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)
Wax doesn’t decay much faster than plastic does.
Sustainability is not impacting future generations with what we do today. That includes respecting the environment that sustains all life.
Companies would be more responsible if their business plan included recycling their waste. Apple is reported to be worth 7-800 billion dollar and they wouldn’t have that ridiculous wealth if they had to recycle their waste. Millions of of phones are discarded every year. Same applies to others including Microsoft or other companies. Bottled water is a big industry, what do they pay to deal with their waste products?
This is what we do in construction estimating so waste is minimized.
There are millions of tons of plastic in the Pacific Ocean wit that domino effect into our bodies. CBC did an investigation of Apple as one example and the eco damage they caused in Indonesia looking for tin was disgraceful. Child labor was exploited to do the open pit mining. They showed workers building the phones and being exploited to get the product out. Apple does that as do others to save money. Build it cheap and bring it back to countries to sell retail for ridiculous profits.
Companies use China to build all the crap cheap and make outrageous profits. The Shark Tank always refer to getting products made in China to maximize profits but you are getting what you pay for. The smog in China doesn’t allow you to see across the street and that smog is reported to circulate the globe in 3 weeks. I have bought GE products in Canada and they didn’t even work because they are made in areas where there is no quality control.
Good for Britain for dealing with the plastics, what we don’t recycle recycles through us. The Environmental Working Group did a study called the Body Burden where the Red Cross randomly picked 10 umbilical cords from US hospitals. The cord was thought to be a filter between the mom and the baby while they cycle blood back and forth.
The results were the umbilical cord blood had 100s of chemicals in them and they only checked for a few hundred. 100% of the umbilical cords had Mercury, banned pesticides, fossil fuel emissions, fire retardants, scotch guards, plastics and more. Our medical lead spoke with an Oncologist about the chemical load and the Oncologist said they would have cancers from conception. I was asked how these chemicals got into moms who did not work in toxic environments. Mom absorbed it, drank it, ate it, breathed it.
I was asked in my capacity if we could isolate inflammations in the body as toxins attack a specific part of the body. Our team went to waste water management and asked about the the pollutants caught in water treatment. Everything we consume, dump in a drain, pee or poop into the toilet goes to waste water treatment before the water is released down stream. None of the pollutants are caught and the sludge is put on our agriculture. It should be used as a renewable resource for creating electricity but that competes with oil industries.
Every year we have Breast Cancer awareness and shirts, More toxins, dyes, fossil fuel emissions contributing to health and environmental problems. Good for Britain and all countries need to participate or there isn’t a happy ending. The youngest girl to have a breast removed in Canada was 4 years old, thank goodness her doctors found it. Men need to know this is affecting your parts as well. Our non invasive radiology applications are isolating problems and there are far to many.
Planet Earth sustains all life, not the other way around. We aren’t doing a good job.
The problem is that I understand that 90 % of the plastic in the oceans comes from the major rivers in the East
where there are millions of people living close
to the large rivers such as the Mekon and Ganges etc. These areas of the world have
little or no recycling and plastic gets thrown into the rivers.
Y’know, if I’m downstream in the Ganges, I may be delighted if only plastic bottles bombard me.
Beats the usual dead bodies and turds from upstream.
But,being Western,Christian,evil, white,racist must not discuss such cultural delights.
And must hand over the straws.
…”This pointless ban suggests the fake plastic crisis is getting traction in green Britain.”
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Pretty sure it was just rubber, but this is what traction looks like:
Whats next ? Banning single use toilet paper ?
Maybe they should build water treatment facilities if flushed items are such a problem.
My family has been in the sewage treatment equipment business since the 50’s. Straining out junk is a part of the process. Many municipalities don’t spend the money for modern treatment.
Portland Oregon doesn’t want to spend the money (for part of their system, during high flows).
Greenie Portland has DEQ “waivers” allowing them to dump shit (and Q-tips) into the Columbia River system.
What some people do not understand, apparently the UK Parliament, that single use items as listed in the article can be very important for hygiene, to prevent spreading communicable diseases, especially now with resistant bacteria raising their ugly heads. Florida reacting to mercury in fish caught in the Everglades passed rules to eliminate all mercury items from the waste stream. Problem was that most of those items were medical waste. Eliminating them actually increased the cost of medical procedures in the state. One odd thing that was eliminated were mercury thermometers. The technocrats, educated by certain manufacturers, claimed there were plenty of alternatives. So not only did Florida ban sale but also set up programs for homeowners to dispose to them. Of course the alternatives are primarily battery operated. If you don’t regularly replace the battery when you need to take your kids temperature in the middle of the night you have to run around finding/ hoping you have the right battery. I questioned everyone involved whether traditional mercury thermometers had been documented as ever causing mercury poisoning. I ask them to give me a single case in the USA, not just Florida. They sputtered and stammered and never answered me. They just claimed that all human use of mercury had to be eliminated immediately. Of course the problem in the Everglades was never solved. These same technocrats had not bothered to read the literature concerning peat soils. Peat soils accumulate over millennia and doing so they also accumulate atmospheric mercury. It is fine until peat sediments are disturbed, then methyl mercury is released. So either when the sea level rise and floods the Glades or the soils totally decompose because of prolonged drought the mercury will continued to be release.
George Carlin has a comment or two about plastic pollution (caution profanity alert) and on the eve of Earth Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
Anyone who is old enough will remember that the reason we have plastic grocery bags is because the environmentalists of the early ’70’s demanded that we stop using paper bags because we were killing all the trees.
So, instead, we started using a waste product of oil to make bags in order to save the trees.
Outstanding, Don!!
And then, duringthe early 90’s, we found that the landfills had more paper products by far than plastic, even tho we were trying to save the trees by using plastic.
Now we are concerned with cosmetic ornaments on our trees and roadsides composed of plactic bags and bottled water plastic containers and…. Oh yeah, a few sea turtles try to eat a plastic bag that resembles jellyfish.
Ya just can’t win.
As with guns, people’s behavior has more effect than hardware control or material control.
Gums sends…
Excellent policy. If anyone wants to help reduce plastic waste on U.K. beaches, you might check out a group, Surfers against Sewerage, which organizes massive volunteer clean-ups every year. https://www.sas.org.uk/
Symbolic nonsense.
Surfers are some of the most sanctimonious dullards on the planet.
Considering the amount of petrochemicals and the absurd pollution caused by polyester resins
and poly blanks, plus nylon boardies, wetsuits and the problems of disposing of old boards,the
best thing you can do is quit.
We won’t mention the travel emissions…
https://youtu.be/Y5YW4qKOAVM
We Brits continue to lead the world in futile gestures.
Plastic bags are a bit of a joke, especially at the grocery store. They are weak, so especially with canned and liquid goods, they have to use a lot, just to be safe. We bring our own, very sturdy bags – they can easily hold 10 to 15 pounds. Been doing it for many, many years. Same bags. Yes, we occasionally can find a use for a plastic bag, but not 20 of them.
Do you wash those bags between uses? If you don’t, you are putting your family’s health at risk.
That’s a myth, and a convenient one. Obviously, anything like chicken goes in it’s own little bag. In over 30 years, never had a problem.
It is not a myth.
It is not just chicken but pork and ground beef.
Then there’s the salad greens and such. Ask anyone who served in the southeast asia fracas about raw greens and salads.
If you have the means to sterilize your bags, then go for it until the windmills stop providing electrons or you burn precious tree residue to heat the water. It’s a losibng deal, but using dirty bags over and over is your choice.
Gums sends…
Pardon me, but our family has been in the plastic molding business for over 50 years, so please permit me to make a few comments:
“Plastic” is an all encompassing word. Disposables, packaging, and the like, are the real culprits in pollution.
Disposables and packaging consume a huge proportion of the feed stock for all plastics. Reducing disposables intelligently makes durable plastics less expensive.
Many plastics are produced from coal and natural gas. Still fossil fuels, but not tied to the price of oil.
Recycling as a solution for disposables is problematic. Ultimately, there has to be a volume end use for any of the recycled feed goods. That is lacking in most cases. The recycling market has been completely upended by the ban on imported recycled plastic by the Chinese. Many empty trade containers were returned to China with bales of recycled materials, but that has ended. They converted it into material to be used by their industry where quality standards were often overlooked. Here in the US it is very hard to maintain quality while using post recycling plastic. We need a new paradigm, whether it is clean incineration, or source reduction (gradual replacement of disposables)
When you consider the fossil fuel costs to transport all of the recyclables, is it really worth it economically? If they are aggregated, and then just put into a landfill by the recycling company because there is no market for it, what have we accomplished?
We recycle as much plastic as we can and specify second generation reprocessed materials whenever possible, but engineering standards often don’t permit it. End use development is desperately needed.
I’m all in. Then make the plastic water bottles have strapped attached caps. I walk beaches 5 days a week and pick up at least 20 caps in 3 miles
What a bunch of knobs. You’re not supposed to flush q-tips!
I wonder when we start taking our own knife and fork to McDonald’s…
So, I wonder … is the establishment going to ban disposable baby (and geriatric) diapers? Seriously – we make them by the millions. Millions PER DAY. Their purpose is obvious – sit on a shelf or in a box until needed. Swathe a bottom, let ‘er blow… contain the mess, be removed and tossed in the waste bin, eventually to wend its way to a landfill.
Shîtbags are full of plastics. Biodegradable or not, plastics. Full of elastic polymers, plastic tapes, plastic adhesives. 3 kinds of plastic liners and outer films. Plastic inks and dyes. And we make billions per year of these little packages of love.
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I often think about other things like this: the enormous waste stream produced by the whole medical profession. Endless throw-aways. One-use-everything. Where does it all go?
Will next be on the list the frankly life-saving common household kitchen film that is used to wrap food, cover dishes, keep bad-acting microbes at bay? The same film(s) that package all meat products at the grocery store. The plastic bags that the laundry sheathes one’s laundered jackets, hung shirts, slacks? What of the endless production and disposal of plastic bags, and with special honorable irony, plastic trash bags? We make plastic to contain garbage, to make more tidy the disposal of the very same refuse.
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In California, we have a plastic-bag tax. 10¢/ea., at the grocery store. Now at clothing stores, at sundry stores, at drug stores and even at boxed-product item stores (e.g. Walmart, Best Buy, Petco). Where does the 10¢ go? It is obviously collected. Who is getting the dough, and from there, where is it being funneled into? Perhaps bag-plastic mitigation efforts? One wonders.
Back to baby-bumsacks, is there a 10¢ per unit tax on those? No? Why not? Should the granny bûm sacks carry a 20¢ per unit tax due to being at LEAST double the dimensions?
Just asking,
GoatGuy
As far as baby diapers/napkins goes – who’s seen a diaper service around lately? We used one in the early 1980’s for our first child, but by the time of the second, the service had closed down. With my wife working part-time, there was no way we could wash and sterilise 4-6 diapers per day, so disposables was the only way!
Never mind the fact that the “pollution of the world’s rivers and oceans” is not being done by England, the U.S., or any other of the dozens of Western countries. They all banned dumping in rivers and oceans decades ago and, like the U.S., have been cleaning up their messes left over from the industrial period. The plastic waste in the oceans is coming from poor countries in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
This is another scheme by the intellectually-challenged, driven by their loathing of all humans (other than themselves). It will do nothing to remove plastic from rivers and oceans because it isn’t coming from England in the first place.
There are approximately 11 million disabled people in the UK and only a small percentage of these people have to drink through a straw. So where is the incentive for local companies to produce this small number of plastic straws if allowed? There would be no financial gain to a company for the same reasons there is almost nil research into genetic diseases that affect just a small proportion of the population. The UK government would have to import plastic straws for disabled people from countries that do not ban plastics which to me reeks of hypocrisy.
‘over 100,000 sea mammals die from eating or getting tangled up in plastic waste’
Habeus corpi.