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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the taking-care-of-the-place dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by tfried on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:12PM (13 children)

    by tfried (5534) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:12PM (#686353)

    First, you need a viable alternative.

    I'll bite:

    • Plastic straws - paper straws, bamboo straws, straw straws, no straws at all (you know, some people are actually able to drink without a straw)
    • Plastic stirs - wooden stirs, if needed at all
    • Plastic plates - paper plates (ok, often coated with - thin - plastics), plates formed from starches, PLA, "editable" containers (where possible), leaves, returnable dishes
    • Plastic cotton buds - cotton buds attached to rolled-up paper, instead of plastic stick
    • Some other banned plastic thing - oh well, your turn now to tell us which of the items to be banned has no viable alternative available.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=1, Touché=3, Total=4
    Extra 'Touché' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:34PM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:34PM (#686368)

    You want to re-jigger an entire sector of the economy.

    You have to set up business relationships, secure flows of resources, re-establish production facilities, and find the right prices for everything so that all of these moving parts continue to work in tandem without halting.

    This is an enormous and expensive undertaking, which leads us to the folly of Authoritarian (e.g., socialist) organizations of society: An attempt at a command-and-control economy, whereby top-down decrees are made according to the fantastical whims of know-nothing bureaucrats.

    Every sufficiently complex system requires that its design be found through evolution by variation and selection; in these systems, there is no such thing as Intelligent Design.

    Sure, throw a giant asteroid at a part of your economy. If you can stomach a mass-extinction event, then you might end up with a novel design, but you might just fuck everything up, too.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:13PM (5 children)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:13PM (#686488)

      An effective political litmus test is the left sees that as ha ha funny can't be serious, and the right sees that as "duh obvious!"

      The purpose of a lot of leftism is simply destruction. Its like asking the intelligent design behind the Heavens Gate Upload Event or the Russian Revolution, there is no intelligence just destruction.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:23PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:23PM (#686492)

        There is no cure for stupid, especially when it thinks it is the smartest thing in the room. You are too stupid to understand the role of government and regulations and you apply edge cases to the whole.

        I'm more curious why such beliefs seem to dovetail so nicely with prejudice, as you so amply demonstrate all the time.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by tfried on Thursday May 31 2018, @07:22AM (3 children)

        by tfried (5534) on Thursday May 31 2018, @07:22AM (#686632)

        The purpose of a lot of leftism is simply destruction.

        Exactly. You see, and that's why we cherish these moments so much, when frightened libertarians predict mass-extinction(!) as a result of going back to paper straws. (On the day that the bans become effective - sudden and unexpected - paper will immediately be in short supply, leading to a screeching halt of all printing, followed by a wave of raids on public and private libraries for recyclable paper, led by an army former-top-earning-now-starving plastic straw engineers, while the police forces are effectively tied to their desks trying to sip their coffee through ball-pen casings, because they can no longer afford any straws, ..., all because we deliberately failed to wait for the invention of a viable alternative to plastic straws).

        We rate this funny, not because we disagree, but because we always value the expression of terror on our victims' faces, when they come to see through our subtle plans, and realize they are doomed. That and the fact that +1 Funny comes closest to the missing +1 Maniacal Laughter.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:40PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:40PM (#686751)

          The libertarian AC above is extrapolating from straws to the general case.

          Meanwhile, you seem to be quite content to ignore the general ramifications of your leftism.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:59PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:59PM (#686791)

            Ah yes, saving the planet is suuuper scary. Leftism? OK if we're gonna reduce smassive systems to a single word then I'll saddle you with "Racism". Your racism was best left in the past, it is an ignorant harmful mode of being and led to genocide. Why do you wantyo commit genocide???

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @06:02PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @06:02PM (#686852)

              Try again.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:15PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:15PM (#686489)

      Lol, and what exactly would you call corporate structures? Through your reasoning they are "An attempt at a command-and-control economy, whereby top-down decrees are made according to the fantastical whims of know-nothing bureaucrats."

      Guess it is time we tossed out corporations and let all the "moving parts" FIND the optimal solution through variation and selection. That means the workers need to find the optimal solution and toss out the no-nothing "bureaucrats".

      Finally you've said something approaching useful!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:50PM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:50PM (#686503)

        A corporation is a hierarchical centralization that emerges within a decentralized system of voluntary interaction.

        It's form or very existence is NOT guaranteed in perpetuity; unlike a government, a corporation does NOT get to decree its income regardless of performance.

        Should a corporation become dysfunctional, the wider society can (without even realizing it) deem that dysfunction to be damage and then go about the business of routing around it! By dropping back down into the underlying decentralized market place, society can find a new solution, which may result in the emergence of a new, functioning centralization to replace the old dysfunctional one.

        DO YOU GET IT YET????

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:23AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:23AM (#686577)

          no, i don't think we get it yet, and you clearly don't get the inherent contradictions of capitalism yet

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:49AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:49AM (#686597)

          No we don't get it yet. things aren't that simple.

          Case in point, Microsoft Windows is still dominant, although it's pretty clear that MS as a company has been pretty dis-functional for many years.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:26AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:26AM (#686606)

            You are begging the question; your logic is circular.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:56PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:56PM (#686790)

              You learned how to argue through mimicry. Introspection is important, grow into a better person.