Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The UK Government has announced a ban on cotton buds, drink stirrers and plastic drinking straws to combat the “scourge” of plastic pollution.
Cotton buds and plastic straws could be banned in England next year
Consultation to start later this year as Theresa May continues drive against single-use plastic waste
Cotton buds, plastic drinking straws and other single-use plastics could be banned from sale in England next year in the next phase of the campaign to try to halt the pollution of the world’s rivers and oceans.
Theresa May hopes to use the announcement to encourage the Commonwealth heads of government to join the fight as the meeting opens formally on Thursday. “The Commonwealth is a unique organisation with a huge diversity of wildlife, and environments – so it is vital we act now,” the prime minister will say, urging all Commonwealth countries to participate.
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Cotton buds, often flushed down the lavatory, are one of the most serious sources of marine pollution. They are small enough to be eaten by birds and marine life.
Altogether it is estimated that there are 150m tonnes of plastic in the world’s oceans, and over 100,000 sea mammals die from eating or getting tangled up in plastic waste.
Plastic microbeads have already been banned, and the introduction of the 5p plastic bag charge in England has led to a dramatic fall in their use: 9bn fewer bags have been distributed, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) figures show.
Michael Gove, the Defra secretary, called single-use plastics a scourge. “It is only through government, business and the public working together and the public working together that we will protect our environment for the next generation,” he said.
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Climate Depot suggested in 2010 that greens were desperately market testing new scare campaigns to replace the faltering climate crisis. This pointless ban suggests the fake plastic crisis is getting traction in green Britain.
Update (EW): Cotton Buds (UK) = Q-tips (USA)
Look here.
Is it not true that 90% of plastic pollution in the oceans emanates from the major
rivers in the East where there are very large populations and there is
is very little recycling?
Only ten rivers in the world produce this ocean pollution, Teresa May needs an education.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4970214/95-plastic-oceans-comes-just-TEN-rivers.html
Most Australian states have banned (or will soon) “single use” supermarket plastic bags. Of course, for most people they are not single use. They are used for storing things, carrying things, or for bin liners.
Those bags weigh 5 grams each.
The kitchen tidy bin liners we will now buy instead weigh 10 grams.
So for many people that will result in the disposal of twice as much plastic.
I think we really do need to recycle more, and stopping filling the oceans with plastic may well be very sensible. There are simple ways.
I’m in Italy, and recycling seems to be a mania. If you get a bag in a shop, or for veg in a supermarket, it’s a composting bag for organic waste. What’s not to like? You have to buy them anyway, so serious reuse there.
It isn’t just me then who thinks that this whole plastic ‘crisis’ is just a sinister attempt to persuade the world’s hoodwinked minions to forget all about global warming. “Er, yes it wasn’t man-made CO2 after all, we got it horribly wrong, so we’re banning plastic.”
Like the ‘scourge of single-use carrier bags’, why not ban all those single-use asthma inhaler cases. With 300 million asthmatics in the world (that includes me) getting through an average of 10 Ventolins, Becotides or Seretides each year – why do we get a new plastic outer case every time? Why can’t we rinse it out and re-use it for our next little cannister of medicinal magic gas? Just another bunch of selfish environmental polluters – that’s us.
Recently visited Tasmania (Au).
Didn’t see one piece of plastic in the water anywhere (harbours/beaches/rivers).
Saw untold coffee cups and shopping bags etc. in people’s hands (not one on the streets).
Au Gov still about to ban plastic ‘supermarket’ shopping bags.
Is the problem really that big in the ‘civilised’ World?
My guess, it’s politicians self immortalizing.
“Under my Government we banned “this & that”.
It’s also a left-wing badge of honour to have successfully banned something.
The real reason that the UK wants to ban plastic straws is that, after knives are banned, skilled ninja assassins in North London will murder their victims with plastic straws.
Actually there is an increase in attacks using bottles of corrosive liquids to squirt in peoples’ faces.
Further proof that weapon restrictions just cause criminals to use different weapons.
“When (Fill in the blank) are banned, only criminals will have (Fill in the blank with same)!”
Knives, hammers, acids, guns, clubs….. Violent criminals will use any weapon against a vulnerable disarmed population. The right to self defense, and the right to carry an effective self defense weapon, is the greatest and best deterrence to criminal violence.
British doctors actually advocated banning pointy kitchen knives. I guess then the knife murder epidemic in London would have to continue with slashing rather than stabbing. You have a better chance of surviving a stabbing than having your throat or neck cut.
Those intent on murder won’t be deterred by a lack of pointed knives. Next, the UK would have to ban pipe wrenches, or as known in the Misty Isles, Stillsons. Followed by metal pipes themselves. Followed by rocks.
It doesn’t take a lot of skill, ingenuity, or time to make a non-pointy knife into a pointy one.
True. It’s done with spoons in prison.
Ban spoons! Whether metal, wooden or plastic. We should all eat a liquid diet, drunk from bowls. Although a bowl could also be a weapon. Paper bowls then. Except for the lost forests needed to make them.
You can make a shiv (prison lingo for makeshift weapon) out of toilet paper. Wrap it around a base, wet it, let it dry, repeat. You eventually get a piece of pseudo-wood that’s solid enough to hold a point.
I agree with the need to do something about the fad for bottled water. UK water is perfectly safe to drink so there is no need for it anyway. The plastic bottles get thrown all over the place by litter louts, after which they blow around with the wind. When they end up on the road they are a safety hazard. (Drivers cannot tell if they are plastic or glass so have to avoid them.) Maybe they need a minimum price for bottled water, or a fairly hefty deposit on the bottle.
In France and Italy, and probably Spain, people usually drink mineral water. The water in the UK tastes like shit, but I’m sure the Brits would be happy to drink it anyway. After all, they drink crappy instant coffee, and awful types of herbal tea. The only reason they drink mineral water is because they think it’s a cool thing to do. If you put the price up by 1 pence a bottle, most of them would stop drinking it.
First, do you really assume the right to tell others what to drink or how to spend their money? I hope not. Secondly, don’t punish or inconvenience everybody for the actions of some. Put a huge fine on littering, and actually enforce it.
You might start with those Travelers who use the UK as their personal dumping ground.
Go to a cinema and the choice is huge sweet fizzy drinks or bottled water (at the same price). As a diabetic, I’ve effectively stopped seeing movies away from home
I have never flushed a qtip, am I am doing it wrong?
I wish I had photos of plastic bag contamination in Africa and some parts of Asia. All water channels, public toilets, and foreshores are clogged with festering plastic in or near most/many slums. I have walked food markets where the ‘street’ is paved in discarded plastic. Trees are decorated with them (wind-blown) as though it may be Christmas. One of the first countries in Africa to ban plastic bags was Eritrea. Good on them.
I don’t see any good coming from plastic in our oceans. I recall a video of a Korean long-liner bating hooks. The bait was from plastic bags immediately thrown into he ocean on being emptied. I am not a greenie but there are limits.
Regards
Michael C
That doesn’t seem like the problem of plastic bags. The problem seems to be poverty and trashing. If we are going to ban things just because it can cause problems in the environment, then we need to ban way more things than just plastic bags.
Third World immigrants willing to defecate in the street and teach their kids to do the same aren’t going to scruple over throwing away plastic bags. Ideally they’d at least put the excrement in them.
Yes, Michael, there are limits, and I’d like to see some of the folks who contribute to this site living in shitty, crowded, littered noisy places. They’d be the first to moan. And they’d move away to a nicer place as soon as they got the chance!
Now I know why you and your friends regret having kids. Your lives are miserable and you want to share that misery with others.
One reason this is such a problem is that many of these countries have little to no garbage collection and few official dumps. Kenya recently banned plastic bags, but I am not sure how much of a difference it will make to the garbage/litter problem. Even in Nairobi, garbage collection is non-existent in many areas. People either burn the waste or leave it where it fell. People are so used to trash being everywhere that they do not really notice it. Visitors from developed countries are usually aghast when they see litter all over the place, but the locals just think it is normal.
Perhaps some NGOs or the UN should do something really useful: establish places for waste disposal and/or recycling, and do some massive education on the benefits of proper garbage disposal. (Of course, someone will probably scream racism or that such ideas are colonialist or culture-destroying.) Realistically, this would still probably take at least a couple of generations. Change is hard, even when it is reasonable.
However, I think that bans in the US are generally stupid. My biggest reason is that I do reuse the “single” use bags for things like wastebasket liners. I also am bothered by the fact that when there are charges for bags (5 cents, etc.), said charges are not necessarily used for litter cleanup. If the bags are such a problem, then any associated tax (because it is a tax, make no mistake) should be spent on on the problem, not put in the general slush fund.
MarkW, I don’t regret having kids as I am, thankfully, child free! It’s my poor friends who regret having had them, especially my female friends. I can’t figure out why you responded in such an emotional way to my comment above about litter. Perhaps, unconsciously, you think kids are ‘litter’??
The ridiculous thing about he plastic bag restrictions is that I get a ridiculous number of bags from charities asking me to fill them with old clothes and leave them out for collection. I average more than one of these a week and got 3 in one day once; how many clothes do these people think I buy?
Be careful who you blame. In our area there are many drop off boxes for clothes and shoes for charity with Red Cross, Diabetes, MS, etc on the boxes.
In actuality, the boxes are tended by used clothing businesses which make a small! donation to the charity to use their name. I expect the same applies to the bags, a business distributes the bags in the name of the charity so as to get their free used clothes. A small pittance is paid to the charity.
Nine articles out of a total of 22 on the Telegraphs Environment page were about plastic pollution. Only one about Global Warming, sorry, Climate Change.
All the other scare stories failed to fly so here we are. Our pathetic government laps it up as a simple virtue signal requiring no real effort on their part. Ban it or tax it. Sugar tax on fizzy drinks just brought in. Extra tax on diesel cars just brought in. It is like watching a government sponsored train wreck……except of course you cannot tax or ban train wrecks………or can you?
It seems that the alternative to EU regulation is just national regulation. Apparently politician is still a politician no matter how far away he or she is.
As I recall, the cotton buds ‘problem’ was mostly about them being flushed down toilets and blocking the drains. (Also ladies sanitary products)
A self generated problem because the Q-tips combine with saturated fat – ever so carefully removed from food by health-conscious individuals and thence dropped into the same effluent stream as the Q-tips.
As the old saying goes: “You cannot make bricks without straw” and therein is what happens. The cold & solidifying fat combines with the Q-tips and makes ‘bricks’ – hard lumps of stuff that block drains.
London fatberg
Then of course, nobody wanted to go and clean them out.
So much for ‘Broken Window’ economics.
Enterprising Victorians did just that, removed the fat from the drains & cleaned it up a bit AND THEN, sold the fat back to the kitchen chefs.
Just beautiful. Folks knew what was good to eat back then.
Thanks to doctors, their pills and a DNA ‘thing’ that makes my blood clot much faster than it normally would – I have few vices.
Another thing doctors say is “Don’t eat saturated fat” )
Doncha just love the smell of good intentions unravelling fast?
2 of the vices I have left are driving (the dirty diesel) and exploring, esp visiting new pubs to drink coffee & play on the Wifi. I am a semi-professional explorer, observer and nosey parker.
Where I iz now. Wetherspoons in Worksop.
Hence my take on the plastic bag story. The Government Line was that there are millions and millions of these things blowing on the wind and creating an unsightly mess across vast swathes of the UK and taxing them would ‘clean the place up’
My exploring revealed just how out of touch these people must be.
It simply wasn’t true. Period.
The country is not, was not, littered with these things in the way described.
What The Ban (tax) did was simply add an extra cost/expense to large retailers. They had to employ extra people to manage the scheme – these people then becoming tax-payers. (Recall, easily 65% of a UK person’s gross salary goes in mandatory take. Even larger since April 5th with the 3% increase in mandatory pension contributions and a price (tax) hike amounting to over 30% on soda pop.
Please UK Government, where is the money coming from to pay these people – if not from an increase in resource use somewhere else within (what we have left of) the economy?
Jevon’s Paradox on speed.
Plastic drinking straws:
Being in the perfect place to do the research, I have grabbed one of the new paper straws off the bar.
1. It comes individually wrapped in a paper sleeve, the old plastic one didn’t.
2. Seems to made of paper but is actually waxed paper.
Calling any Einsteins we have within UK bureaucracy – What is wax made of?
Is it not a possible precursor to plastic and a significant component of diesel? Wax is why diesel engines smoke, trying to burn these very long chain hydrocarbons.
Also why the formulation of diesel here in the UK changes during winter. When it’s cold, UK diesel becomes 33% kerosene to try and keep the wax within it from freezing solid.
(There’s a lovely thing about dirty diesels and city centre pollution. Instead of getting everyone to buy new cars and trucks, why not get the oil companies to simply change the recipe for diesel. Add more kerosene into into, reduce the heavy wax content and put in a Cetane improver to help it burn cleaner. Will never happen will it? Too simple and just look at the tax revenue stream coming from the sales of new vehicles. If that dried up, will put an end to Big Willyism and to shooting missiles into Syria? Ha ha ha)
Plastic stirrers.
OK they have a point, again they can get into the sewage system and create fatbergs. The paper straws actually make good stirrers for cold drinks because they are much fatter that the plastic ones ever were.
Stirrers for hot drinks did use to be metal (stainless steel) teaspoons.
But guess what. Following our own Government’s lead for efficiency, economy and recycling, folks visiting the pubs took the teaspoons home with them.
To recycle.
The workings of the Insanity Machine really is a thing of beauty and true wonder of our times.
wax paper is either beswax or a blend of beeswax n parrafin
beeswax sure isnt used in fuel. its too expensive and limited supply as more bees die off.
Plastic stirrers? Hurumph! If the end of a biro was good enough for me to stir coffee with it should be good enough for wetherspoons patrons.
tonyb
Better ban plastic politicians like Gove.
In the UK, this week job losses were announced due to a drop in diesel car sales. In turn,this is due to the banning of diesel and petrol engined cars from 2040.
So, drivers do not upgrade but keep their car for longer. Engines with more miles on them emit more ‘stuff’.
So this green announcement of no more IC cars from 2040 is increasing pollution and costing jobs.
Well done politicians…..
Don’t worry. They will soon see the error of their ways, and use the situation as an excuse to restrict the sale of gasoline and diesel (limited to haulers, law, emergency, and politicians). See? Problem solved.
Insanity alert: “…On Wednesday, lawmakers in Sacramento are set to debate legislation aimed at taking away Californians’ right to make choices about the energy they use in their homes and businesses. …” …http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article209189564.html
To our overseas friends it might seem a bit strange that a government that is labelled Conservative is doing stupid things like this. First of all, they are conservative in name only. They are centre left liberals and until Marxist communist anti-semite Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, barely distinguishable from that party. In fact the bulk of the Labour members of parliament and those in government would be at home in the same party. To help identify the parties they are often called Blue Labour and Red Labour. And the second thing to note is that currently the UK is governed by total morons. There is little voters can currently do about it as it is just a choice of which moron at the ballot box.
A choice of candidates, but not of platforms. Just the way the Lefties like it.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Wait until they ban condoms.
‘Wait until they ban condoms’. The way some folks in the UK are breeding, I don’t think they’ve ever used a condom! Perhaps the government should let them have some for free, and teach them how to exercise a little bit of self control too. And stop their benefits as well.
They had already banned toothbrushes 🙂
Theresa May hopes to use the announcement to encourage the Commonwealth heads of government to join the fight as the meeting opens formally on Thursday.
Oh dear, with our vacuous PM, this stupdity is bound to occur now in Canada.
Just a point, there are no single use plastic bags in my household. They are reeused many times and ultimately used to pick up doggy-doo.
Okay, no plastic grocery bags, huh? Well, then, where does one put the stuff from the catboxes? That is NOT going down my drains, period. You want a clog? The clay used in cat litter is specifically designed to absorb liquid quickly and dry out quickly, and clump like mad. And no, you can’t put on the vegetable garden, either. It’s no good for that. So it will go into the landfill, and because it’s full of urine and feces, it will slowly but surely create enough of a methane load to make the dump explode some day.
I will enjoy it. And I don’t live in England. But a couple of years ago, Illinois tried a plastic bags ban, which annoyed shoppers A LOT. As a result, stores kept the bags, but charged a small fee for them, so we smarter shoppers bought reusable shopping bags. I have a pile of them – very sturdy, and I use them for a lot of things. That was then.
The “ban” on those shopping bags ended when the stores couldn’t make a cent off the bags and got complaints from customers about the charge. I use the reusable bags, anyway, and enjoyed dragging the Aldi bags into Walmart. 🙂 The ban/extra charge finally came to a halt and we went back to business as usual.
And I can’t think of a better way to recycle those thin plastic shopping bags than to put the stuff from the cat boxes into it. I also use them for collecting the cat food cans and lids for recycling, at a dollar a pound at the recycling center. Why let money go down the drain?
Wrong target as usual. This was actually hilarious.
https://www.joe.co.uk/entertainment/the-one-show-filled-their-studio-with-plastic-rubbish-and-everyone-made-the-same-joke-173201
Prime time BBC propaganda telling us we were destroying the oceans with cotton buds and coffee cups.
One problem – take a close look – 99.999% of the plastic waste they have collected is fishing and shipping waste – fishing net, floats, buoys, lobster pots, broken boats, fish boxes etc. etc. Nearly every picture of plastic beach pollution actually in the UK shows the same sort of thing.
Another issue in the UK is a plague of foxes and gulls that the do-gooders insist shouldn’t be culled. Every morning all the public bins are totally emptied out onto the streets and seafront by these vermin.
Of course, foxes and gulls have no money, so fining *them* for littering would be pointless. ;]
Virtue signaling exercise, nothing more. The source of the problem is in Asia.
https://qz.com/1004589/80-of-plastic-in-the-ocean-can-be-traced-back-to-asias-rivers-led-by-china-indonesia-myanmar-a-study-by-netherland-based-the-ocean-cleanup-found/
In the UK only a very limited amount of plastic waste is actually recycled locally. The bulk of it is compressed into bales and transported to the Far East for “recycling”. What actually happens to it is anyone’s guess, but it is taken for granted that the UK has met its obligations under the recycling regulations. But if most plastic in the oceans originated in Asia it’s possible that the answer is to stop “recycling” in Europe.