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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 FatPhil on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:54PM (6 children)
I remember back in the 80s, someone invented the concept of "biodegradability", which was being applied to a range of things - I wonder why we've forgotten about that concept?
Drinking straws typically have to survive a wet environment for less than an hour - there's no reason why they shouldn't be made of something which happily degrades and dissolves in a wet environment over a span of a week or so, say.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:07PM (2 children)
Make them out of pasta or a pasta-like substance.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:56PM
Make them out of Italian Government and they'll degrade before they even start.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 31 2018, @12:00PM
I find it hard to believe that in 2018 there aren't a dozen well-known (at least to (bio-)chemists) solutions to this problem.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @06:59PM
So they're sequestering Carbon?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:44AM
Speaking of the 80s, I ran a 8 year experiment back in the 80s when one of the politicians was singing the praises of their paper straws. Tacked a couple to the sunny side of a shed, and staked a couple more on the ground. Ten years later my wife took them down and threw them in the recycle when we moved out of that house.
Statute of limitations on false advertising had already expired.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday May 31 2018, @12:54PM
Are people here aware that drinking straws used to be made of paper, waxed I believe, until relatively recently (at least the 1970's)? I found a packet of them in my parents' sideboard cupboard recently when I was dealing with their effects, and I can remember using them as a child. No-one had any problem with them. I suppose that making plastic straws just became cheaper (by 0.001 pence?) at some point, but the World is not going to end over this.