stuff.
i really do not understand where this idea that plastic has something to do with the climate came from, how do people imagine that to work?
No, the point of not using plastic is to not have plastics blowing around on the street for 50 years before it’s degraded into microplastics that instead enter our bodies.
Plastic is made from oil that is pumped up from the earth. This oil contains carbon that eventually gets released into the atmosphere.
The climate change is caused by carbon that is pumped up from the earth and released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Do you have enough imagination to see any kind of connection?
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Yeah, I see that. Actually, it’s only about the carbon that is pumped up from the earth. Nothing else matters (with respect to climate change). It’s doesn’t even matter how many trees are cut down, as long as they re-grow.
Takes a while for the trees to regrow. So if you burn them, you will still hurt the climate.
They said " environment", not climate.
No, no. It’s beyond the environment. It’s not in an environment.
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Oil is processed into polymers and has plasticizers added to it to become a drinking straw, a process that emits mucho carbon.
But the image states the environment right, not specifically the climate.
Honestly, I’m just sick of picking it up on my local beach. That and plastic bags. I’m sick of picking up plastic bags.
Someone always says this. Predictable now.
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All of us walking around with plastic in our blood is probably an indicator of a poor environment as well
Some materials have higher carbon emissions than others, in terms of refinement, processing, and transportation. The third point is location dependant, but creating and shaping different materials will have different contributions to global warming.
Edit: There are also concerns with the product’s end of lifespan. How long it takes to biodegrades, how easily recyclable it is, and how much the available disposal methods will effect the environment. Plastic is not great on several of these accounts. Recycling plastic water bottles isn’t very efficient either, compared to glass bottles for instance.
clears throat Cave Johnson here. I’ve been thinking…
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Taylor Swift needs to relax her Triangle of Sadness.
Not even a shit post
There’s a different between shitpost and shit post, you know?
We aim for the former in here.
Taylor on the way to, ah forget it.
Why not use “straw” straws again?
Pasta straws seem like the obvious solution, it takes at least 5 minutes to soften in BOILING water, it’s gonna last at least that long in a chilled beverage, and then if you throw it in the forest that’s literally just food
I’m guessing it’s because there’s not as much profit for billionaires in it.
Ah yes, I forgot.
I mean, let’s be honest, that’s how the system works. Apart from essential goods, most demand is entirely artificial and generated either by advertising (luxury goods), or, in this case, more covertly by manipulating the public opinion and, if necessary, bribing a few public officials to pass a law that makes your product mandatory.
That’s the equivalent of a lot of straws.
let me add my contribution to this meme:
image description: a luxurious inside view of a private jet, in which another jet is flying inside.
the text above it reads, “Taylor swift yendo al baño de su jet.”
lit: Taylor swift going to her jet’s bathroom.
