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 US^1^.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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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).
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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.
They used to do straws in glass bottles, back when glass bottles for soda were a big thing. Maybe it’s a sanitary thing?
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
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.
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 uncomfortable
Just look at Every Day Carry (EDC) channels on Youtube and you will feel like a small pocket straw is fine.
I 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
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.
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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.
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
The jet is so large it actually has its own smaller jets inside to travel from the mansion to the wave pool.
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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
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?
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.
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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.
All of us walking around with plastic in our blood is probably an indicator of a poor environment as well
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.
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.
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There's a different between shitpost and shit post, you know?
We aim for the former in here.
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 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.
I don't know if all these recent jet memes are people just joking around or are you people actually convinced private jets are the problem?
Taylor swift, and every single billionaire alive could be flying 24/7/365 OR NOT and it would make absolutely no difference to fighting climate change.
The main polluters are industry and farming.
All this other shit around are just distractions keeping you from actually going after the people that are causing our crisis.
I don't know if it's astroturfing or what, but it seems like it's deliberate manipulation to keep people inactive.
You memeing on Tylor or using wood straws, or recycling your soda can does fuck all. A single paper plant will dump out so much co2 and pollution that will negate the effort of millions.
Well, none of that matters anyways when China now emits almost twice as much CO2 as the US and is basically single-handedly not just absorbing all the rest of the world's reduction efforts, but increasing the global output enormously.
Double the emissions for 4 times the people? Damn that's pretty efficient in comparison.
While that's efficient by comparison, the atmosphere doesn't really give us a break for per-capita adjustments. Yes, the US is more irresponsible per capita and they need to fix that. However China gets more bang-for-the-buck in per-capita improvements when it comes to the actual environmental impact.
Depends on whether we are talking about where to optimize for best impact, or whether we are talking about fairness of blame.
the data you shared only shows half the picture. if you take into account cumulative emissions, the US isn't doing any good. it's responsible fit a quarter of emissions to date.
source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions
Past emissions are just assigning blame, future emissions are all that matters. USA emissions have peaked, China is growing exponentially. That's a problem.
Blame matters, when the world’s leading economy at the time did fuck all to remedy the situation.
the US(and Europe) emitted tons for centuries and became developed. and now when others want to do the same, the US goes bonkers.
and don't talk about alternatives, since the developed world can't even give 100 billion dollars to developing nations they promised years(in 2009) ago.
That's cumulative as in "from the beginning of time" (as far as we have record allowing us to estimate). It merely proves that the US has had a head start in all this because they industrialized at a large scale far earlier than China. But as you can see, China's curve is literally steeper than anyone else's, having already almost caught up to the EU in a mere 50 years.
A lot of it is political at end of day.
Taylor Swift is looking to be a supporter of the Democratic Party in US, so the Republicans are running targeted attacks on her to reduce credibility as the election is coming up.
It's nothing new but just be aware that people posting these memes may just be bots/paid marketers essentially.
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.
The thing is billionaires will always use more resources than you. They will have more stuff. It'll have more houses. They will have boats, private planes, huge mansions, and more money than they know what to do with. They will always use more resources than you. If your whole statement is we shouldn't try to solve global warming because some people are rich, and we're doomed to all die. And by the way, The billionaires will have a nice air-conditioned bunker while the rest of us die.
I'm all for trying to solve wealth inequality, but it shouldn't get in the way of solving a major environmental disaster.
If your whole statement is we shouldn't try to solve global warming because some people are rich
I don't think that's what they're saying at all. Any solution to climate change is incomplete if it doesn't also address inequality and overconsumption
Not just incomplete. You probably need to start with inequality. 25% of global emissions are created by the richest 1%. 50% by the richest 10%
Well, one version of 'solving inequality' would be making sure the other 99% create as much emissions as that 1%, which taking your statistics at face value would be a massive bump in emissions.
Well, I can't help but notice it's mostly those billionaires and the people who work for them who are telling us there's a climate issue and WE need to solve it while they continue to fly everywhere on their private jets and buy more waterfront mansions they tell us will be underwater in 10 years.
So IDK man... I'm certainly not a climate scientist but something doesn't add up here.
More people than billionaires are telling you there's a climate issue. Scientists are, normal people are, etc. It's the biggest environmental issue of our lifetimes. And there are some celebrities that are also trying to use their popularity to promote the message to get the government to create a set of rules that will actually impact out much CO2 we're putting into our atmosphere. The right-wing talking heads have found that it's really effective to point at them and say "LOOK! They have big houses! They fly around in private jets! They use more resources that 100 of you normal folks, therefore we shouldn't do anything."
The reality is that they're using more resources than 100 of us normal folks, but there are 100k of us normal folks to each of them so we make a much more significant impact on the climate than they do. And yes, lets make the laws affect them also. But the "they're flying around in jets" talking point is lame. They're going to be flying around in jets no matter what. They're going to have big houses no matter what. So lets make them have lots of solar panels on their big houses or make flying around in private jets more expensive. That's just a reason to make the laws affect them also, it's NOT a reason to do nothing and let the world burn.
Sorry, but you're putting the cart before the horse there. More people than billionaires are telling us there's a climate issue BECAUSE celebrities are using their clout to promote this issue. And most of these people, including the celebrities, aren't climate scientists either, they just parrot stuff they've heard from people they trust.
So you only heard about climate change when celebs like Taylor Swift started promoting it? The writing has been on the wall for decades (from scientists) and we've been hearing about it for that amount of time. If you think that the only reason you know about it is from celebs then apparently they were needed in order to reach you.
Yes because Taylor Swift was the first celebrity to ever promote it.
It’s certainly not like Al Gore once made an entire movie about it or anything.
Yep. I’m all for limiting waste, but we never should’ve gotten rid of plastic straws. Paper straws DO NOT WORK. It’s as simple as that.
I’ve resorted to carrying my own straws these days, just so I don’t have to use soggy paper.
And frankly, I doubt getting rid of plastic straws had any effect anyway. They claimed here it was to protect sea turtles. I live four hours from the ocean. Unless a sea turtle knows how to use public transport, they’re not likely to get near my straw. Especially since I actually put it in the recycling bin anyway.
Are you living on a dumpster or really that naive, that you think your waste is staying where you leave it?
Well, all I can reasonably do is put it in the correct bin for proper recycling, as they tell you to do. I would never litter; it’s antisocial as fuck.
Once it’s collected, I have zero control over it. I assume Dutch garbage companies don’t dump my trash in the ocean, but I honestly haven’t bothered to check if they export it to somewhere else or anything like that.
You know you could just learn to drink like grown ups so you don't need to carry around special implements? My babies could pretty much drink straight from a cup or a glass before they had turned two, you can do it too
And that’s perfectly fine to do with a soda, sure. But with a milkshake? Or a very cold slushie? You can’t really drink those like a soda. Not unless you let them melt completely, which rather defeats the purpose…
All the other pre-teens out there are protesting that we only have one planet and all you have to complain about is that you have to carry disposable straws for your milkshake or your very cold slushie, or you won't be able to enjoy them? Those are going to hurt your teeth and your tum-tum anyway, you should probably stop
Well, all I can reasonably do is put it in the correct bin for proper recycling, as they tell you to do. I would never litter; it’s antisocial as fuck.
Once it’s collected, I have zero control over it. I assume Dutch garbage companies don’t dump my trash in the ocean, but I honestly haven’t bothered to check if they export it to somewhere else or anything like that.
Just be a grown up like me and always have a handy Red Vine ^tm^ to use as a straw.
Instead of paper we should have gone stainless steel. Safe, strong, reusable, fully recyclable. Ive got a few and i love em personally but i get why people don't go outta their way to have some
I use metal straws as well. It’s a decent option.
As for safe, wellllll… there’s some debate on it. People have been impaled when they tripped and fell while drinking from them. They’re also a bit more difficult to clean, since you just toss a plastic straw.
First World problems, amirite? Gotta carry your own metal straw everywhere if you don't like mushy PFAS.
Safe, strong
This seems to be opposing objectives for a straw. If it's strong, then it can puncture/lacerate if someone falls while carrying a drink. This has been an issue, and it has killed at least one person. I don't want my drinking straw to be that strong. Frankly I'll just skip the straw for the most part.
Not to be the "well akshually" guy, but I personally find that while paper straws are fine for most drinks, when it comes to thicker ones they really suck (no pun intended). Like, using a paper straw with a slurpee or milkshake is a nightmare.
I'm team paper straws, but surely there's a better solution for drinks like those.
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Idk, would it be any different than reusable metal silverware? Restaurants use those all the time. ┐( ∵ )┌
First of all, you'd be surprised, and second of all, while most people DO have silverware at more, they probably don't have metal straws, and they'd also be easier to steal because they're thinner than a fork or a knife and thus easier to conceal.