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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: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday July 04 2018, @06:20PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 04 2018, @06:20PM (#702661) Journal

    Reusable straws need to be personal, as cleaning them is quite hard. OTOH, paper straws work pretty well. And there are biodegradable plastics that would do a good job. (Just call them something besides plastic. (They're a different chemical, so that should work, but lawyers...) Call them stabilized paper or some such. (I.e., paper impregnated with a stabilizing agent. Wax was used in the past, but the corn stalk based polymers should do a better job, and still be biodegradable.)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:09PM (#702737)

    Yeah, I've heard about that stuff but I'm not sure I've ever encountered it IRL.

    It does make me wonder how well it would survive when dunked in a liquid for 15 minutes or more.

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