Do you really need a straw to drink from a cup? The origin of straws can be traced back to the Sumerians about 3000 BC, another fact points to it being invented to help beer drinkers avoid consuming the fermented particles at the bottom of the mug. Today, it is a common sight, from road-side food hawkers to restaurants to hippie-dippie joints serving artisan cocktails at USD 50 per glass. It is a convenience that is shaped by the food industry as well as motivated by consumer behavior. Now, it is the target of environmentalist to have it banned due to the recent environmental awareness – which is the wrong way to resolving the issue.
The intention of banning straws, plastic, and non-recyclable and non-compostable materials has all the right intentions but the wrong approach. It needs more intelligent planning. Banning all the consumer-end materials is as mundane as banning guns to stop gun violence as banning those non-recyclable materials doesn’t necessarily save the environment. One of the issues is the energy it takes to produce the alternatives to plastic – as proven if one reviews the results of various Life Cycle Assessments conducted by different university and bodies around the world:
“To compete with plastic in every LCA category, regular cotton bags would need to be reused 7,100 times, and 20,000 times for organic cotton. Paper bags would’ve needed to be used 43 times to compete.”
Taking the regular cotton bag as a use-case; one needs to use it 7,100 times before it has fully paid its manufacturing due and serve its purpose when compared to the plastic bag. Assuming a single person lives to the ripe age of 85 and started using his cotton bag (and only one in his lifetime) when he was 22 years old, and assuming he does his grocery shopping every 1.5 weeks, he would have used the bag only 2184 times, not even close to half of the re-use required to justify the cost of manufacturing of the bag.
Ouch.
Instead of having consumers buy the cotton or highly recyclable bags cause the retailers won’t give any bags, how about having a sharing system where the retailers provide the cotton bags that must be returned and re-use upon your next purchase?
Or just getting rid of the entire system of using bags to transport all the foods, and have consumers ferry their purchase goods through the metals baskets or have them sent directly to one’s home through an established goods delivery system? It’s not foolproof but better than manufacturing products to replace plastic bags that require over 1000 times the energy to make a bag.
Better than drowning earth with another bunch of non-recyclable item due to our haste in solving a larger problem.