
Plastic Straws Aren’t the Problem - rbanffy
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-07/plastic-straws-aren-t-the-problem
======
chewbacha
The plastic straw boycott is not meant to fix the problem, that’s been
acknowledged [0]. It’s to help drive a message and teach awareness. The hope
being that people shift behaviors that impact other areas.

Everything helps at this point. Because something helps less shouldn’t mean we
bash it. Collectively we should do more.

[0] [https://www.vox.com/2018/6/25/17488336/starbucks-plastic-
str...](https://www.vox.com/2018/6/25/17488336/starbucks-plastic-straw-ban-
ocean-pollution)

~~~
throwaway76543
I don't think it's true that "everything helps." I think many of these
grandstanding initiatives are received with open mockery and I think they
serve to undermine the credibility of the larger environmental effort.

Recently we have had some rather large political shifts which move the needle
considerably further away from our ecological goals. If you look at what
people are saying within these political circles you will see derisive phrases
like "virtue signaling," referring to exactly this sort of thing.

When you "send a message" you take work which might be perceived as mutually
beneficial and you turn it into a fight. You should expect the response to be
the inverse: People will begin to _intentionally destroy_ the environment to
send you a message in return. This has been part of Trump's schtick over the
last year. This is why there is a culture around "rolling coal." This is
actually happening.

This is extremely bad policy and it hurts the environment.

~~~
ams6110
I find myself sort of in that camp. I think rolling coal is stupid, but when I
saw people wanting to ban straws, I just had to roll my eyes. I think the
larger goals of environmental protection lose some credibility when obviously
inconsequential stuff like that becomes the message of the day.

------
michaelkeenan
A problem with directing people toward ineffective solutions is that it may
"use up" people's limited willingness to be pro-social. Scott Alexander
described a few studies on this phenomenon at Less Wrong:
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r8stxYL29NF9w53am/doing-
your...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r8stxYL29NF9w53am/doing-your-good-
deed-for-the-day)

Briefly: people manipulated into buying environmentally friendly products
shared less of their money in a Dictator Game, and were more likely to lie for
financial gain. (Beware that this is from 2009, i.e. pre-replication crisis,
so the studies might warrant careful checking.)

Alexander: "If this is true, then anything that makes people feel moral
without actually doing good is no longer a harmless distraction. All those
biases that lead people to give time and money and thought to causes that
don't really merit them waste not only time and money, but an exhaustible
supply of moral fiber"

------
wlll
Just the other day I went to throw a plastic straw away and as I opened up the
bin was faced with a load of un-recyclable plastic film, wrappers for fruit
and veg and plastic punnets etc. The straw was a tiny fraction of the problem.

At that point it really felt like the focus on plastic straws was just a token
gesture. Some small gesture to make people feel good about themselves and the
people in power while the main problem, the tons of other plastic we use,
isn't close to getting fixed.

------
stephenbez
I view this like software performance optimization. First thing you do is
profile the application.

Would anyone suggest spending a lot of effort to speed up the part of the
program that is taking 0.03% of the time?

There definitely is environmental fatigue. I know someone that always unplugs
her microwave when she leaves the house because she is concerned about phantom
electricity usage. She feels like she is doing her part, but then ends up
running the air conditioner all the time which uses way more.

------
michelledepeil
Surprise surprise, corporations (in this case commercial fishing) are doing
major damage to the environment, and even after realizing that straws make up
only 0.03% of the oceans plastic waste, the attention is still (even in this
comment thread) pointed at the consumer.

The free market will not save the environment, regulatory action will.

~~~
syntaticSugar
Will it tho? Or rather the free market won't? Isn't a majority of the push for
more environmentally safe products a result of the market demand?

~~~
michelledepeil
Yes, you are correct that "a majority of the push for more environmentally
safe products [is] a result of the market demand", but as we read in the
parent article, environmentally safe products are not making a significant
difference. This is a bit of an assumption, because the article only speaks of
straws, and I'm extrapolating that to _all_ consumer goods. The article then
goes on to highlight what _would_ make a significant difference: fishing net
cleanup.

What I'm saying is that the significant mess made by commercial fishing should
be cleaned up by commercial fishing - or prevented in the first place by
regulating the practice.

If we look a little further down the line at consumer behaviour again, I will
make the anecdotal assumption that the vast majority of consumers does not
care in the least about the packaging of their products (or the number of
plastic straw it comes with), as they are too busy budgeting their lives.

------
Svoka
Plastic straw isn't a problem. It's a movement to demonstrate how dependant we
are on plastic, that even something trivial and mostly luxury & low impact
item as a plastic straw is hard to get rid of. Whole point of stopping plastic
straws is not to reduce plastic waste, because it's negligible comparing to,
say, plastic bags, but to start a conversation and rise awareness of what
materials are used where and how they are recycled.

Planet Money had excellent podcast with people who came up with whole "Ban
Plastic Straw" idea.

[https://www.npr.org/2018/07/19/630589386/how-the-campaign-
to...](https://www.npr.org/2018/07/19/630589386/how-the-campaign-to-ban-
plastic-straws-got-its-start)

------
ghshephard
Plastic Straws are irrelevant in the greater picture, and the global boycott
has nothing to do with _them_ \- but the broader picture of responsible
resource management. Reducing, Re-Using, Repurposing, Redirecting(compost,
energy), and finally Recycling are habits which the straw ban is meant to
_strengthen_.

No serious person thinks banning plastic straws, in and of itself, has any
purpose.

------
cageface
_Using surface samples and aerial surveys, the group determined that at least
46 percent of the plastic in the garbage patch by weight comes from a single
product: fishing nets._

One more reason to stop eating seafood. It’s not like there’s going to be any
left soon at current rates of overfishing anyway.

~~~
st26
You could switch to longline-caught fish, which is a good thing for other
reasons too.

~~~
cageface
That's a step in the right direction for sure but why not just cut it out of
your diet entirely? There's nothing in fish you can't get from plant sources
and with current ocean pollution levels even line caught fish are going to
have a lot of heavy metals and PCBs in them.

~~~
st26
Plant based vitamin D & B12? Do tell.

I don't eat a lot of fish or anything, but empirically it is shown to be a
healthy thing to eat (well, certain species at least)

------
saudioger
Hey people are talking about trash, so that's better than nothing... but the
big message people should be taking home is PICK UP TRASH AND SHAME OTHERS FOR
LITTERING. It doesn't matter if you didn't leave it there, if you don't pick
it up it's probably going to end up in the ocean.

The vast majority of plastic in the ocean is washed out through rivers and
storm drains.

Much of this comes from countries with poor waste management... but the US is
still an embarrassingly large source despite being in the first world. There's
no excuse. We can not take waste management for granted.

------
coatmatter
Every time this topic surfaces in my various feeds, I do a Ctrl+F/Cmd+F// for
car/motor/driv/vehicle. To date, I've found no articles that mention plastic
and excessive motor vehicle use (often single-occupancy) in the same article.

I don't really understand why no one ever seems to make that final step in
logic. How many plastic straws-worth of oil do we waste on private motor
vehicle mileage each year?

~~~
gbear605
This topic is primarily about the accumulation of physical waste (ie.
garbage), not about the oil usage. Of course, the oil usage is a valid problem
that needs to be solved, but that's not why people are caring about the
straws.

~~~
coatmatter
I see the article highlighting the community's continual misplacing of
priorities. This doesn't mean that I don't think plastic straws present any
problems, but I believe most aren't thinking rationally about the cause of the
problem (excessive consumption, etc).

A similar hysteria has recently been occuring with dumped bikes while the
ongoing issue with motoring addiction goes on unaddressed:
[https://slate.com/business/2018/04/astounding-photos-
capture...](https://slate.com/business/2018/04/astounding-photos-capture-
graveyards-of-unused-dockless-vehicles-in-american-cities.html)

To borrow what I believe is an unfair phrase, the article as I see it is about
"bike-shedding".

------
torpfactory
I mean, you'd probably be better off just not going to the bar/restaurant in
the first place. Plastic pollution is sort-of orthogonal to greenhouse gas
emissions, and orders of magnitude easier to solve.

A straw is like what 0.01 lb CO2e (CO2 equivalent). The trip to the bar
creates something like 1 lb of CO2e pollution PER MILE if you drove a car. The
math is pretty simple but I think most people just don't like being told their
lifestyle has an impact and they ought to make changes for the good of the
planet. I'm not sure if a straw ban is an effective way to create meaningful
discussion about reducing impact. In any case, efforts to enact it probably
represent and opportunity cost which might be better utilized pushing for
something like (at the city level, at least) electric car charging stations at
all city owned parking garages. Here are some other, unsolicited, out-in-left-
field, "fun" ideas I have for reducing climate change.

\- Create a Strava-like reward system for people who bike to work. Make it
cool and adventurous to bike to work every day, NO MATTER WHAT!

\- Have cities pay employers to have employees work from home some days of the
week. Preferably on a coordinated schedule so that highway volumes are reduced
as well. This would reduce the need for highway infrastructure and reduce GHG
emissions at the same time.

\- Subtly encourage people to just buy fewer things and travel less. Maybe you
could accomplish this by setting up more community events (potlucks, movies in
the park, recreational sports, etc). People wouldn't feel the need to buy
stuff or get away so much if they were busy having fun closer to home.

This is kind of fun: Other people should put their "fun" ideas for reducing
impact here, I'd love to see them!

------
chmaynard
A more general article on plastic waste by the same author:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-25/how-to-
so...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-25/how-to-solve-the-
plastic-crisis)

~~~
baxtr
A good thread on this subject regarding the article you’ve linked to. I don’t
think “it’s just eight countries”

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067350)

------
Jaruzel
Banning plastic straws may not directly reduce the plastic waste problem
itself, but it HAS had a very high profile with almost all major media outlets
talking about it.

Anything that keeps reminding people that we are destroying our home with use-
once plastic is a good thing in my opinion. Today it's plastic straws and
shopping bags, tomorrow hopefully it will be larger use-once plastic items and
from there we may actually start making an impact.

~~~
rbanffy
> all major media outlets talking about it.

The issue is that, when it's (easily) demonstrated it's an exaggeration, the
credibility of all major media outlets gets questioned, and rightly so.

------
remote_phone
We should outlaw single use non recyclable plastic everywhere. If not across
the US, at least in California. The idea that we just throw plastic into a
landfill is simply stupid. Our descendants will look back on us and think we
are on the level of apes to just throw stuff into landfills and believe it
solves the problems.

~~~
slavik81
What problems remain unresolved when plastic has been buried in a landfill?

~~~
dwd
At some point we will need a bacteria that can break down
polypropylene/polyethylene chains. This will bring an end to plastics
usefulness, but the alternative is going to be a continual buildup of
inorganic molecules in the environment with unknown consequences.

~~~
slavik81
That's not quite what I meant. It does seem clear that the plastic littered
throughout the environment is a problem. The bit that isn't obvious to me is
why the plastic in landfills is a problem.

The first step to picking a solution is understanding the problem, and I'm not
there yet.

------
thinkingkong
After reading the really good Donna Meadows essay on leverage points, perhaps
we should have taxed straws when theyre purchased and used that as money to
pay Fishermen to haul in unused / found nets.

------
tjtuck
Plastic straws are a problem indeed. They are hard to sort out, end up in the
drains, crumble and contaminates the land everywhere. Can't get rid of them
soon enough.

------
trishmapow2
> estimated that lost and abandoned crab pots take in 1.25 million blue crabs
> each year

I can't even catch a single crab doing that on purpose. I think I'm doing it
wrong.

------
clamprecht
Why don't they apply Amdahl's law to this kind of problem?

------
geofft
The plastic straw ban seems like an entirely unforced error on the part of
liberals: disability-rights folks on the left are rightly upset that the
removal of plastic straws makes life worse for people who physically need them
in order to drink, environmentalist folks on the left who have actually looked
at the data have concluded that a plastic straw ban is at best useless and at
worst more harmful (e.g., Starbucks' new sippy-cup top uses more plastic than
the old top + the old straw put together), and the right is having a field day
with "You'll take my plastic straw from my cold, dead hands" jokes and calling
liberals stupid - and they're not entirely wrong.

Is there something people in California can do to convince Gov. Brown not to
sign the bill? (Do governors' offices typically listen to phone calls?)

~~~
enraged_camel
>>e.g., Starbucks' new sippy-cup top uses more plastic than the old top + the
old straw put together

This tells me you misunderstand the problem.

It’s not about the _amount_ of plastic used, but rather the _shape_. Plastic
straws are very conducive to getting stuck inside various cavities of wild
animals, which eventually kills them.

~~~
gravypod
Couldn't we make spiral straws?

------
intended
Ahahahha.

The pro plastic Astro turf begins, study this article for the major markers of
FUD.

First, ensure that the data is debatable. Then use it as a stepping stone to
shift the focus to something logically more sound, while ignoring one of the
core premises of the system.

But wait! this doesn’t really do anything to make plastics more appealing!

Correct, which is why the final step is to push the blame and responsibility
to someone else and to other shores.

Keep using these talking points till you have a group of people who think it’s
reasonable, and use them as a staging ground for the next level of FUD.

you may think that the article is reasonable - and it is! It just makes minor
errors or shifts focus, fairly to other places.

But the fact is that per capita plastic consumption in the West is much higher
than developing nations.

China was the one who was taking everyone’s trash in the first place, which is
why it got worse.

Not to mention, Third world countries will DEFINITELY do worse on recycling,
because of how hard it is to get passably right.

And this does nothing about the current rate of trash dumping, or production!
It just pushes the problem out to tomorrow.

I’d give the author the benefit of doubt, but this is a business journal.

