> and straws are part of the debris I have to routinely clean up

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.

Let's consider the biggest city in the U.S., NYC. Manhattan? An island of 1.8 million no more than 2 miles wide. Brooklyn and Queens are on a spit of land called "Long Island". Together they have 4.8 million residents. Staten Island is, you guessed it, an island. And the Bronx is necessarily very close to a lot of water.

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 saw it in action firsthand in NYC. A garbage truck picked up an overflowing trash bin around midnight, and the dome of trash on top fell off and into the street, and the worker did not even break stride. Many well-meaning people took the time to carefully place their trash on the trash that was in a garbage bin, but they may as well have just dropped it on the street directly for all the good it did.

After I saw this happen a few times, I stopped taking the time to carefully place my trash, and just held onto it until I found an emptier receptacle. After all, emptying public trashcans is already a terrible job. The garbageman isn't carrying a broom and dustpan. Why make his job more difficult?

(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.)

Yep. Litterbugs, all 4.8 Million of them.

Our weather patterns here include heavy rain storms. What I don't happen to catch gets flushed away into the drain in the street, which leads to a nearby creek (stormwater is kept separate from sewage here).

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.

that's anecdotal evidence. how may of the straws used in your city end up in a front yard?

On the other hand all the straws have to go somewhere. If you're picking up one straw a day from your garden, you'd expect each household in the city to generate at least one improperly disposed of straw per day.

How do you think they generate statistics for this kind of thing? They don't count everything, they take samples and infer from that.

If I'm picking up one straw a day from my garden, and assume everyone in my city has a straw in their garden every day, I would be making a Hasty Generalisation [0]

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...

I think its only as hasty as assuming that it's a straw accumulation zone.

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.

I agree, trying to generalise anything based on 1 data point is going to be fraught with danger of hastiness.

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.

The other poster provided no evidence at all, just stated things authoritatively.