We can say it's not us tossing the bottle overboard, but buying things the boats transport supports the system.
Among the most important leverage points for changing a system are its goals and values. Changing from growth to enjoying what we have and from externalizing costs to taking responsibility and stewarding takes time and is not the only course of action, but are necessary.
If we avoid straws and stop there, the action doesn't add up. If we use avoiding straws as practice then to avoid bigger things, then yet bigger things, I see avoiding straws like playing scales to learn piano. Scales alone seem like nothing, but they're how you get to Carnegie Hall.
In my case, starting avoiding packaged food led to no flying which led to leadership roles with my podcast, my second TEDx talk on environmental leadership this weekend (my first: http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-del...), and many people now contacting me that they're changing and enjoying the process and results.
Because jettisoning junk improves our lives, we expect to continue.
Only action -- not talking, not reading, not writing, not debating, not analyzing -- only action on one's values brings that joy. If straws are someone's starting point, I support them. Then I support them to continue. I believe everyone should start and accelerate as much as possible in changing their behavior and values.
Your framing of the solution as "Humans need to change from growth to enjoying what we have" is wrong. This is diametrically opposed to human nature--you're literally swimming upstream on this one. It's not going to happen.
If we look at the solution in a way that harnesses the natural tendencies of humans to compete with each other and seek better lives for their children--you could describe it as the following: We need to find newer, more environmentally friendly technologies, faster. This is the Elon Musk approach, and he's proven it works.
Instead of spending billions of dollars on public education programs to eliminate plastic straws, why not direct that money toward inventing bio-degradable straws that are cheaper than plastic? This is absolutely doable.
Instead of telling people to stop flying to visit their family, why not work toward creating more fuel efficient forms of air travel?
You're misguided if you think wrapping yourself in the self-satisfied flag of "do-gooder" and shouting loudly at people to join you is going to have any meaningful impact.
Americans love to fool themselves into these naive, moralistic tirades that lead nowhere. Take the issue of teen pregnancy, for example.
For decades, the American approach was to wag their fingers at teenagers and tell them to not have sex (similar to how we currently wag our fingers at the developing world and their use of oil). Meanwhile, in Northern Europe, they focused on making contraception widely available for teen girls via state run healthcare programs.
Fast forward 50 years and the US has 6X as many teen pregnancies per capita as a country like the Netherlands. Ignoring human nature and focusing on moral appeals doesn't work for sex, and it won't work for consumption either:
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adolescent-pregnancy-a...
If India and China will not join you every sacrifice you did was essentially worthless
Reducing is strategic. Efficiency, such as bio-degradable straws and most newer technologies like you described, is tactical.
I covered this in part in my podcast "episode 183: Reusing and recycling are tactical. Reducing is strategic": https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the-environment/episod....
I'm sorry you think reduction is misguided. Your appeal to human nature opposes hundreds of thousands of years of human history before the past few thousand.
Is it possible the reason humans in the past didn't consume as much, was simply because they lacked the technology to allow them to?
If you gave a human from 10,000 B.C. a private jet, while also telling him that jet is bad for the environment, that human would still be flying all over the globe in an instant.
I don't think humans were somehow more morally conscientious in the past. And I'm not sure we should be aiming to head back to those "glory days" of 20 year lifespans and terrible infant mortality rates.
There is no lack of incentive for this to be invented. The global airline industry is approaching 1 trillion USD in revenue. Climate concerns are not the thing that will provoke innovation here.
Besides, "fly less" is infinitely more tangible. When you become aware that skipping one intercontinental plane (round)trip has the same positive CO2 impact as going from moderate meat consumption to veganism for one year (!) you might weigh your travel options differently. I know I do.
That isn't remotely true. The best pianists in the world who play at Carnegie Hall, true virtuosi, are far beyond attributing their skill to scales. Scales are mainly used by great pianists within the context of your work on specific pieces, as that is where pianists will be judged. Why waste time on all 24 scales for an hour? That's terribly inefficient practice.
For instance, Ballade No 1 by Chopin: you need to practice scales for the coda only, but there are 30-40 other passages that are just as important. You'd be wasting your time to practice scales in other keys and not practicing those challenge moments, as no one cares if you can do scales in E major when those scales are adjacent to the G minor tonality. When I learned that piece, I practiced the two scalar passages maybe 1% of my work on the whole piece.
A more apt analogy would be: if we wean ourselves off of single-use straws, beginning piano students can wean themselves off of pneumonic devices for remembering note names. It's just the very basics of decarbonization/piano playing, and so so much more has to be done in both cases.
So, no, getting to the tip-top level of decarbonization doesn't rely on not using straws, just like Carnegie Hall doesn't rely on scales. This is a classic example of focusing on very miniscule lifestyle changes, when climate change/environmentalism is about huge, broad stroke issues first and foremost.
mnemonic
Ehh, not much point in doing this without also tossing some execs in prison. People won’t see the justice in it otherwise and it will continue to fail catastrophically.
Reducing straws won’t “save the planet” on its own. We will improve the planet by doing multiple things.
Reducing plastic use (less packaging, fewer straws, reusable shopping bags) all play a role in a much bigger effort.
My front yard disagrees. It's adjacent to a somewhat busy road, and straws are part of the debris I have to routinely clean up (along with various wrappers and cigarette butts).
I assume this cleaning includes putting them in your trash and the city taking them to a landfill?
It's obviously not the best path, but cities[0] (by necessity) generally do a good job cleaning up the trash that gets scattered around.
Bigger issue is non-urbanized areas where there isn't the density/wealth to clean up litter.
[0] The collection of people and institutions, not just the government.
People litter. Cigarette butts, straws, plastic bottles, etc. all very regularly and easily wind up in the ocean with an assist of a slight breeze.
(I would distinguish public trashcans like this from e.g. commercial trashcans for the use of customers of private businesses. First, they should never fill over halfway. Second, the whole thing should be kept clean. Anything else is a failure of management.)
And of course, all the other parts of the road that don't happen to run up to a yard are not really groomed, so all that debris is flushed into the waterways.
How do you think they generate statistics for this kind of thing? They don't count everything, they take samples and infer from that.
It's far more likely that I live in a stray straw accumulation zone than straws are uniformly distributed over the entire city's gardens by some method.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization#Hasty_ge...
Considering that a lot of land in a city isnt your garden/house (shops, offices, parks), I would suggest that that would tend to balance out the risk of this being a SAZ.
I take your point that this is a data point of one. But if I found one straw in my garden, it is astoundingly unlikely that is the only wild straw in my city. I wouldn't start putting a figure on it from that, but it does suggest the lower bound is much higher than one.
Having never found a straw in my garden my intuition is that (not finding straws in every garden) is more likely than (finding straws in every garden) but obviously I have no valid basis to put a number of any kind on that.
Now while I think the original post is an example of Hasty Generalisation, I think the bigger issue is the generalisation combined with a sample bias. Self reported data points tend to be interesting because otherwise they wouldn't be reported. My thesis is that regularly finding a straw in your garden is interesting because it is unusual.
Arguably it raises awareness and the shard belief in at least the principle of individual responsibility. Against the overwhelming tide of the "Fuck it, I'll be dead before this shit starts to really come down on our heads anyway" which would otherwise be the reigning default.
You (obviously) can't do this on your own and, at a certain level, the environmental movement's focus on bogus, small-time, feel-good issues reveals its cynicism. BUT PLEASE, stop defending it. You're just empowering those looking for a reason to resent the movement.
Like trying to start banning categories of plastic? Straws and shopping bags?
Just Ctrl+F for straws in this thread. Two top comments are taking shots at straws and once I post this reply, those two comments will have pushed the word straw to 97 counts.
Lastly just for fun, just a tally of the most common words on this page: 447 the
230 to
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170 in
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103 i
98 plastic
91 it
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57 but
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55 straws
52 with
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39 was
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The article is about merchant and fishing ships.
Actually it was primarily about these ships as primary sources of plastic dumping in the ocean.
Not about the "ships" per se.
It is usually contaminated with food and several different types of plastic are mixed together, including unrecycleable ones. Sorting them for recycling is usually uneconomical.
if everyone stops using plastic straws tomorrow it will not matter and will not make an impact on how much plastic keeps accumulating.
here are a few more ideas for helping the planet: have fewer kids - this weird trick works, learn to love GMOs - this is the future, there is no way we can sustain the population growth we are experience with everyone eating organic, drive your car into the ground or until it's too expensive to repair it.
What is doomed to fail again. You won't save the planet by focusing at the least effective, most demanding action one can do.
On the consumer side. You now no longer see the packaging as it arrives to your house. Do an image search for Pallet Deliveries (I don't want to point fingers) and look at just how much plastic wrap comes on the "reduced waste" packaging, when it's delivered to your supermarket/department store. It's utterly astonishing.
The home machinist trashes his chips, the production shop scraps them.
The problem is that people don't have infinite time or attention. So if you raise awareness and guy buy-in for something like straws, you took away time and awareness from things that could have actually made a difference. To make things worse, people will eventually realize that getting rid of straws didn't have much impact and would be less likely to participate in future causes.
Exactly this. Furthermore, we should be thinking about these issues in terms of ROI; how much time/effort/political capital does this intervention cost? And how much utility does it yield? Banning straws vs. sending them to landfill - not much difference in utility there as I see it.
Unfortunately a lot of movement environmentalism (every movement, really) is just virtue signaling ("Look at me, I fit in to this community, I don't use plastic straws!") rather than actions that are rationally constructed to make a difference.
Now consider your ideas that would actually make a difference. I bet they actually change people's lifestyles which means those proposals are going to be political suicide unlike plastic straws/bags.
For example, look how angry and defensive people get when it comes to their meat consumption. People will openly brag about how little they care about the slaughter of factory-farmed animals because it tastes good, just in response to someone bringing up ethical concerns.
Though I do think plastic straw/bag movements are a gateway to larger ecological movements. You can't jump straight into massive changes unless society is advanced enough to not throw a shitfit if their drink doesn't come with a straw, something that we're still working on.
So, maybe it's plastic straws today, but tomorrow a politician will have a real shot with a platform against waste wrt TFA.
My impression was the exact opposite. A plastic straw ban is invasive and annoying, which makes it a good way to prove commitment to the environmental movement.
I just want to enjoy an occasional unplanned fountain drink without having to use a straw that dissolves in my mouth. I never litter, and would happily cut out some other use of plastic from my life to compensate.
> So, maybe it's plastic straws today, but tomorrow a politician will have a real shot with a platform against waste wrt TFA.
Plastic straw bans are not a prerequisite for fishing reforms. Regulating the commercial fishing industry to fix this problem will be difficult to coordinate internationally, but the end result is not going to have a noticeable effect on most people's lives.
Those sort of reforms are the easiest policy wins and the most impactful, so the focus should be on campaigning for them directly.
So now, when I don’t have a shopping bag in the car (something I’ve done since back when it was specifically “uncool” to do so), and need a bag, I pay a dime for a plastic bag that has at least 5 times as much plastic in it, and it doesn’t photo-degrade in the sunlight like the filthy evil old T-shirt bags (which I also reused) of yesteryear.
Like focusing on mass murders or killing by cop only, in the USA, when talking about gun violence. I get that it’s the most visible thing but it sucks all the political capital out of the discussion to do something major.
One of my first part-time jobs were on construction sites, where I'd spend my day unloading materials which was packed in plastic - which was then just thrown in containers, which in turn were dumped in land-fills.
But with that said, I think it's good that people are aware, and spread awareness.
Add to this, plastic straws are a trifling fraction of plastic pollution, and the made-up furor distracts from actual important issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/world/europe/metal-straws...
Actually the "single-use plastics directive proposal [1]", part of a greater plastic strategy [2], is not only about plastic straws:
a) The ban will apply to plastic cotton buds, cutlery, plates, straws, drink stirrers and balloon sticks. These items represent 86% of all single-use plastic items on European beaches, and about half of all plastic marine litter washed up on European beaches.
b) Member States will have to reduce the use of plastic food containers and drinks cups.
c) Producers will help cover the costs of waste management and clean-up. The industry will also be given incentives to develop less polluting alternatives for these products.
d) Member States will be obliged to collect 90% of single-use plastic drinks bottles by 2025.
e) Member States will be obliged to raise consumers' awareness about the negative impact of littering of single-use plastics and fishing gear as well as about the available re-use systems and waste management options for all these products.
f) Fishing gear is also addressed: "up to now, ports have been able to charge fishermen for bringing retrieved abandoned, lost or disposed of fishing gear ashore over and above their normal fee. The Commission’s proposal to revise the Port Reception Facilities Directive (COM(2018)33 final) removes this disincentive. However, ports' costs for expanding facilities and running them could find their way back into the port fee; thus increasing the overall cost for fishers. This is where the Extended Producer Responsibility comes in. Under this scheme, fishing net producers take on the responsibility (and the cost) for managing fishing gear plastic once it is landed. So, this will reduce port costs for fishers, particularly in small fishing ports, and it will accelerate the development of a dedicated waste stream for fishing gear waste. [3]"
You could argue that this regulation is not enough.
You could argue that the ban should not focus on the most occuring single-use plastics that wash up on European beaches but should focus on the most occurring (micro)plastic-types in the oceans.
I would say this is a perfectly fine complementory step in the right direction.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/environment/circular-economy/pdf/single...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/plastic_waste.htm
[3] https://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/new-proposal-will-tackle-mari...
Also banning straws does impact disabled people who as usual are often ignored.
All the straws and all the 6-pack cartilages that make it into the ocean are nothing compared with lost fishing net detritus--the things that are designed to kill and capture marine life.
I imagine the only substantial course of action would be to ban ocean fishing vessels from the entire coast.
also the elephant in the room is that an individual in the US has little to no control over huge sources of pollution apart from feel good activism (look at this! i'm using a paper straw! I saved 2 turtles this morning y'all! what? can i drink though the paper straw? naaaw dog - it's mushy after 5 seconds but the turtles)
And it's contagious. Several of my peers (who aren't ultra-green types) bought electric cars or installed solar roofs after I talked about my EVs, and even some of their peers bought electric cars after talking to them. Individual action builds consensus on the importance of political action, too, as it is tangible proof that a transition to a low-carbon economy isn't just possible but attractive.
As far as plastic waste:
We can just replace drink straws with biodegradable plastic of the same performance. Techno solutions work. It's how we fixed ozone depletion.
Not trying to suggest you can create structural change here, but just as a product of being an American consumer you have a larger power to reduce GHG emissions than most of the other 6.6 billion people on the planet.
On plastic waste specifically, I think there is far more consumer awareness and consciousness than where I am now, Japan. Everything is in bags in bags in bags.
And here we are "saving the planet", by reducing the plastic straw consumption:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/18/anti-straw-mo...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-07/plasti...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-b...
Mental gymnastics at its best:
> “Whether it’s 500 million or 500 a day, we shouldn’t lose sight of the real issue: Straws should be disposed of properly and should never, ever be littered on land or in waterways,” she said.