SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.