Meanwhile they wont ban those white K-cup pods, or the white grainy Styrofoam used for packaging (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=expanded+polystyrene+foam&iax=images&ia=images)
That shit should have been banned years ago.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Ya or some replacement for the excessive use of wrapping everything inside of products in plastic
Will the single-use plastics ban itself have any practical effect? I honestly don't have any idea how much it will reduce the use of plastic. How big are plastic bags and straws compared to the vast bulk of plastic products that get produced? Are we talking 1%? 5%? Is there any process in place to measure how much less of particular types of plastic are used after it goes into effect? Is there a target for what it's meant to accomplish? Whatever, I guess they've got to start somewhere. It's just frustrating that I've read so many news reports about this and none of them make any effort to quantify it properly.
close [to] 57 million straws are used daily
WTF Canada, that's a lot straws. How is that even possible?
As it turns out, the 57 millions straws (link is to Reason which as always is unreasonable about it) factoid was apparently a guess made by a nine-year-old several years ago. Other sources have it as close to 16 million, which is more plausible although still more than I would've guessed.
I kind of get straws, but plastic bags are NOT single use. Everyone I know, or even talk to about it, has a bag of bags in their home somewhere. Those things get reused more than almost any plastic out there. and the paper bags they replaced them with, have a much higher carbon footprint in the manufacturing of them, and they are truly single use because they're usually falling apart after a single use.
I have to buy white garbage bags now for the trashcans that were specifically bought for shopping bags to fit them. Now that's true single use plastic.
This ban is a dog and pony show. But I guess that doesn't surprise me at all.
The issue isn't only the carbon footprint of creating them. It's what happens to them end of life.
Not everyone used plastic bags as garbage bags and many of them just got thrown in the trash. Many of them also ended up in the environment.
On the whole I can't imagine plastic bags were used more than 1.1 times each. But I would love to see an actual number for this if anyone has one.
All of this style of legislation exists for the sole purpose of optics, no amount of banning consumer plastics will make a dent compared to our fossil fuel industry. We are being choked to death but our attacker said "look over there! A puppy!" so we dont realize.