“Why not both?”
Because those “personal choices” are usually not significant in the face of corporate decisions (I can choose not to use a plastic straw with my drink - and not have any impact on the plastics used to ship the drink ingredients to me) and are often constrained - if not outright dictated - by the decisions rapacious corporations have already made.
And I can safely say that a soggy, crappy wet paper straw weighs 5 grams, so that’s 730,000+ metric tons of PAPER waste instead, if we all switched to paper straws instead of plastic. Rape the forests to save the dino juice? Still just a drop in the bucket, compared to the amount of pollution caused by “rapacious corporations.”
It’s very fashionable to say that straws are a distraction but it completely misses the point and betrays a lack of understanding of how campaigning works.
They’re a totem, a symbol. It’s not like any campaigner anywhere has ever thought “if we can just get rid of plastic straws our work will be done”.
The straw is an emblem of the problem we have with single use plastics and is used by campaigners to raise awareness of the problem. And it has been phenomenally successful in just a few years (which is, frankly, astoundingly rapid as these things go).
It has galvanised millions around the world to demand change which will (eventually) come.
It starts with restaurants not offering straws and then continues into plastic bags, water bottles, plasticised coffee cups, food packaging etc etc.
The paper ones are kinda crappy. There are however “biodegradable” plastic ones (it’s debatable how fast they degrade but surely faster than the regular ones.) and I was just at a bar that was using ones from some sort of literal grass straw. That one was great because it’s just more natural than plastic and doesn’t get soggy at all. The biodegradable plastic company makes lids and cups too.
But I agree with the main point however than all these sort of changes are really minor compared to waste at the industrial scale. You need large governmental solutions to large problems. I do appreciate that NYC makes recycling rather simple. You can put almost any kind of plastic glass and metal together and they sort it out down the line. Even there, it’s a much larger effort than any individual could accomplish.
One single individual personal choice is insignificant. All of our personal choices together – known as collective action – add up to a significant part of the problem.
There is no silver bullet. The problem has a myriad of aspects, and we have to address all of them.
Yes it’s going to take all of us, and wanting to find a solution – each of us, individually – is where it starts. It starts with caring, a desire for action, and a willingness to make the effort.
Business as usual is not a viable approach, not for this, not for any of the problems having to do with the human footprint on the Earth.
And all it took was steamrolling and jeopardizing the accessibility needs of millions of people with physical disabilities. Job well done, gang!
Also, Starbucks’s new “strawless” lid uses more plastic than their old lids + a straw would have. And I’ll spare the BBS my repeated complaint about Taco Bell’s switch to all-plastic cups. But keep banging that personal responsibility drum, buddy. Together we can partially impact the makeup of a fraction of a percent of the plastic being dumped into the environment.
A million individuals may never coordinate. But a government regulation can have the desired effect almost overnight. Capitalism is great for rewarding personal choice but horrible for encouraging people to choose things where the effect is long delayed or far away. For those things regulation must come from top down.
There are plenty of ways that people who have a genuine need to use straws can access them while removing them from the rest of the population.
And was that last bit aimed at me? I suggest you reread my post if so.
I was reading an article. It mentioned that B.C.'s recycling programs get their funds from the manufacturers. It also mentioned that some companies use highly recyclable packaging only for B.C. So this tells me that until the cost of packaging disposal is uniformly forced on manufacturers they will continue to be stupid and put our ecology at risk. Put a $0.01 tax on black plastic and watch how fast its use disappears.
Still wouldn’t work for yogurt or cottage cheese; buying those in bulk like at a salad bar could get very nasty. Cleaning it, too.
Socialized losses are also known as externalities.
The business of a corporatation, small enterprise, mom and pop shoppe (!), and any other enterprise engaged in producing for consumption, including the for-profit and non-profit “service sector”, is to maximize a balance sheet or at least balance a balance sheet rather than show a loss.
The incentive is to throw off as much of the cost of doing business as possible. This process always means socialized losses, privatized profits.
I wonder how many businesses/services would actually show a profit if all externalities were forced back onto the balance sheet? I suspect very few.
I live in a moderate old “mill town”. Uniroyal had a massive factory for about 50 years in my town. They had a dock on the river behind the factory. At the end of every shift, rejected tires were thrown off the dock into the river where they “went away”. This was the practice until they shuttered in the 70’s when environmental and labor arbitrage “forced” them to move. The entire campus, which is enormous, can’t be redeveloped for anything as it is so toxic. It’s been an abandoned eyesore and environmental nightmare since the 70’s!
Uniroyal paid exactly zero pennies for these externalized fever dreams. I can’t help myself for wondering how much shareholder value would have been created if Uniroyal actually had to account for this corporate horror.
Probably very few. But what we’re seeing is the general public being told by corporations that they as individuals are most responsible for taking on the burden of 80% of those externalities, while in reality that responsibility belongs to the corporations themselves.
Once corporations truly shift from a shareholder-value mentality to a stakeholder-value mentality we might see a change in how externalities are viewed. It’s a testament to how far things have gone in the wrong direction in terms of inequality and global warming that even CEOs recognise the danger enough to pay lip service to the idea of a change:
In a similar vein:
Social media is rife with accounts of people who “don’t look disabled” being denied straws by people who have bought fully into the “no one needs straws” argument. This is already actively hurting people with disabilities, who are now having to “prove” their disability in public by people who now feel empowered to police their needs.
https://twitter.com/EhlersDanlosgrl/status/1139214883549925377
The straw ban movement – which is built on a 5th-grade science project with extremely dodgy methodology estimating the number of straws used in the US – is hurting people in exchange for essentially nothing but self-righteous feel-goods from people who would rather do the easy thing than the effective one.
Absolutely none of the activism around banning straws has targeted corporations’ overwhelming reliance on plastics when other materials would suffice. All of it has been framed as “personal choice” and “eliminate straws” to save the environment. If the straw ban movement is trying to target the broader problem of corporate over-use of plastic, it’s done a pretty terrible job of getting that message across. Companies like Starbucks that benefit from the good press of being “eco-friendly” by banning straws are making moves to “limit” plastic consumption that actually increase the volume of plastic being produced, and others like Taco Bell are just straight-up converting more of their produced single-use containers to plastic because it’s probably a fraction of a cent cheaper than paying for sustainable paper.
Also, as a fun fact about biodegradable straws: some of them have gluten in them, which means they can set off people with celiacs. Unsurprisingly, this fact is not broadly disclosed at the point of dispensation.
No, no you don’t.
You may think you do, but you don’t.
Let’s look at the straw. It’s a great way of looking at this.
Have you ever really thought about the straw? You probably don’t use straws at home. You probably don’t use straws much - except when you buy a drink in a plastic, single-use cup. Why is that? Why do you suddenly want and NEED a straw, but not other times?
It’s because the cup. The cup has been chipped away and reduced in how much it weighs and how strong it is until it is nearly too flimsy to use without a lid. I mean, think about how hard it is to get the cup off the fountain to the counter until you slap that lid on it, then it becomes fairly durable. That’s because the cup doesn’t have much crush resistance until you put the lid on it.
The lid needs to be strong enough to support the top of the glass to keep it from collapsing. If it has a straw hole in the center of the cup, it can be thinner. It is cleverly designed with reinforcing ridges and to lock onto the cup so it supports it. But, if you don’t have a straw, you would need a sipping hole, which would make the lid weaker, so it would need to be thicker.
You probably never thought about this. You just know that using that cup without a straw is horribly hard, and it really sucks, and you’re always spilling it on yourself.
That’s because the cup, lid, and straw are a system. And in order to move away from using the straw, you have to change the entire system.
Yep, you can walk away from the counter at the gas station with your 52oz drink and your lid but no straw as an individual. But you can’t change the system that makes it really annoying to try to drink your drink without the straw.
Without changing the system which made the choice the default choice asking the end user to change their behavior away from the indicated use of the system is bound for failure. The only way to effectively drive end user behavior is to change the system to enable the end user to use the system more efficiently.
Never ban straws. Work with industry to figure out a more efficient drink package that uses less overall plastic. Work with industry to figure better ways of enabling single-use plastics to be replaced with multi-use plastics. Figure out ways of using single-use plastics multiple times. Build systems that don’t have single-use components.
Don’t discount ideas without a proper analysis. Perhaps the most effective solution is to make cups heavier duty again so they are multi use and don’t need a straw. Perhaps a solution where there is a deposit on cups and they are recovered and reused or reformed (I honestly don’t know which is more energy efficient) is the best way of handling it. Perhaps offering half-price refills (even in your competitor’s cups) is the way to go. Perhaps decoupling the purchase price of the cup and the drink that goes in it is the way to go. (Drink $1. Cup (a nice, reusable one) to put drink in is $5.) Perhaps paper is the right solution. Perhaps you could make an entire cup system out of paper that lasts for a day but biodegrades quickly is the answer.
The funny thing is that the plastic straws are actually almost as durable as the silicone or metal ones. I have a plastic straw that came with a drink from a gas station that I’ve been using for months. (Washed regularly, of course.) I’ve been using drink cups from gas stations for days or weeks at a time (again, washed regularly). The nicer plastic “Tupper Ware” style take out containers can be used several times. It’s actually amazing how many “one time use” plastics can be reused for a fairly long time with a modicum of care.
Here’s a recent NPR podcast on exactly this story: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757539617/the-litter-myth
Naw, the dude was an asshat. He really did believe that the only way to make things better is though protest. Actually doing something, like putting in the work to find solutions, was alien to him. Gave me a rather jaded view of some protesters after that.
Because, if personal choices could, at most, account for about 10% of our emissions, (which is p pro good ballpark, unless your personal choices involve being a subsistence farmer, and not heating your hut in the winter, or assassinating oil executives and their pet politicians) then focusing on that is a dangerous distraction from the systematic problems with our technology and industry.
