So I've wanted to do this for a minute..

But how many paper straws would you have to use to offset one of these explosions? How long would it take to offset one of these explosions through straw use?

Writing this now I was surprised by the results...

Source for plastic v paper straw data

So apparently plastic straws are actually more carbon neutral than paper straws, but for the purposes of this analysis I'm going to carry it through to find out how long it takes to create equivalent emissions.

Paper straws:

Call it 1430 grams of emissions per straw (which is wild btw)

Plastic straws:

Call it 610 per plastic straw. Still wild for something which weighs less than a gram.

This is also from the thesis

So yeah.. not great.

Gonna be using 825 tons of carbon dioxide emitted from Hank Green's video.

I think Hank is working in US standard units here.. which is also weird and annoying but whatever... We're getting to units of rocket explosion per straw so it's fine..

And I'm going to be using 500 million straws per day, which is cited in the thesis from a 2017 study and repeated elsewhere in other studies on this.

It's not great but what even are we doing here..

I don't know how we get a plastic straw versus compostable straw use rate (what proportion of straws are still plastic versus how many are now paper or some other alternatives)

But we get 820 additional grams of emissions for each straw swapped.

500 tons to grams is:

838238016

Divided by the difference in co2e foot print per straw...

838238016 / 820 is about 1022240, in other words, about a million.

So for about every million straws swapped from plastic to paper, one giant fiery rocket explosion of CO2 emissions occurs.

The US consumes straws at a convenient rate of 500 million a day, so if ALL of those straws were converted to paper, we're setting off about 500 of those explosions per day.

Have you noticed the intense UV this summer? I think he legit ripped a hole in the ozone layer with that explosion.

Bingo.

It invites hatred from a sizeable (though perhaps potentially less politically-aware) fan base that might otherwise be receptive.

Using someone as popular as Swift as a target for less-pop-culture-interested folks who are politically informed is clearly kicking the hornets’ nest to stir up in-fighting among the working class.

Next time use Bezos or one of the other folks who showed up in that “Dialog” secret society since they also use private jets in the same way someone like Swift does, but in addition are far worse in every other way and who also lobby with their billions towards worsening the world in every way imaginable.

Taylor swift is a leftist just like my racist boss has a black friend and is thus not racist.

There are no ethical billionaires

If you make a snappy meme about it, I’ll start using it.

I'm blown away every time anew how some people on lemmy, like you here, effortlessly cut through manipulation. Reflecting on the state of the internet it's sadly delightful and refreshing.

the handful of megacorporations emitting 80% of all green house gases

That's just nonsense.

1. The top two providers in that list are the governments of USSR and China. They are not "megacorporations"
2. It not a list of "emitters". These entities are just "linked to" the emissions -- i.e. they provided the fuel that someone else burned.

It's completely ridiculous to say that it doesn't matter that someone burns 1,000 gallons of fuel a day because a big company sold it to them.

Targetting individuals people or companies is useless. There's over a billion co-contributers, not a handful. Systematic changes like a carbon tax are necessary.

As i do every time somebody posts this article:

The headline is misleading. It's not 57 "companies". The original source speaks of "Entities".

Number one on that List of 57? The former Soviet Union. Good luck holding them responsible. Next to several state controlled Actors like Gazprom (6th) or Saudi Armaco (3rd), some privat companies like ExxonMobile (5th), there are entities like Chinas Coal production from 1945 - 2004 (2nd) North Korea (57th) or Cinas Cement production (13th).

The list shows that oil companies cause a lot of emissions (but apparently not as much as the former soviet union). To absolutly nobodies suprise.

Next to holding them accountable for their emissions (and their lobbying, pro oil propaganda, etc) we need to find ways to reduce emissions in our lives. Those companies will only stop if their products is less and less needed.

It's crazy how long that misrepresented study stays alive. The point wasn't to find fault, it was to figure out how much comes from people in general. After all, nature does create it's own green house gases.

By the logic of the study, the oil company that sold Swift her kerosene is 100% responsible for it. By that studies logic me, you and Swift are EQUALLY not responsible for ANY oil we use, ever. That's obviously stupid.

Everything looks like a lobster disintegrating when your only tool is a lobster reintegrator.

It's quite thin for aluminum, and the downside with glass is the high energy cost of melting it. I'd like if we went back to washing and reusing bottles, but I suppose that's a big shift in processing capabilities.

Not 100% win though:

Glass bottles of lemonade, iced tea, soft drinks and beer contained on average around 100 microplastic particles per litre, which is between five and 50 times more than plastic bottles or cans. Source

and tin cans. i think with tin it might be wax though

That's bullshit from the oil companies. They did a "study" that concluded that, but if you read the methodology, they made the assumption that the reusable bag would be unusable after 20 uses.

Meanwhile I've been going to the grocery store every week for quite a few years using the same bags without much issue. I've had one strap on a bag break after ~10 years of use, so there's that I guess. Still haven't thrown it out, keep meaning to repair it which I never get around to doing.

Anyway, if you read between the lines of the study conducted by the oil companies, if you reuse the bag more than 20 times (half a year of going to the grocery store every week) you are reducing plastic waste.

If they're made from fabric they're pretty repairable though.

Wat? It’s great if it gets recycled, but it works if it gets reused

A German talking about overpopulation. I don't like where this is going...

Yeah, I want to be able shove my McDonald's cups up my ass without ending up like the jar guy

Unlike plastic which never breaks ever

Even if you perfectly sort the plastic out, it can only be recycled about 1.5 times before the structure changes so much it's not suitable for the original use. Plastic recycling is a scam.

I've worked with plastic recycling in West Africa at one factory, and just sorting plastic waste by hand is a decent job for a few dozen marginalized women because it demand real human level work.

The reason why is pigment and color. They could recycle yellow into yellow or tan, red into red, green into green. But blue and black were the deal breakers. Black being probably already recycled plastic that uses black pigment to mix colors.

Everything after the sorting is trivial. Shredding, re-peletizing, molding, all easily done.

I've heard of the phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order", and in looking that up TIL there's even a bit more to it:

Is this real?

Not if we line it with plastic

Also, fuck people with gluten allergy I guess 🤷

PLA is not compostable or anything of the sort. So honestly it's more of a "this plastic could be recycled, given that it's sorted out from the other plastic, and given financial viability".

Edit: as pointed out below, it's more correct to say that it's not home-compostable

PLA isn't food safe though, and it's only bio degradable in very specific circumstances, and that ""biodegradable"" status also means it puts off tons of micro plastics

Hence the likely a fossil fuel byproduct. But let's be real the cost associated with using beeswax would be unbelievable

It's not just profitable, it also requires most people in the west (probably 99% of people here) to realize there understanding of what a "basic level of quality of life" is is completely scewed by our immense privilege. Globally speaking, we are all part of the top 10% destroying the planet the most. From memory, a single american going vegan can make up for a families worth of emissions in a poorer country.

There's no amount of rich people we can eat or corporations we can destroy that will allow us to just live like we are at the moment. Nowhere close.

The real trick all along was always reducing you

Less people = less consumption.

I mean you still gotta eat

if people knew just how little the typical fountain drink cost, cups and straws included, they would riot over the costs.

They won't, the McD machines have preset settings to dispense an exact amount of drink every time, they don't measure it by hand.

I know. Thank you.

If so, then okay. The idea is that single use plastic is used because plastic is so damn cheap. From what I understand, the precursor is basically a waste product from oil extraction. But add a small tax and it breaks the model.

A single cheap fork is less than US$0.01 on a commercial restaurant website. For many restaurants, that is easier to deal with than washing dishes. But let's tack on a $0.05 tax per single use item or $0.50 single use tax. Pass it directly on to the customer on the check.

That puts single use more on an equal footing with restaurants that are reusing dishes. Single use plastic doesn't have its true cost built in. A tax can do that in a transparent way.

The point is to increase the cost of the plastics to the point that alternatives start to actually be competitive. And really, we're just making them actually pay for some of the externalities they're getting a free ride on.

If you use government to increase the cost of a thing to the point alternatives become cheaper, most businesses are going to switch. They aren't sticking with plastics out of ideology or anything... it's just cheap. And it shouldn't be.

Literally happened in the netherlands

How about a child's freedom to not have microplastics in their brain?

Uh uh muh fredomz

You had leaded gasoline for way too long and it shows

Fair point.

The environmental impact of their factory farms is what I was getting at...

Go to any grocery store and buy a pack of small frozen burgers.

Literally the same thing McDonald's uses.

we fill up the just with ice to the top, then just refill with water as we run out. it is a delicious methodology.

You hit them with a signature look of superiority as you sip from your metal straw.