@shpuld
This is why "green" advocacy is retarded. This is what "green" advocacy brings you, along with shitty straws that are no longer recyclable and now get to rot in your landfill.

@alyx @shpuld well, paper straws are bio-degradable, aren't they? I bet you can sort them into biowaste for them to become compost or cardboard/paper for recycling if they aren't too soggy.

Staws themselves aren't terribly useful tho, their main use is complicated coctails and sodas (since you avoid washing your teeth in goga-gola :DDDD)

but real solution was with us all along - drink more water

@hj @shpuld
Ideally you'd want to reuse paper straws to make other paper/cardboard products. Compost is the last thing you want to do with paper/cardboard stuff. Technically you can, but it's not the easiest thing to compost, and it's a waste.

But from the discussions I've heard when this entire mess started, the issue is that straws are too narrow/small to throw into the normal paper shredders, so they currently can't actually be processed.

Places like McDonald's apparently invested money into custom infrastructure to handle plastic straws, precisely because of their small size leaves them harder to deal with. And now they're forced to do it all over again because some stupid politicians behind a desk that have no idea how the world works.

@alyx @shpuld ideally yes. But if paper/cardboard is too dirty (i.e. greasy paper wrapper for a burger) it should probably go into bio.

Yeah I get that straws can be too tiny to shred, makes plastic straws somewhat better alternative i imagine since you just smelt/dissolve those(?).

I think real problem and real reason why people switched to paper straw is littering and people not sorting the trash.

I still don't understand why don't they just serve bottles/cans.

@hj @shpuld
>and real reason why people switched to paper straw is littering and people not sorting the trash
Here's the thing though, most straw use is in restaurants, not random people at home. It's much easier to get restaurants to sort trash, a lot of them do it already, and it's much easier accomplished.

The idiocy of the paper straw "solution", is that it focuses at 1% of the straw problem, that come from domestic usage, when with traditional plastic straws you had solutions ready and available to fix 99% of the problem.

But this is what dipshit "green" advocacy does. It ignores good enough solutions, because they're "just" 99% instead of 100%, and they literally advocate against them, and leaves you into a spot where you're struggling to even get back at where you were previously.

Another sign of "green" advocacy doing this is with the decline in nuclear energy. It's not 100% "clean&renewable" so they're trowing away this solution when we didn't even manage to phase out coal yet.
Instead of pushing for nuclear and solar/wind/etc. until we phase out coal, and only after that trying to phase out unsafe nuclear too; instead they're slowly pushing out nuclear while we're literally still relying on fossil fuels.

@alyx @shpuld last time i worked at mcd they didn't do diddly-dick about sorting trash, it's all same container and everything gets compressed in an industrial trash compactor, but it was in a shitty country and 10 years ago. Nowadays I only see two types of sorting at restaurants - in actual cafeterias where you have to put your dishes back there's usually biowaste/energy waste containers; in fast-food joints there's a place to put liquids/ice in and bag for everything else. I can't imagine restaurants digging through the trash to sort unfinished burgers from paper straws. And this is Finland, where people seem to care about sorting trash and recycling. I can imagine in america most people would think recycling is "buncha commie shit", and asking customers to sort their trash would be impolite.


>because they're "just" 99% instead of 100%

oh hey, like technology connection guy would say, " "but sometimes" ". Fear is easy to manipulate, it's very powerful and fear mongering is a very real thing.


two of retarded things related to recycling that i see here are:
- hand soap bottles that say "reuse your pump" but they don't sell refills, i.e. same thing without the pump.
- clothes conditioner in a plastic bottle with a plastic label that you should remove before recycling for whatever reason.
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@hj @shpuld
There are retarded shit about recycling everywhere, all the time. It gets really fucked up when you start to thing about it.

Take milk cartons. They're supposedly recyclable, but god only knows how they actually separate all the different layers that make up the "cardboard" box. That's usually actually a sandwich of cardboard, plastic, and sometimes aluminium too.

>technology connection viewer
Nice.

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@alyx @shpuld i imagine it's doable, like use use chemicals to strip the plastic, then grind the sucker and use magnets to separate metal foil from paper? Oh and remove the caps manually beforehand?

@hj @shpuld
Except you can't use magnets, cause it's aluminium metal, not steel. I know technically all metal is magnetic to some degree, but to use magnets strong enough to attract aluminium is unfeasible because it would mess with the machinery itself.

If it's just a cardboard/plastic sandwich, and you're not expecting to get high qualify cardboard after the recycling, you can just shred the thing as is. The plastic is not a large proportion, so the impurities would be acceptable. But for the life of me, I can't figure out what they'd do for the ones that also include the foil.

@alyx @shpuld you could also make differently-sized nets to filter out smaller (paper) dust from bigger (metal) dust, or put both in a container and shake it for a long while to make heavier filings drop at the bottom and lighter to come out on top, then dump container through a hole with proper timing.

I mean i don't think it's impossible to do, maybe just impossible to make perfect separation.

@hj @shpuld
Actually, the shaking bit might work, but do it in water. Metal would drop, paper would likely float. I think they do something like this when recycling plastics, to both clean the plastic flakes after shredding, and make sure any metal that could have gotten in is separated.

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