"Capitalism to the rescue" Topic

I was shopping on Amazon and I noticed you can get 1000 plastic bags for like $35. USD

With so many places enacting bag bans, it's sad but nice that you can get your own.

Get your own plastic straws while you can, too.

We alway had a second use for the grocery story bags; Laundry bags while traveling, dog droppings clean up in the backyard, and take along bags for trash found on the trail to name a few.

Get your own plastic straws

Except for McDonald's where I have to ask for straws…now I ask for two so I can throw one away for spite, one use straws paper fiber straws are fine as they last the length of the beverage. It's the people with bring your own metal ones which are nuts

We can lament the demise of these plastic things, and I'm as guilty as anyone about getting a ton of bags every time I go shopping, but it 'is' a serious issue – and not just for heart-aching lefties – if we enjoy our planet. See this recent report:
link

not just for heart-aching lefties – if we enjoy our planet

Riiiight: it's been said that 0.025% of ocean plastic is straws. Not to mention 81% comes from Asia.

We could try and solve the problem, or we could ban straws. There are deck chairs that need some rearranging it seems.

The world did just fine without plastic straws for most of its history…this is….

….I don't actually know what it is…

…how can anyone get riled up by plastic straws being no more?

how can anyone get riled up

Because plastic straws were the culmination of improvements to the straw!

It is cheap
It is disposable
It is sturdy enough to last through a use or refill

BUT NOW we have to use inferior products to "save the planet" even though it will make no difference in that regard. I do not like lowering my standard of living for no reason.

The (in)famous photo of the turtle with the straw in its nose was staged. Yep, somebody stuck that straw in the turtle in order to take the photograph and tell the rest of us how awful WE are for using straws because by doing so, WE are abusing animals. No, pal— YOU are the one who abused the animal.

Hey, think about it: How does a straw get sucked into a nostril? The straw is hollow— you can't suck it in, you can only suck through it. If you actually stick your nostril over a straw and suck in, the straw won't be sucked into your nose. In fact, it won't even budge. You will only suck in whatever can pass through the straw, not the straw itself. So, obviously, animals are not sucking straws into their nostrils, either.

By the way, reusable grocery bags are a bad idea— you just wind up spreading contaminants from the bag onto your groceries.

The best grocery bags for the environment are the old-fashioned paper ones, and not when made from recycled paper (recycling is actually horrible for the environment— it is energy intensive and involves considerable toxic pollutants). But a paper bag made from tree pulp is entirely sustainable— trees used for paper are a CROP, no different than corn or soybeans or carrots or lettuce. The forestry industry operates on a "chop one, plant seven" concept— and they don't cut old growth forests for paper. So paper doesn't mean there are less trees, it means there are more trees. (That's what happens when a plant is a profitable product— we plant more of it. Best evolution thing a species can do is make itself valuable to humans.) And paper bags are biodegradable, too.
BRING BACK THE PAPER BAG!

Parzival – ‌‌‌‌

‌‌ you guys really are too much sometimes‌‌

Yeah, it's great to be right all the time.

"Oh Lord, it's hard to be humble
When you're perfect in every way…"

Seriously, I don't like plastic bags (except for the large, sturdy ones that make great bathroom trash can sacks). I'm all for getting rid of them. I just want the convenience of a paper bag— which can indeed be the "sustainable" solution environmental activists claim they want to see happen.

For the record, paper straws are awful— they disintegrate and leave a taste in your mouth (which should give one pause, as that means some particles of the paper or its coating is making its way into your body…). Metal straws have already caused some horrific accidents, and washing them wastes water and may not be effective at removing contaminants picked up in use. Plus, bendable, disposable plastic straws are practically a necessity for hospitals, nursing homes, and hospice care— they make it easy for extremely ill and injured patients to take in liquids, regardless of body position, and fight the spread of infectious disease by being both plastic and disposable.

Like so many things, there's more to the story than those who call for bans on this or that ever realize.

Plus, bendable, disposable plastic straws are practically a necessity for hospitals, nursing homes, and hospice care— they make it easy for extremely ill and injured patients to take in liquids, regardless of body position, and fight the spread of infectious disease by being both plastic and disposable.

So for that use one renames them Medicinal Care Feeding Aid (or some such) and continue to supply them for that specific use.

I just can't get all upset about a return to paper straws for drinking McD Milkshakes or whatever – because I am old enough to remember a time before all such straws were plastic. They were grim hard times but we personed up and got through them.

Yes, it was after the dinosaurs, there weren't any McD's in the Jurassic Period. Once we have time travel I may have to revise that statement.

So because I survived what must look, to some, as a particularly bleak time of human history quite easily I just can't see the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse being PaperStraws.

I've don't use straws to drink soft drinks. Not because of the environment, but because I never understood the need. I can sip a drink perfectly well without one.

Shakes, however, are a bit more of an issue.

"The (in)famous photo of the turtle with the straw in its nose was staged. Yep, somebody stuck that straw in the turtle in order to take the photograph…"

Regardless of the other issues here, where's your evidence for this?
There seems to be some doubt as to whether the plastic was an actual straw, but it seems clear that turtles sometimes eject things out of their nostrils when trying to regurgitate.

Mea culpa— the source I had read was wrong — the straw was not inserted by anyone, or probably wasn't. So yes, I was wrong. I admit it and apologize for my error. (Although I may have been confused by two stories— the original story is based on a video on a research boat; I think what I had read about may have been a single photo staged on a beach… but I am unable to find it, so I still am wrong. So again, my apologies.)

However, I have now viewed the real video, and it doesn't actually support the straw ban as much as it's been made to appear. Here's the rundown:

It seems that the "straw" in the turtle's nostril was not examined or tested chemically to determine whether it was drinking straw plastic at all— the only "test" was for one of the young college researchers to bite it when it was drawn out, which strikes me as fundamentally unscientific (if not foolish) on all fronts. He declared it to be "plastic" (which covers a lot of territory), which means we have to take some college kid's declaration of a bite test as a valid determination as to whether something is plastic. Well, maybe…

As for being a drinking straw, the "confirmation" in the incident was one of the turtle researchers declaring "we have drinking straws like that in Germany"— because apparently it appeared to be white with a black stripe. Yeah, that's definitive proof right there.

Note also that the straw is only 12 cm long. Drinking straws are typically approx 18 to 26 cm long (doesn't mean it can't be cut or torn, but that's not easy without deliberate effort with a knife or scissors— could a turtle's teeth cut it? I don't know).

So, that being the case, what else is plastic, and white with a black stripe?

Well, electrical wire insulation for one.

Wire insulation is thicker, and has less internal cavity diameter than a sipping straw. And is typically clipped and stripped at smaller lengths to expose the wiring for application, with the stripped insulation tossed away. And it comes in many sizes.

All of that visually fits the object being withdrawn, which appears to be much thicker than typical drinking straw plastic in the video (watch the attempts to grip it with needle-nose pliers— a normal plastic straw would immediately crimp under such effort, but this "straw" does not). It also doesn't cut quite as readily as you'd expect when the scissors are used— they have to work at it.

A chemical scientist even contacted the research team, who confirmed they made no chemical test of the "straw," and admitted they actually didn't know what the item was, and even agreed to the possibility that it was instead electrical wire insulation.

So, was it actually a drinking straw? Or something else? We don't know.

But the entire ban comes from this video— based on an assumption by a college kid who bit into a tube of unknown origin or material and announced it was "plastic."

The odd thing in all of this is that in the US we know how to handle the plastic "problem"— we collect plastic trash and bury it in landfills— which means it doesn't wind up in the ocean. And those landfills can eventually become valuable sites for other purposes— filled up landfills today are used as everything from solar electrical sites to community parks and nature preserves. Yes, nature preserves. From a landfill.

Now, should we reduce the use of plastic? Depends on where we get the "should" from. Emotional videos of sea turtles not withstanding, a cost-vs.-benefits estimation needs to be done. Personally, I'd like to see less disposable plastic out in the world, if only because so often it looks trashy (literally), and there seem to be an awful lot of people who don't care about how the world around them looks. And that's apparently true on every corner of the planet. But is that a universal should, or just my preference? And does that mean we ban plastic items, or does it mean we teach our children how to be good stewards and use trash cans for disposable things? And then we as adults accept the communal cost of creating and maintaining proper disposal facilities— be they landfills or whatever?

I think it can be a mix.

In any case, clean up your own mess, and keep your hands off my straws. *I* dispose of my straws properly, thank you very much, as does my community. And if I can, then everybody else can.

Funny, I remember the rapturous joy heard around the world when plastic grocery bags were invented. No more cutting down trees to make paper bags.