Plastic Straw Ban Enforcement

It's true. It's like when people replace their lightbulbs with more efficient bulbs and then go on burning 1000kwh/month on air-conditioning.

And yet wouldn't it be that much more wasteful if incandescent bulbs were still standard and people were burning 100s of kwh per month on just lighting?

There's many uses for a straw.

Such as cocaine.

Not that "I" would know any thing about that.

As far as plastic straws are concerned, it seems the main problem will be to get the straws to the people that actually need them, and only to those people. While the price of said straws would unarguably go up when production is limited to a very specific group of people, said people could be financially supported by the government in order to cope with said higher costs.

That would also eliminate the problem of plastic straws being used outside of their specific target population.

The simple fact of the matter is that as long as people are not willing or able to embrace a different style of living and a different mentality in regards to the environment, this is a hopeless battle. It doesn't help that certain individuals in positions of power seem to disbelieve either the scale of the problem, or even the fact that there is a problem in the first place.

If you can afford cocaine? You might as well buy a reusable metal straw for that purpose. Maybe something in solid gold?

I was watching Drug Years on tv and they said the most common object used was a hundred dollar bill because it can be unrolled and licked for residue.

Ever since then when I cash my check, I refuse taking those bills. It's not the fact of cocaine residue, it's the fact of how many tongues actually could potentially have licked it. Ew. Just no....

But back to the subject, since it seems you may know the answer to this is, since gold is a porous metal, wouldn't a substance get stuck and clog the straw?

How would one clean it?

So just order the next cocktail without a straw, problem solved.

Do you know what one dollar bills are used for?

If you are worried about $100s (probably one of the cleanest denominations), you really shouldn't be touching money at all. I handle $100 bills quite a bit, because they are the most common currency when buying and cashing in poker chips. I am still alive.

Yes, the power issue is the biggest problem. What ends up happening is that some politicians will support something like a plastic straw ban/tax in order to get credit for supporting environmental causes so that they can sell out the environment on other levels when it's in their interest.

Really, the concept of liberty is that people just police themselves and don't create unnecessary waste or environmental problems. But what do you do when they shirk their responsibility? Do you endless argue with them while they deny the problem, or do you go ahead and create some policies and enforce them against people who reject their importance? If so, how far do you go?

Let's say you tax plastic straws and exempt people with disabilities who need a straw. So now everyone has to pay 25 cents extra for a straw if they want one. Presumably most people will just say no to the straw, but what if people who want to support government by paying extra taxes start buying the straws all the time and defeating the purpose of the tax as a deterrent? Do you keep raising the tax until it's too much for anyone to take a straw? What about when people complain about it, like they sometimes do with Uber peak pricing where some drunk idiot takes an Uber without seeing the price is $600 and then complains that they got charged $600 for a ride, even though the whole point of peak pricing is to deter people from taking rides unless they absolutely need one badly enough to pay that high price?

Banning plastic straws is a start. It's not the biggest issue though. The biggest issue is convincing our President that conservation is BETTER than big business.

National park ban saved 2m plastic bottles – and still Trump reversed it
Trump administration reversed ban in August despite environmental protest
Activists say plastic is biggest threat to environment after climate change
Jessica Glenza in New York

@JessicaGlenza
Tue 26 Sep 2017 05.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 15 Feb 2018 08.35 EST

Grand Canyon banned the sale of plastic water bottles in its gift shops.

A ban on bottled water in 23 national parks prevented up to 2m plastic bottles from being used and discarded every year, a US national park service study found. That is equivalent to up to 326 barrels of oil worth of emissions, 419 cubic yards of landfill space and 111,743lb of plastic, according to the May study.

Despite that, the Trump administration reversed the bottled water ban just three months later, a decision that horrified conservationists and pleased the bottled water industry.

“The bottled water industry has led a years-long campaign against this commonsense policy, all to protect its bottom line,” said Lauren DeRusha Florez, an associate campaign director at Corporate Accountability International.

“The fact that Trump administration officials knew the benefits of this policy back in May but still decided to rescind it last month sure looks to me like the bottled water industry’s lobbying dollars at work,” she said.

The plan to curb pollution in America’s most famous wilderness areas was spurred when arguably its most famous park, the Grand Canyon, banned the sale of plastic water bottles in its gift shops, according to the report. Approximately 331 million people visit US national parks each year.

The program was meant to support a “life cycle” approach to plastic, which activists say is the largest global threat to the environment behind climate change. are sold per minute, according to a Guardian analysis. The top six drink companies in the world use an average of just .

At the same time, new research has shown that plastics which find their way into the sea have entered the food supply. Scientists have found plastic particles in sea salt, honey, fish, beer and tap water.

The National Park Service released the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. In a cover sheet to the report, the agency said it was originally developed to help management make decisions, but that the agency has “lacked the data necessary to ensure the report’s findings”.

The agency started allowing parks to ban bottled water in 2011. Since then, the bottled water industry argued that the ban was unfair and eliminated a healthy beverage option, even though hydration stations with free water were installed in parks.

When the National Park Service ended the ban in August, it echoed an industry argument: “It should be up to our visitors to decide how best to keep themselves and their families hydrated during a visit to a national park, particularly during hot summer visitation periods,” said the acting service director, Michael Reynolds.

Unfortunately, the issue is even tougher than that. You have to convince the people, not just the president. Most people are simply more attached to lifestyle choices than they are interested in conservation and environmental protection. E.g. try to convince people to give up driving or give up air-conditioning and heating as the most significant household uses of electrical power and you will see that people are simply resistant to changing their behavior when it's inconvenient or if they see no one else changing, they want to wait until it's a trend or a law/policy.

People don't realize that the laws/policies that are good for them are almost always going to get blocked by the interests that are against them. It's much easier for people to change their own personal behavior than to lobby government to change the law, but lobbying government gives them an excuse to not actually take the initiative of changing their own behavior independently.


Exactly. That's always going to happen. Laws and policies can only really guide people into better behavior for a while. If people insist on desiring the thing that is banned, the laws will eventually be changed to facilitate desire. It is a weak point of democracy, but more centralist/strong governments don't really do any better because people still find ways to liberate their desires, i.e. by doing so secretly, using black markets, etc.

That's why I still continue to believe in liberty (responsible use of freedom) and democracy. It's not because they are working very well, because they are doing really REALLY bad right now. It's because ultimately they are the only way to achieve effective reforms. The Paris accord, for example, has not resulted in CO2 emissions reductions in the countries that criticize Trump for dissenting from the accord. They like the idea that they are doing something about climate problems by making policies, taxes, etc. but in reality they are not changing their behavior. That will only happen when the people decide to exercise the liberty of reducing their fossil fuel use by changing their lifestyles and businesses to use less energy.

In a 2018 life-cycle assessment, Denmark's ministry of environment and food agreed with previous similar studies, finding that classic plastic shopping bags have the least environmental impact. This assessment does not take marine litter into account--so as far as that gigantic problem is concerned, plastics are almost certainly the worst, since they don't break down on a timescale meaningful to human or animal life.

But when taking into account other factors, like the impact of manufacturing on climate change, ozone depletion, water use, air pollution, and human toxicity, those classic, plastic shopping bags are actually the most benign of the current common options.

The technical name for the wispy plastic bags, like the ones you might get at the grocery store or deli, are low-density polyethylene (LDPE) bags.

The table below, using data from the Denmark study, compares the environmental performance of LDPE bags to other bags, assuming that the LDPE bags are reused once as a trash bin liner before being incinerated (incineration is the best possible disposal for these bags, according to the report).

Cotton bags must be reused thousands of times before they meet the environmental performance of plastic bags--and, the Denmark researchers write, organic cotton is worse than conventional cotton when it comes to overall environmental impact. According to the report, organic cotton bags have to be reused many more times than conventional cotton bags (20,000 versus 7,000 times), based on the assumption that organic cotton has a 30% lower yield rate on average than conventional cotton, and therefore was assumed to require 30% more resources, like water, to grow the same amount.

http://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotton-totes-might-be-worse-than-plastic/