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posted by mrpg on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the pollution dept.

[...] "Plastic pollution is surpassing crisis levels in the world's oceans, and I'm proud Seattle is leading the way and setting an example for the nation by enacting a plastic straw ban," Mami Hara, the general manager of Seattle Public Utilities, told KOMO News.

The National Park Service estimates 500 million straws are used by Americans each day.

The Seattle ban actually began with an ordinance prohibiting one-time-use food service items in 2008, but the city has allowed exemptions on certain items every year since. For example, Styrofoam food packaging was banned in 2009, according to the Seattle Times. But because of the market, plastic utensils and straws have been exempted in Seattle's ban until now, the newspaper reported.

Seattle bans plastic straws, utensils, becoming first major US city to do so


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @01:41PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @01:41PM (#702535)

    I see this is a good thing, but when (and I can't be bothered to lookup the statistics) somewhere in the region of 80% of the plastic pollution in the ocean is coming from 7 rivers, 6 of which are in China, it almost doesn't seem to matter.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 04 2018, @06:47PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 04 2018, @06:47PM (#702674) Journal

    Well, China is starting to address this by rejecting plastic recycling waste. And one wonders how much of that waste was used straws.

    That said, the evidence that is matters much is scant. But it's one thing they can do.

    A lot of the "ecology" measures are ill conceived. A good example is the single-use plastic bag. You need to reuse the average reusable bag over thirty times before it has less impact that the equivalent use of single-use plastic bags, and the reusable bags wear out. Inferior quality ones won't last for 30 uses. What they should do is require that single use bags be biodegradable. Even that wouldn't guarantee that this wasn't worse than doing nothing, though. But at minimum it would push the development of cheap biodegradable plastics...preferably made from cellulose.

    Personally, I think of this as analogous to an enforceable law against littering. A good idea, but probably poorly implemented.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:26AM (#702876)

      Plastic bags are also a big source of littering.