How about people driving those trucks that directly dump mixed waste into the ocean? That’s a very common thing to do in South-East Asia. Plus, there are a zillion villages everywhere around there that dump all of their mixed waste into creeks going through them – to be brought “away”. Into the oceans.
That’s where almost half of all microplastic comes from. Then there’s the other approximately half that comes from cars’ tyres. And then a part of a percent that comes from drinking straws and such. Hooray.
Straws don’t pollute the oceans if you throw them in the trash. Well, unless that trash gets processed badly. Where I live trash gets burned. So I make sure to throw some straws in the river so the sea turtles can do coke off each others backs 😎
Good luck choking sea turtles by throwing straws in the river. The only turtles you’ll choke that way are the river turtles
The river turtles collect the plastic straws and bring them downstream to the sea turtles. Basic nature stuff.
Where do you think the river goes?
Who cares? out of sight, out of mind.
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Do you think plastic straws are banned in the places with waste management that allow plastics to be dumped in the ocean?
In my country pretty much every fast food straw lands in a fast food bin or in someone’s car and thence into household rubbish
None of that goes into water courses
Asia on the other hand has some pretty poor countries with crap rubbish handling
I used to work in a warehouse that made a HUGE deal about the employees using the proper recycling bin so the company can get a nice check from somewhere or other for “going green”
This warehouse recieved thousands of pallets every day.
Each pallet is wrapped with hundreds of square feet of plastic wrap.
Each box is individually wrapped with maybe 10ftsq-50 depending on size.
Each box contains goods in plastic bags. Many of them with plastic clamshell packaging.
The products get unwrapped, and placed in larger boxes on shelves.
When the items get distributed to stores, the items were put in plastic bags, boxed up and wrapped in plastic wrap, boxes placed on pallets that were automatically wrapped by machines in hundreds of square feet of plastic.
None of the plastic from the warehouse floor is separated from the general waste.
Remember, it’s your responsibility to reduce waste.
It’d be great if more and more companies packaged their foods through EcoEnclose or similar.
It’d be even better if this was made default by legislation that eliminates the need for good will.
I loathe the trend to blame the end consumer for their waste and eliminate very publicly visible things like straws when the vast majority is caused by industry every step of the way. The amount of plastic I see in retail garbage bins is sickening, and the average customer has no clue because it’s all long before anything ends up on the shelf.
Then people stop using plastic cutlery and think they’re helping the planet meanwhile it’s just a facade to keep the real wasters off their radar.
Also, I would LOVE to buy stuff not wrapped in plastic, but it doesn’t exist. There are no glass bottles of milk anymore, no soy-butcher
glass costs and weighs significantly more than plastic
that’s why plastic needs to be taxed, and sustainable alternatives subsidised, until it is the same or similar price to use…
The straw thing seems like such an inconsequential place to start over things like switching to bar soap and bar shampoo to avoid using so many plastic bottles.
Nooooooooo please oh no, pleasee, you can’t make me use bar soap please noo.
I seriously hate it, maybe saving the planet is not worth it after all /j…= but also those bottles are refillable while straws are not only single use but are thrown away way more often.
You do you. I switched to bar shampoo and I like it so much more!
How much shampoo are you going through???
Think of it in scale. It’s not just you. It’s millions of people. Even if every household only used one bottle over one year that still would be tons of tons of (easily to avoid) waste. And of course it’s a lot more than one bottle a year.
Because you can’t say the same thing about straws or other single use plastics?
How much plastic is in a bottle of shampoo vs a straw, even averaged by day?
Sounds like that’s something you should have the numbers on if you’re making the claim.
Yeah that’s a reasonable expectation. I’ll just start a massive study to see if people use so many straws that it outweighs every other use of plastic in their life. You’ve totally got me there. Congrats.
Edit: That was sarcasm. The burden of proof that straws are the most impactful discarded plastic is on you, not on my skepticism of it.
All you need to do is walk on the side of a busy road and look in the ditch to see what people just throw away.
It’s not a lot of shampoo bottles, but tons of plastic cups and accompanied straws.
Anecdotes aren’t a great way to measure this. Observations like this are variable by location, and ignores the much larger mass in landfills or unrecycled stockpiles.
And observations of landfills or unrecycled stockpiles doesn’t vary by location?
The idea was to try and remove plastic waste that people tend to just throw away without thinking much of it. Lab students don’t exactly take pipets with them and throw away in a ditch. But unfortunately, way too many people just throw away single use plastics like straws, cutlery, cups, “paper plates”, etc.
I didn’t make any such “observations”, or even claim that it doesn’t vary by location. I’m just pointing out that your approach ignores a lot of much larger plastic masses. It’s ok for identifying some obvious opportunities, but I’d hesitate to call it definitive for the purposes of establishing the most impactful strategy.
I’m not sure if people’s unmindfulness is responsible for a larger share of waste than indifference, but maybe?
I’m not ignoring anything. But if you want me to cover every single issue and aspect of various types of trash management, it’s gonna be a god damn university essay, I don’t even think lemmy would allow so many characters in a comment.
Peoples “unmindfulness” is responsible for every single piece of garbage you see around you. When I walk down the road and see a bag of crisps laying around. That’s because a person just tossed it. And no. I’m not ignoring corporate waste or pollution, criminal or otherwise. But that isn’t the topic right now.
This specific post was making fun of the straw bans vs other single use plastics that are seemingly fine. straws vs pipets used in labs. And what I said was that pipets are not being littered around every corner of the globe. But straws are. That’s why movements to ban such implements are ongoing. That’s why we have movements to ban single use plastics like straws and cutlery, while a plastic shampoo bottle is still “fair game” since they’re not typically just tossed in nature.
That doesn’t mean I’m just ignoring everything else. We also didn’t talk about how armed robberies are bad. But I can assure you, I’m not ignoring them, they’re just not the topic at hand.
Look, all I’m saying is that straws probably aren’t the #1 source of discarded plastic, and it seems like focusing on one thing like that results in more performative than substantive change.
Ah yes, the good old, “It’s not the #1 problem so why bother doing anything”. It’s that wonderful kind of attitude that simply doesn’t get anything done, ever. Because there’s always a bigger problem.
The only ones focusing on one thing like plastic straws, are people like you. The rest of us moved on
bar shampoo gets a no from me, I have a HORRIBLE amount of hair/skin oil (genetic) and if I don’t wash my hair for even 1 day it looks like an absolute mess.
good news is that when I’m older I’ll have absolutely glorious hair though lol
I use bar shampoo and body wash. Daily, because i sweat a lot (genetics too).
I use bar stuff because i have to shower daily. It prevents so much waste, because i work through soap fast, so at least i am not producing plastic waste.
If you have to wash your hair a lot, thats an argument for bar shampoo, not against.
My hair is also excessively oily, and I wash it daily with bar shampoo.
Get back to me when bar shampoo has medicated variants and doesn’t fucking suck.
Yeah, not everyone can do it, but I have no reason to doubt that most can, but we’re really getting hung up on a single example here, people.
How about deodorant? How many people use deodorant in a cardboard container instead of plastic?
To avoid plastic waste, they use now paper straws …wrapped individualy in plastic. Genius
Simple. Don’t throw them in the ocean. Why are you throwing them in the ocean?
LoL. Just autoclave them
I recently saw paper straws for sale in a carboard box with a cutout so you could physically touch the straws. Naturally, I was revolted.
lab rats who use a pipette robot that eats boxes of tips:
People in America who use pipet tips: probably 10k People who use plastic straws: 300 mil
I feel like you might be doing something wrong.
Multi-channel pipette goes brrrrrr
Having to dispense a different volume to every sample goes faaaaack.
That’s why you use pipetting robots. Just sit back and watch the show.
Also used a heap of tips (unless it’s the kind that washes, those are weird)
I know. They’re definitely not environment friendly. Still much better than manual pipetting.
It takes the resources it takes. Can’t just go “we’re stopping doing science because it uses plastic, sorry everyone”.
Yeah. True. I’m a programmer of those things and I make an effort to be as efficient as possible with tips, ie mixing with the same tip and compensating accuracy for it. It’s more difficult but worth the effort imo.
Also reuse for things like reagents makes a big difference.
Why? Seems like a reasonable amount. In the boxes i used there was place for i believe 80 tips so when i had to pipet something in a 96well plate with multiple components that where not able to be mixed before i sometimes got through multiple boxes in a single session. (And yes i wish i had a digital multi pipet but even then it would not have alwqys been possible to use it.
I was joking, honestly. There are both multitip pipettes and experiments requiring a ridiculous amount of separate wells to be filled, both which will make a box disappear.
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I am just assuming but would this not very dependent on the like of work?
Its probably fine for most things but lets say forensic lab or virus research?
Like seriously, we save SO much money on tips.
Researchers shouldn’t have to live off of tips.
Its a matter of scale. If labs went through pipette tips the same way that fast food joints went through plastic straws, they’d be banned too.
No they wouldn’t. Banning straws is politically expedient, not effective policy. Straws are a tiny drop in the bucket of plastic waste. But they’re visible, largely optional, and have alternatives. It’s easy to make them look bad so a politician can look big by banning them. Your average person can feel like they’re making a difference by buying a reusable straw. The industrial scale plastic waste that happens out of sight is allowed to continue because nobody cares about actually doing anything. Everyone wants to feel like they’re doing something.
Some estimates claim that (life) science produces about 2% of worldwide plastic waste even though only 0.1% of the population works in this industry. I’m not sure how accurate these estimates are, but I find them believable considering how much waste I see every day in labs. On the upside, this waste usually stays in contained systems and doesn’t end up in the ocean.
And we don’t throw pipette tips in the ocean, we throw them in the biohazard box. While not better for the environment, at least we don’t choke baby turtles.
The lab is a much more controlled environment. I trust a lab tech to dispose of the tips as per protocol, which could reduce the number of tips that end up as litter.
How many of them get incinerated? I know most large hospitals near me do that but do they take the waste from the gazillion small labs & diagnostics places?
In the three countries I worked in (netherlands, belgium and usa) all level 2 lab waste was collected in biohazard boxes and taken to special lab waste management. I assume they get the same treatment as hospital waste. We did have the non-biohazard labs in which pipettes just went in the normal trash. I assume you can’t get a biohazard lab approved without organizing special waste pickup.
Recycling companies who ship bottles to India landfills/sea because recycling too expensive:
