Banning Plastic Straws Harms Real People
SPOTLIGHT: Banning plastic straws is the latest trend. BIG PICTURE: Here in Canada, the city of Vancouver has outlawed disposable drinking straws as of June 2019.
The European Union is talking about doing the same. Greenpeace thinks they should be curtailed in Australia.
As I’ve previously explained, these measures have no hope of cleaning up the ocean since the vast majority of trash polluting it comes from impoverished countries in Asia and Africa with no waste management systems.
Ten-year-olds may believe they’re saving turtles and seabirds by banning straws, but that’s wishful thinking. Nothing will seriously change until the garbage disposal problems of the third world are addressed.
If the litter is a concern along our coastlines, let’s do a better job of addressing littering. But let us not insult each other’s intelligence by pretending that banning straws will significantly reduce the total trash ending up in landfills.
Straws are small and weigh nothing. As a percentage of the overall refuse we produce each year, they’re trivial. Less than a rounding error.
The problem with these kinds of environmental crusades is that the crusaders believe they’re on the side of the angels. It doesn’t occur to them that their campaign might have unintended consequences – that real people might get hurt.
Vancouver was recently described as “the most ‘Asian’ city outside Asia.” Its ban will adversely affect the numerous small businesses who sell wildly popular Asian bubble tea, as well as thick milkshakes.
“Change like this can be costly,” says the president of a Restaurant and Food Services Association. Why increase costs for no discernible benefit? Why interfere with private businesses (be they successful or marginal) minus a compelling reason?
Then there are the sick and the disabled. Near the end of her long battle with breast cancer, the only way my mother could manage to drink was through a straw.
People with a range of disabilities also need them. One woman who is incapable of holding a cup told a newspaper that no straws were available in three establishments she visited recently, and that the staff was decidedly non-apologetic. From her perspective, her already difficult life is being made more so:
We’re really kind of viliyfing [sic] people who need straws or forgetting about them completely – let’s be honest – in encouraging shaming people who are asking for them.
Another woman, confined to a wheelchair, suffers from a disease that affects her ability to swallow. The same newspaper article reads:
“Are straws then going to be something you buy at a medical supply store? And as soon as you do that they become more expensive and they become less accessible,” says [Vancouver’s Gabrielle] Peters, on a fixed income of disability benefits she estimates at $1,100 per month. “You’re just adding that cost to me.”
TOP TAKEAWAY: Banning plastic straws in affluent countries has no realistic chance of improving the state of the ocean. But these bans are making life worse for small business people, sick people, and the disabled.
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nfw
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I had the misfortune of being sent, for work, to Pakistan about 20 years ago. The first thing that struck me after the poverty but mosque on every corner, was the litter everywhere. I started to believe plastic bags and other wrappings were actually grown in the dirt, you could hardly call it soil, in the city I was working. I agree entirely, fix the third world filth and attitude to litter and that will go a long way to fixing Greenpeace’s “problems”. Of course Greenpeace and its ilk know they wouldn’t last 5 minutes in the third world telling them to pick up their garbage. In fact, why doesn’t Greenpeace et al have their headquarters in third word guano-holes? The question was rhetorical.
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tom0mason
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Banning drinking straws is nothing more than easy virtue signalling tool for politicians.
Little is actually achieved but politicians preening themselves before the public. Billions of tons of plastics, one of mankind’s most useful materials, is just used mere disposable part of our ‘throw away’ mindset.
IMO it will take a huge shift in thinking to move society from demanding, and manufacturers supplying ‘throw away’ products costing us dearly in the long run in resources and environment degradation.
The move should be toward making products that are more durable, sold with the minimum of packaging, with longer lives, and where needed, simple upgrade methods, while being truly recyclable. That should be the aims of inventors, designers and manufacturers — durable and recyclable.
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4TimesAYear
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Have you ever seen some of the “reusable” straws they’ve made in the past? They were a nightmare to clean – a breeding ground for germs. They were rippled so they’d stay in the container it came with.
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4TimesAYear
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They do this with taxing soda as well. It’s punitive to those who are sick and those who have chronic digestive problems who need soda to settle their stomachs. If you have stomach flu, what do you drink? Soda. If you’re recovering from multiple day migraine and need to be rehydrated, what do you drink? Soda. If your prescription meds (or even vitamins) give you stomach problems, what do you use to help get and keep them where they belong? Soda. Now this with straws. What the dickens are they going to do, require a prescription from your doctor for straws and soda? We already have to do this for over the counter sinus meds and I believe the bill passed that would require a script for over the counter anti-diarrhea drugs. Seriously – if you want more than the allowed amount they’re allowed to sell you at once, and you need a 30 day supply, you need to get a prescription for over the counter meds. My guess is that they will require this with soda, straws, and God only knows what else that’s coming down the pike. Doctors have better things to do with their time than to write scripts for OTC meds. (Oh, btw, the reason that scripts for opioids are up is due to the fact that you cannot get refills any more. You have to get a new script every time you get the med whereas in the past that script might have been good for 6 months.)
More about the straw issue:
I used to use re-usable straws. I can tell you that what it takes to make sure they’re clean and not a prime home for germs takes more resources than using disposable ones. A piece of cotton or Q-Tip shoved through a straw with a bamboo skewer isn’t very environmentally friendly. It’s wasteful. If you have a family of four or five and you’re all using reusable straws, it’s also time intensive. These people need to find something else to do with their time and stop wasting ours.
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