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The European Commission has proposed new rules to ban certain plastic products in order to reduce the waste filling our oceans, it announced Monday.
The EU's measures tackle the top 10 plastic products that wash up on Europe's beaches and fill its seas, including a ban on the private use of single-use plastics like plastic straws, plates and utensils and containers used for fast food or your daily takeaway coffee.
The measures would also have each country in the EU come up with a system that would collect 90 percent of plastic bottles by 2025.
"The proposed ban in the European Union of single use plastics, notably plastic straws and cotton buds, is welcome and very promising news," said Dr. Paul Harvey from Macquarie University in a press release. "Single use plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental catastrophes of this generation."
You can see why the EU is making the proposal. Single-use plastic objects and fishing gear account for 70 percent of waste in the ocean, according to the EU. In 2017, researchers found 38 million pieces of plastic waste on an uninhabited South Pacific island. Figures from the same year showed that a million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute, a number predicted to jump 20 percent by 2021.
Fortunately, others are tackling the plastic problem, including scientists and environmentalists who've come up with one solution involving mushrooms that can eat plastic.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 30 2018, @03:14PM (17 children)
I already have my many-times-reusable coffee cup. I never use straws. I hate those disposable plastic bags. I don't much like plastic in general, but most plastics CAN be recycled. I've never seen a recycled plastic bag in my life. In some places, they actually recycle soda bottles, milk bottles, and the like. Of course, we can't be bothered with that kind of thing in Backwoods, Nowhere. Less plastic sounds like a "good thing" to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @03:18PM (1 child)
This will lead to nothing, because my money is that the pollution comes from outside the EU.
Also I have glass straws, pretty cool actually.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 30 2018, @03:28PM
So . . . you're saying that the EU doesn't produce pollution?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by schad on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:04PM (9 children)
Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order.
The problem is that there are a ton of cases where you can't do anything except recycle the plastic. Like blister packs. How can you reduce your consumption of blister packs? You can't. How can you reuse them once you cut the packaging open? You can't. The only thing you can do is recycle them. And the problem there is that there's just so much plastic waste that most places can't handle the volume, and it's not cost-effective to add capacity. Thus even if you put it in the recycling bin, it's likely to end up in a landfill anyway.
Thing is, sellers really love blister packs. It lets you see the product while protecting it from dust, dirt, breakage, and so on. They're not gonna get rid of them unless forced to. Even if one big chain decided to act unilaterally, it wouldn't matter because the packaging is controlled by the manufacturer. As long as most sellers still want blister packs, the manufacturer isn't going to package one seller's goods specially. It may, unfortunately, be the case that regulation is actually the only way to solve this problem.
Of course, you could also just add a tax that reflects the actual disposal cost of the good. In the case of plastics, that would be the cost of recycling the bits that are recyclable and indefinitely sequestering the bits that aren't. Pretty sure that would drive up costs enough that we'd suddenly see a lot of "green" packaging appear.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snow on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:19PM (2 children)
Back in the day, I worked at Future shop (basically a Best Buy). I sold discmans. When I started, they would be sold in cardboard boxes. They would be a box with a cardboard sleeve that slipped over it. It was nice. Unboxing them was satisfying.
By the time I left, pretty much everything was in those blister packages. I've cut my hands pretty badly at least twice trying to open those things.
From a merchant perspective, they are way better though. You can hang them on a hook. They are difficult to open, which reduces 'shrinkage' (theft). The packages don't get wrecked over time (the cardboard boxes would look worse the more they got handled).
I would love a return to cardboard boxes for electronics. It's a much more satisfying unboxing experience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @06:56PM (1 child)
What is an unboxing experience? Is that like opening up a birthday present?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:53AM
film some boxers. Run the film backwards?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @08:30PM
I reuse my plastic grocery bags four or five times before i eventually use them as trash bags.
Since I'm required by the government to wrap my trash in plastic bags, I use grocery bags instead of paying extra for large 200l garbage bags.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:17PM
Aiming at the wrong problem in that most of the crap in blister packs represents several kilos of petroleum turned into plastic and diesel fumes from shipping it and it'll be in a landfill at most a couple years after the milligrams of blister pack end up in the same landfill. Its a feel good measure.
Besides with the death of retail and the rise of online, most of the stuff I get from Amazon does not benefit from the miligrams of blister pack, so the bean counters annihilate it, so I get stuff in three or four layers of cardboard boxes, sometimes packed in biodegradable (or not..) shipping peanuts, etc. I'm sure paper and ink telegrams were bad for the environment too, but in 2018 thats "whatevs" much like brick and mortar retail is soon to be "whatevs".
(Score: 2) by BK on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:34AM
If the government allocated the revenue from the tax exclusively to dealing with problem they hoped to tax away, I could support a measure like this. Unfortunately, it will be used for this, AND the children. AND education. AND road construction. AND AND AND.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday May 31 2018, @12:45PM (2 children)
Like most politicians do, you left out "repair". That is because the corporates (Apple for example) want you to buy a new thing from them rather than have you repair your adequate old one.
You can burn it. I burn tons of stuff, largely to avoid issues with the Local Authority rubbish collection people who want everything they collect to fall into one of their neat categories (and to be pre-segregated by you accordingly), and lots of my rubbish does not.
Funny how your post shows the corruption of the word "recycle" which has come to mean in common parlance "throw away; get rid of; pass onto someone else". People today say that something is "recycled" simply because they have put it in a bin marked "recycling", even though as you say it is likely to end up in landfill, probably after an expensive journey to China (or India next? or Africa after that?) where a team of 8-year olds has been trained to look through for anything valuable first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:06PM (1 child)
"Reuse" is the repair bit. Recycle is last because in the three Rs because it requires a lot of effort and energy. You are right that a lot of recycling is not done properly, my own garbage company puts the recycling right into the same bin as the garbage.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday May 31 2018, @10:21PM
No it isn't. "Reuse" is using a plastic shopping bag for several occasions, or giving your old phone to your kid when you upgrade. Repair is a different issue, and a massive issue in its own right that is far too important to be submerged under "Reuse"; when someone replaces a leaky car radiator with a new one, no-one calls it "reusing" the car, not in the English language anyway. The issue is that manufacturers are wanting and tending to make it difficult for anyone but authorised dealers to repair things*, giving dealers a monopoly on repair and hence driving up repair costs and hence making people more inclined to toss the old and buy new than to get repaired. In this the manufacturers are joined by the health and safety nazis who never did like things being repaired. Unfortunately these groups tend to get their way with politicians, who rarely have much grasp of technology.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/06/nebraska-farmers-right-to-repair-john-deere-apple [theguardian.com]
https://www.eff.org/issues/right-to-repair [eff.org]
* Eg by making components like windscreen wiper motors "smart" so a new one does not work until it is "registered" by the car's central computer, and only dealers have the software to do this. Right now it would cost me ~£100 just to rotate my tyres myself, as the tyre pressure sensors would then need to be re-registered in the new positions - can only be done at a main dealer.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:17PM (4 children)
I've never seen a recycled plastic bag in my life.
Have you never been to Walmart? Every Walmart I've been to in recent memory, even in rural locations, has a big bin for plastic bags in the front entranceway.
Other grocery stores usually do the same.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:22PM
Never noticed. Maybe I'll look the next time I'm in there.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)
What's a "Walmart"?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:43PM
A store that sells walls?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday May 31 2018, @10:26PM
What makes you so sure they are then "recycled" (whatever it is you understand by that) ? Oh wait, it says "Recycling" on the bin of course.