• How the Disposable Straw Explains Modern Capitalism - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/disposable-america/563204

    Alexis C. Madrigal - Jun 21, 2018

    A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This is the stuff of tragedy, and America.

    Over the last several months, plastic straws have come under fire from environmental activists who rightly point out that disposable plastics have created a swirling, centuries-long ecological disaster that is brutally difficult to clean up. Bags were first against the wall, but municipalities from Oakland, California, (yup) to Surfside, Florida, (huh!) have started to restrict the use of plastic straws. Of course, now there is a movement afoot among conservatives to keep those plastics flowing for freedom. Meanwhile, disability advocates have pointed out that plastic straws, in particular, are important for people with physical limitations. “To me, it’s just lame liberal activism that in the end is nothing,” one activist told The Toronto Star. “We’re really kind of vilifying people who need straws.” Other environmentalists aren’t sure that banning straws is gonna do much, and point out that banning straws is not an entirely rigorous approach to global systems change, considering that a widely cited estimate for the magnitude of the problem was, umm, created by a smart 9-year-old.

    All this to say: The straw is officially part of the culture wars, and you might be thinking, “Gah, these contentious times we live in!” But the straw has always been dragged along by the currents of history, soaking up the era, shaping not its direction, but its texture.

    The invention of American industrialism, the creation of urban life, changing gender relations, public-health reform, suburbia and its hamburger-loving teens, better living through plastics, and the financialization of the economy: The straw was there for all these things—rolled out of extrusion machines, dispensed, pushed through lids, bent, dropped into the abyss.

    You can learn a lot about this country, and the dilemmas of contemporary capitalism, by taking a straw-eyed view.

    People have probably been drinking things through cylindrical tubes for as long as Homo sapiens has been around, and maybe before. Scientists observed orangutans demonstrating a preference for a straw-like tool over similar, less functional things. Ancient versions existed, too.

    But in 19th-century America, straws were straw, rye stalks, cut and dried. An alternative did not present itself widely until 1888. That year, Marvin Stone, a Washington, D.C., gentleman, was awarded a patent for an “artificial straw”—“a cheap, durable, and unobjectionable” substitute for natural straws, Stone wrote, “commonly used for the administration of medicines, beverages, etc.”

    Workmen created these early artificial straws by winding paper around a thin cylindrical form, then covering them in paraffin. Often, they were “colored in imitation of the natural straw.” Within a decade, these straws appeared often in newspaper items and advertisements across the country.
    A typical Stone straw ad from a newspaper in 1899 (Google Books)

    Advertising for the Stone straw describes its virtues and emphasizes the faults of the natural straw. Stone’s straws were free from TASTE and ODOR (natural straws were not). Stone’s straws were SWEET, CLEAN, and PERFECT (natural straws could be cracked or musty). You only had to use one Stone straw per drink (not always the case with natural straws).

    They worked. They were cheap. They were very popular and spawned many imitators because once an artificial straw had been conceived, it just wasn’t that hard to make them, tinkering with the process just enough to route around Stone’s patent. This could be read as a story of individual genius. America likes this kind of story.

    But in 1850, long before Stone, Abijah Fessenden patented a drinking tube with a filter attached to a vessel shaped like a spyglass. Disabled people were using drinking tubes in the mid-19th century, as attested to by a patent from 1870. These were artificial, high-value straws; rye was natural and disposable. But it wasn’t until the late 1880s that someone thought to create the disposable, artificial straw.

    Why?

    Americans were primarily a rural people in the early 19th century. Cities had few restaurants until the 1830s and 1840s. Most that did exist were for very rich people. It took the emergence of a new urban life to spark the creation of the kind of eating and drinking establishment that would enshrine the straw in American culture: the soda fountain.

    Carbon dioxide had been isolated decades before, and soda water created with predictably palate-pleasing results, but the equipment to make it was expensive and unwieldy. It wasn’t until the the gas was readily available and cheap that the soda fountain became prevalent. In the 1870s, their technical refinement met a growing market of people who wanted a cold, sweet treat in the city.

    At the same time, the Civil War had intensified American industrialization. More and more people lived in cities and worked outside the home. Cities had saloons, but they were gendered spaces. As urban women fought for greater independence, they, too, wanted places to go. Soda fountains provided a key alternative. Given the female leadership of the late-19th-century temperance movement, soda fountains were drafted onto the side. Sodas were safe and clean. They were soft drinks.

    By 1911, an industry book proclaimed the soda fountain the very height of democratic propriety. “Today everybody, men, women and children, natives and foreigners, patronize the fountain” said The Practical Soda Fountain Guide.

    Temperance and public health grew up together in the disease-ridden cities of America, where despite the modern conveniences and excitements, mortality rates were higher than in the countryside. Straws became a key part of maintaining good hygiene and public health. They became, specifically, part of the answer to the scourge of unclean drinking glasses. Cities begin requiring the use of straws in the late 1890s. A Wisconsin paper noted in 1896 that already in many cities “ordinances have been issued making the use of wrapped drinking straws essential in public eating places.”

    But the laws that regulated health went further. A Kansas doctor campaigned against the widespread use of the “common cup,” which was ... a cup, that many people drank from. Bans began in Kansas and spread.
    The Cup Campaigner

    In many cases, this cup was eventually replaced by the water fountain (or paper cups). Some factories kept the common cup, but purchased straw dispensers that allowed all to partake individually. “The spectacle of groups of able-bodied men standing around drinking water through straws and out of a common, ordinary drinking cup, prompted no end of facetious comment,” read an item in the Shelbina Democrat of October 11, 1911.

    Cup and straw both had to be clean to assure no germs would assail the children (or the able-bodied men). So even the method by which straws were dispensed became an important hygienic indicator. “In some stores, customers are permitted to choose their own straws, and this system would work very well if customers would not finger the straws,” The Practical Soda Fountain Guide lamented.

    That led to the development of the straw dispenser, which has a deep lineage. Already, in 1911, the thing existed where you individually pop a straw into reach. That’s it, right below, with the rationale written in: “Protects straws from flies, dust, and microbes.”
    The Practical Soda Fountain Guide

    To people living through the early 20th century, the straw was a creation of the new public-health regime. “Due to the ‘Yankee mania for sanitation,’ the [American] output of artificial straws has increased from 165 million in 1901 to 4 billion a year at present,” the Battle Creek Enquirer wrote in May 1924. “A manufacturer pointed out yesterday that, laid end to end, these straws would build an ant’s subway 16 times around the world at the equator.”

    Four billion straws! There were only 114 million Americans at the time, so that’s 35 straws per capita (though some were exported).

    Of course, straw making was improving through all these decades—mechanizing, scaling up—but the straw itself basically stayed the same. According to Sidney Graham—who founded the National Soda Straw Company in 1931, and who competed against Stone and other early straw manufacturers—in a 1988 history of the straw:

    Straws were uniform up until the 1930s ... They were tan in color, thin, and exactly 8.5 inches long. Then someone in the soda-bottling business started marketing eight-ounce bottles, and straws grew to 10.5 inches. Various soda fountains began mixing malted milks, and the old straws were too thin. So we started making them thicker. Still, they were all tan in color, like the original straws.

    In the interwar years, however, major changes came to straws. In 1937, for example, Joseph Friedman invented the bendy straw at his brother’s soda shop in San Francisco, leading to the design that’s prevalent today.

    But what happened to the straw industry is far more interesting than its (limited) technical advances. Three of the biggest names in the industry—Friedman’s Flexi-Straw Company; the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation, which made popular white straws; and Maryland Cup Corporation—have bumped around the last 80 years like corporate Forrest Gumps.

    As it turns out, all three companies’ histories intersect with each other, as well as with structural changes to the American economy. But first, we have to talk about McDonald’s.

    Let’s start with Ray Kroc, who built the McDonald’s empire. For about 16 years, beginning in 1922, he sold cups for the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation, rising to lead sales across the Midwest. “I don’t know what appealed to me so much about paper cups. Perhaps it was mostly because they were so innovative and upbeat,” Kroc recalled in his memoir, Grinding It Out. “But I sensed from the outset that paper cups were part of the way America was headed.”

    At first, selling cups was a tough job. Straws were cheap—you could get 100 for nine cents in the 1930s—but cups were many times more expensive. And besides, people could just wash glasses. Why would they need a paper cup? But America was tilting toward speed and disposability. And throwaway products were the future (“innovative and upbeat”). Soda fountains and their fast-food descendants were continuing to grow, spurring more sales of cups and straws. In the end, Kroc called the years between 1927 and 1937 “a decade of destiny for the paper-cup industry.”

    Selling all those cups brought Kroc into contact with soda fountains, and eventually he went into business selling milkshake mixers. This led him to Southern California, where he saw the first McDonald’s in operation. He bought his way into the small company and deposed the original owners. With Kroc growing the brand, McDonald’s added 90 franchises between 1955 and 1959. By 1961, Kroc was fully in control of the company, and by 1968, there were 1,000 McDonald’s restaurants.
    The first McDonald’s that Ray Kroc opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, is now a museum dedicated to the burger chain. (Reuters/Frank Polich)

    The restaurant chain became a key customer for Maryland Cup, which began as an ice-cream-cone bakery in Boston. Its first nonfood product launched under a brand that became nationally famous, Sweetheart. That product? The straw. The name derived from the original packaging, which showed “two children sharing a milkshake, each drinking from a straw and their heads forming the two curved arcs of a heart.”

    After the war, the company went into cups, and later other kinds of packaging for the growing fast-food industry. It developed new products for McDonald’s, like those old foam clamshell packages that hamburgers used to come in. It also snatched up the Flexi-Straw Company—along with all its patents and rights—in 1969. Things were going great. The founder’s son-in-law was president of the company in Baltimore; one nephew of the founder ran the McDonald’s relationship; the other ran the plastics division.

    Because the future, at that point, had become plastics! In 1950, the world produced 1.5 million tons of plastic. By the late 1960s, that production had grown more than tenfold. Every product was being tried as a plastic thing, and so naturally, the straw became a plastic thing, too. It didn’t happen overnight. It took years for paper straws to lose their cultural salience.

    While functionally, paper and plastic straws might have seemed the same, to the keen observer who is the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s dazzling 1988 novel, The Mezzanine, the plastic and paper straw were not interchangeable. Paper did not float. Plastic did: “How could the straw engineers have made so elementary a mistake, designing a straw that weighed less than the sugar-water in which it was intended to stand? Madness!”

    Baker’s narrator wonders why the big fast-food chains like McDonald’s didn’t pressure the straw engineers into fixing this weighting mistake. “[The chains] must have had whole departments dedicated to exacting concessions from Sweetheart and Marcal,” Baker writes.

    But there was a problem: lids, which had come into vogue. Plastic straws could push through the little + slits in the cap. Paper ones could not. The restaurant chains committed fully to plastic straws.

    Baker goes on to imagine the ramifications, painting a miniature portrait of the process of path-dependent technological choice, which has helped shape everything from the width of railroad tracks to the layout of your keyboard. The power players went plastic, so everyone had to go plastic. “Suddenly the paper-goods distributor was offering the small restaurants floating plastic straws and only floating plastic straws, and was saying that this was the way all the big chains were going,” Baker writes. Sometimes it all works. Other times, a small pleasure is lost, or a tiny headache is created: “In this way the quality of life, through nobody’s fault, went down an eighth of a notch.”

    I can’t prove that this was the precise series of events that took hold among straw engineers, cup distributors, and McDonald’s. Most corporate decision-making of this kind simply doesn’t stick in the nets of history. Yet these differences influence the texture of life every single day, and ever more so, as the owners of corporations become ever further removed from the products they sell. Let’s just say that the logic Baker describes, the way he imagines the development and consequences of these forgettable technologies, squares with the histories that we do know. The very straw engineers that Baker describes might well have been working in the plastics division of the Maryland Cup Corporation, owners of the Sweetheart brand.

    Baker was writing in the 1980s, when straws of all kinds had begun to proliferate, and the American economic system entered a period of intense consolidation and financialization. A key component of this new form of capitalism was the “leveraged buyout,” in which private-equity firms descended on old companies, sliced them up, took out huge amounts of debt, and sold off the various components, “unlocking value” for their investors. You might remember this was how Mitt Romney made his fortune. Matt Taibbi described the model in acerbic but not inaccurate terms: “A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place.”

    Global competition and offshoring enabled by containerized trade was responsible for some of the trouble American manufacturing encountered in the 1970s and 1980s. But the wholesale restructuring of the economy by private-equity firms to narrow the beneficiaries of business operations contributed mightily to the resentments still resounding through the country today. The straw, like everything else, was swept along for the ride.

    In the early 1980s, Maryland Cup’s family-linked executives were on the glide path to retirement. Eighty family members held about half the company’s stock. In 1983, the company had $656 million in revenue, $32 million in profits, and 10,000 employees. It was the biggest disposable-food-product manufacturer in the nation, an empire built on cups, straws, and plastic silverware. The family was ready to cash out.

    The big paper and food companies circled Maryland Cup, but it was eventually sold for $534 million to Fort Howard, a paper company that had gone public in the early ’70s, and began to aggressively expand beyond its Wisconsin base.

    The sale was a boon for Maryland Cup’s shareholders, but the company did not fare well under the new management. Following the transaction, the Baltimore Sun relates, Maryland Cup executives flew to dinner with Fort Howard’s hard-charging CEO, Paul Schierl. He brought out a flip chart, on which he’d written the company’s “old” values—“service, quality, responding to customers.” He turned the page to show the company’s “new” values—“profits, profits, profits.” It’s like a scene out of Tommy Boy, or a socialist’s fever dream.

    Fort Howard forced deep cuts on the company. Some longtime managers quit. The trappings of the family company went out the window. No more executives dressing up as Santa Claus or local charitable contributions. And while Fort Howard was cutting people, it invested in expanding the company’s factories. This was just business. Schierl literally appeared at a sales meeting in a devil’s mask.

    Maryland Cup’s struggles intensified after the wave of departures that followed the acquisition. It needed customer volume to keep its new, bigger plants running, so Fort Howard snatched up the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation in 1986 for another $332 million. Surely there would be synergies. More layoffs came.

    Two years later, the private-equity guys struck. Morgan Stanley, which had helped broker Fort Howard’s deals, swept in and snatched the company for $3.9 billion in one of those famed leveraged buyouts. The whole enterprise was swept off the public markets and into their hands.

    One of their moves was to spin out the cup business as Sweetheart Holdings—along with a boatload of debt jettisoned out of Fort Howard. Just eight years inside Fort Howard and a turn through the private-equity wringer had turned a profitable company into one that still made money on operations in 1991, but was $95 million in the red because it was so loaded up with debt.

    The company made layoffs across the country. Retirement health-care benefits were cut, leaving older employees so livid they filed a class-action lawsuit. A huge Wilmington factory closed after McDonald’s got rid of its plastic clamshell packaging for hamburgers, citing environmental concerns over plastic.

    In 1993, the company was sold again to a different investment group, American Industrial Partners. Eventually, it was sold yet again to the Solo Cup Company, makers of one-third of the materials necessary for beer pong. And finally, in 2012, Solo was itself sold to Dart Container, a family-owned packaging company that sells a vast array of straws under the Solo brand.

    Fort Howard continued on, going back public in 1995, then merging with another paper company, James River, in 1997, to become Fort James. Just three years later, an even bigger paper company, Georgia Pacific, snatched up the combined entity. In 2005, Koch Industries bought the shares of all the companies, taking the company back private. They still make straws.

    While bulk capitalism pushes hundreds of millions of plain plastic straws through the American food system, there are also thousands of variations on the straw now, from the “krazy” whirling neon kind to a new natural straw made from rye stalks advertised on Kickstarter (the entrepreneur calls them “Straw Straws”). There are old-school paper straws and newfangled compostable plastic straws. Stone Straw, founded by the inventor of the artificial straw, even survives in some form as the straw-distributing subsidiary of a Canadian manufacturing concern. Basically, there’s never been a better time to be a straw consumer.

    Meanwhile, the country has shed manufacturing jobs for decades, straws contribute their share to a dire global environmental disaster, the economy continues to concentrate wealth among the very richest, and the sodas that pass through the nation’s straws are contributing to an obesity epidemic that threatens to erase many of the public health gains that were won in the 20th century. Local governments may legislate the use of the plastic straw, but they can’t do a thing about the vast system that’s attached to the straw, which created first disposable products, then companies, and finally people.

    The straw is the opposite of special. History has flowed around and through it, like thousands of other bits of material culture. What’s happened to the straw might not even be worth comment, and certainly not essay. But if it’s not clear by now, straws, in this story, are us, inevitable vessels of the times in which we live.

    #USA #histoire #capitalisme #alimentation #plastique

  • Plastikmarché 2 (le retour)
    http://www.weck.fr/2019/02/20/plastikmarche-2-le-retour

    Nouvelle visite au supermarché. Cette fois je suis aussi allé dans les autres rayons (autres que l’alimentaire). C’est toujours aussi déprimant et finalement fascinant. Comme on parle de la beauté du diable et autre oxymores. Inventaire poético-technique apocalyptique de l’industrie alimentaire : le diéthylstilbestrol, les dioxines, le furane (dans le café en capsule), l’acide perfluorooctanoïque […]

    #Militants

  • Plastikmarché
    http://www.weck.fr/2018/12/20/plastikmarche

    J’ai accompagné un copain au supermarché. Il y avait longtemps que je n’y étais pas allé, du moins dans les rayons alimentation. J’ai été surpris de la quantité de plastique autour des fruits et légumes et notamment au rayon bio. Peut-être parce que la présence du bio en supermarché est tout simplement une aberration fondamentale…

    #Militants #plastique #hypermarché #supermarché #consommation

  • The surprising way plastics could actually help fight climate change
    http://theconversation.com/the-surprising-way-plastics-could-actually-help-fight-climate-chang

    Petro-plastics aren’t fundamentally all that bad, but they’re a missed opportunity. Fortunately, there is an alternative. Switching from petroleum-based polymers to polymers that are biologically based could decrease carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons every year. Bio-based polymers are not only renewable and more environmentally friendly to produce, but they can actually have a net beneficial effect on climate change by acting as a carbon sink. But not all bio-polymers are created equal.

    #plastiques

  • Microplastics found in human stools for the first time | Environment | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/22/microplastics-found-in-human-stools-for-the-first-time?CMP=share_btn_tw

    Microplastics have been found in human stools for the first time, according to a study suggesting the tiny particles may be widespread in the human food chain.

    The small study examined eight participants from Europe, Japan and Russia. All of their stool samples were found to contain microplastic particles.

    Up to nine different plastics were found out of 10 varieties tested for, in particles of sizes ranging from 50 to 500 micrometres. Polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate were the plastics most commonly found.

    On average, 20 particles of microplastic were found in each 10g of excreta. Microplastics are defined as particles of less than 5mm, with some created for use in products such as cosmetics but also by the breaking down of larger pieces of plastic, often in the sea.
    We are living on a plastic planet. What does it mean for our health?
    Read more

    Based on this study, the authors estimated that “more than 50% of the world population might have microplastics in their stools”, though they stressed the need for larger-scale studies to confirm this.

    #alimentation #plastique #plasticocène ? #it_has_begun

  • Coca-Cola, PepsiCo et Nestlé sont les plus gros producteurs de déchets en plastique du monde, selon une étude publiée mardi par Greenpeace. nxp/ats - 9 Octobre 2018 - 20 minutes .CH
    https://www.20min.ch/ro/news/suisse/story/Nestle--l-un-des-plus-gros-pollueurs-plastique-30189481
    https://www.greenpeace.fr/pollution-plastique-changeons-de-modele-economique

    Greenpeace annonce dans une étude publiée mardi que #Coca-Cola, #PepsiCo et #Nestlé seraient les plus gros producteurs de #déchets en plastique du monde.

    L’ONG, en partenariat avec le mouvement Break Free From Plastic, a organisé 239 opérations de nettoyage dans 42 pays lors de la journée internationale de nettoyage des plages le 15 septembre et elle a répertorié 187.000 types de déchets en plastique afin de savoir qui sont les plus gros pollueurs.

    Plastique pour l’alimentation en cause
    Le type de plastique le plus fréquemment ramassé a été le polystyrène, utilisé dans les gobelets et couverts jetables, les barquettes alimentaires ou encore les pots de yaourts, suivi de près par le PET (polytéréphtalate d’éthylène) utilisé pour les bouteilles en plastique et toutes sortes de contenants jetables.

    « Nous partageons l’objectif de Greenpeace d’éliminer les déchets des océans et sommes disposés à prendre notre part pour relever cet important défi », a déclaré un porte-parole de Coca-Cola, numéro un mondial des sodas.
    . . . . . . .

    #plastique #pollution #déchets #environnement #multinationales #Greenpeace

  • On a trouvé des #microplastiques jusque dans le corps des #moustiques !
    https://www.consoglobe.com/microplastiques-moustiques-contamination-chaine-alimentaire-cg

    Comment est-ce possible concrètement ? Grâce à leurs travaux, les scientifiques ont découvert que ces petits incestes [sic] ingèrent, dès le stade de larve, des microparticules de plastiques présentes dans l’eau des rivières où ils se développent. Ils grandissent, deviennent des #insectes volants, tout en gardant le plastique présent dans leur organisme.

    En laboratoire, les résultats sont sans appel : les microparticules de plastiques données aux larves se retrouvent, en plus petites quantités, dans les intestins et les reins des moustiques adultes. Leurs prédateurs qui se nourrissent d’insectes volants – on pense ici aux libellules, aux oiseaux et aux chauves-souris – seront donc contaminés à leur tour.

  • Plastique : la grande intox
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZT3drAYIzo

    Dans le monde, dix tonnes de plastique sont produites chaque seconde. Un dixième finit dans les océans, laissant présager qu’en 2050, il y aura plus de plastique que de poissons dans la mer. Face à ces chiffres effarants, Elise Lucet et son équipe partent explorer ce « continent plastique » qui ne cesse de grandir. Les responsables ? Les grands marques qui s’acharnent à développer une addiction à cette matière. Pour éviter d’endosser la responsabilité de la pollution, certains industriels ont trouvé la parade : la mettre sur les épaules des consommateurs. Enquête sur les stratégies secrètes de l’un des géants mondiaux des sodas et les promesses de recyclage des emballages. Source : Cash (...)

  • La poutre en plastique dans l’oeil de l’Assemblée… François Ruffin - 15 Septembre 2018 - francoisruffin.fr
    https://francoisruffin.fr/plastique

    Les véritables réfractaires au changement, ils refusent jusqu’à la simple interdiction des bouteilles et des couverts en plastique au sein même de l’Assemblée nationale : la majorité En Marche.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=113&v=__7l0H4Qcbs

    #plastique #plastique #paille #pollution #déchets #environnement #recyclage #écologie #france

  • Le #plastique, #fléau des #océans - Greenpeace France
    https://www.greenpeace.fr/le-plastique-fleau-des-oceans

    En tant que numéro un mondial des boissons gazeuses, #Coca-Cola (propriétaire de nombreuses marques comme Sprite et Minute Maid) est en grande partie responsable de la #pollution plastique de nos océans. Au vu de ses #profits colossaux, la compagnie a largement les moyens et l’influence nécessaires pour changer de modèle économique et entraîner le reste du secteur avec elle.

    Alors que de véritables « continents de plastique » se forment au large de nos océans, le groupe Coca-Cola ne s’est à ce jour toujours pas engagé à réduire le nombre de #bouteilles plastiques à usage unique qu’il vend tous les jours au quatre coins du monde. Au contraire, ce nombre ne fait qu’augmenter !

    Coca-Cola est la seule entreprises qui a refusé, dans le cadre d’une enquête menée au Royaume-Uni, de communiquer à Greenpeace le volume de plastique qu’elle produit chaque année ! Pour l’instant, elle est plus intéressée par les profits que lui apportent les bouteilles plastiques (notamment en raison de la baisse du prix du pétrole et donc du plastique), que par la protection de l’#environnement et des océans. Et pour que cela ne change pas, elle dépense au niveau européen des milliers d’euros en #lobbying chaque année pour contrer les propositions de législation visant à déployer la consigne et à augmenter le recyclage des contenants.

  • We won’t save the Earth with a better kind of disposable coffee cup

    We must challenge the corporations that urge us to live in a throwaway society rather than seeking ‘greener’ ways of maintaining the status quo.
    Do you believe in miracles? If so, please form an orderly queue. Plenty of people imagine we can carry on as we are, as long as we substitute one material for another. Last month, a request to Starbucks and Costa to replace their plastic coffee cups with cups made from corn starch was retweeted 60,000 times, before it was deleted.

    Those who supported this call failed to ask themselves where the corn starch would come from, how much land would be needed to grow it, or how much food production it would displace. They overlooked the damage this cultivation would inflict: growing corn (maize) is notorious for causing soil erosion, and often requires heavy doses of pesticides and fertilisers.

    The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability. Or, to put it another way, the problem is pursuing, on the one planet known to harbour life, a four-planet lifestyle. Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth’s living systems.
    Retailers likely to face backlash for failing to curb plastic use, survey finds

    Don’t get me wrong. Our greed for plastic is a major environmental blight, and the campaigns to limit its use are well motivated and sometimes effective. But we cannot address our environmental crisis by swapping one overused resource for another. When I challenged that call, some people asked me, “So what should we use instead?”

    The right question is, “How should we live?” But systemic thinking is an endangered species.

    Part of the problem is the source of the plastic campaigns: David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series. The first six episodes had strong, coherent narratives but the seventh, which sought to explain the threats facing the wonderful creatures the series revealed, darted from one issue to another. We were told we could “do something” about the destruction of ocean life. We were not told what. There was no explanation of why the problems are happening and what forces are responsible, or how they can be engaged.

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    Amid the general incoherence, one contributor stated: “It comes down, I think, to us each taking responsibility for the personal choices in our everyday lives. That’s all any of us can be expected to do.” This perfectly represents the mistaken belief that a better form of consumerism will save the planet. The problems we face are structural: a political system captured by commercial interests, and an economic system that seeks endless growth. Of course we should try to minimise our own impacts, but we cannot confront these forces merely by “taking responsibility” for what we consume. Unfortunately, these are issues that the BBC in general and David Attenborough in particular avoid. I admire Attenborough in many ways, but I am no fan of his environmentalism. For many years, it was almost undetectable. When he did at last speak out, he avoided challenging power – either speaking in vague terms or focusing on problems for which powerful interests are not responsible. This tendency may explain Blue Planet’s skirting of the obvious issues.

    The most obvious is the fishing industry, which turns the astonishing life forms the rest of the series depicted into seafood. Throughout the oceans, this industry, driven by our appetites and protected by governments, is causing cascading ecological collapse. Yet the only fishery the programme featured was among the 1% that are in recovery. It was charming to see how Norwegian herring boats seek to avoid killing orcas, but we were given no idea of how unusual it is.

    Even marine plastic is in large part a fishing issue. It turns out that 46% of the Great Pacific garbage patch – which has come to symbolise our throwaway society – is composed of discarded nets, and much of the rest consists of other kinds of fishing gear. Abandoned fishing materials tend to be far more dangerous to marine life than other forms of waste. As for the bags and bottles contributing to the disaster, the great majority arise in poorer nations without good disposal systems. But because this point was not made, we look to the wrong places for solutions.

    From this misdirection arise a thousand perversities. One prominent environmentalist posted a picture of the king prawns she had bought, celebrating the fact that she had persuaded the supermarket to put them in her own container rather than a plastic bag, and linking this to the protection of the seas. But buying prawns causes many times more damage to marine life than any plastic in which they are wrapped. Prawn fishing has the highest rates of bycatch of any fishery – scooping up vast numbers of turtles and other threatened species. Prawn farming is just as bad, eliminating tracts of mangrove forests, crucial nurseries for thousands of species.

    We are kept remarkably ignorant of such issues. As consumers, we are confused, bamboozled and almost powerless – and corporate power has gone to great lengths to persuade us to see ourselves this way. The BBC’s approach to environmental issues is highly partisan, siding with a system that has sought to transfer responsibility for structural forces to individual shoppers. Yet it is only as citizens taking political action that we can promote meaningful change.

    The answer to the question “How should we live?” is: “Simply.” But living simply is highly complicated. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the government massacred the Simple Lifers. This is generally unnecessary: today they can safely be marginalised, insulted and dismissed. The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

    One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.

    As last month’s Hothouse Earth paper, which warned of the danger of flipping the planet into a new, irreversible climatic state, concluded: “Incremental linear changes … are not enough to stabilise the Earth system. Widespread, rapid and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold.”

    Disposable coffee cups made from new materials are not just a non-solution: they are a perpetuation of the problem. Defending the planet means changing the world.


    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/06/save-earth-disposable-coffee-cup-green
    #société_de_la_consommation #consommation #consumérisme #plastique #publicité #moins_consommer

  • #Lego Wants to Completely Remake Its Toy Bricks (Without Anyone Noticing) - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/business/energy-environment/lego-plastic-denmark-environment-toys.html

    BILLUND, Denmark — At the heart of this town lies a building that is a veritable temple to the area’s most famous creation, the humble Lego brick. It is filled with complex creations, from a 50-foot tree to a collection of multicolored dinosaurs, all of them built with a product that has barely changed in more than 50 years.

    A short walk away in its research lab, though, Lego is trying to refashion the product it is best known for: It wants to eliminate its dependence on petroleum-based plastics, and build its toys entirely from plant-based or recycled materials by 2030.

  • Depeche - Le #recyclage s’entasse aux #Etats-Unis car la #Chine n’en veut plus - France 24
    http://www.france24.com/fr/20180712-le-recyclage-sentasse-etats-unis-car-chine-nen-veut-plus

    A la fin du tri, de gros cubes de déchets compactés (papiers, cartons, plastiques...) sont produits. Ces déchets étaient achetés depuis des décennies par des entreprises, principalement en Chine, qui les nettoyaient, broyaient et retransformaient en matières premières pour des industriels. Ces importateurs fermaient les yeux quand les balles de plastiques étaient trop sales ou n’étaient pas assez « pures ».

    La Chine, l’an dernier, a ainsi acheté plus de la moitié des #déchets recyclables exportés par les Etats-Unis. Au niveau mondial, depuis 1992, ce sont 72% des déchets #plastiques qui ont fini en Chine et à Hong Kong, selon une étude parue dans Science Advances.

    Mais depuis janvier, les frontières chinoises se sont fermées à la plupart du papier et du plastique, conséquence d’une nouvelle politique environnementale de Pékin... les dirigeants chinois se disant désireux de ne plus être la poubelle de la planète, ou même sa déchetterie.

    Pour le reste, dont le métal ou le carton, les inspecteurs chinois ont fixé un taux de contamination de 0,5%, trop bas pour les technologies américaines actuelles qui n’arrivent pas à trier les déchets de façon aussi précise. Le secteur s’attend in fine à ce que presque toutes les catégories de déchets soient refusées d’ici 2020.

  • Bye les pailles en plastique, place au maïs - Libération
    http://www.liberation.fr/france/2018/07/06/bye-les-pailles-en-plastique-place-au-mais_1664337

    Des lycéens strasbourgeois ont trouvé une alternative aux consternantes pailles en plastique : des pailles en amidon de maïs, recyclables et biodégradables.

    Des élèves de seconde – apparemment précoces – au lycée Kleber de Strasbourg, ont pris conscience qu’il faut 450 ans pour qu’une paille en plastique se désagrège, qu’on en consomme environ 8,8 millions par jour dans les fast-foods français et que, selon Eco-cycle, une association américaine qui sensibilise au recyclage, on estime la consommation des Américains à 500 millions de pailles par jour, « de quoi remplir 46 400 bus scolaires de pailles chaque année », précise l’ONG.

    L’heure est grave et je ne te facture pas le massacre auprès de la faune et de la flore avec ces cochonneries dont on pourrait, en sus, parfaitement se passer, sauf en cas de râtelier explosé ou en milieu hospitalier et subclaquant. Donc l’idée de ces huit petits colibris d’une quinzaine d’années en route pour des filières économiques et sociales, c’est de fabriquer des pailles biodégradables, après avoir hésité, selon le site Linfodurable, entre le lancement d’une box locale avec des produits biodégradables et des pailles écolo. D’abord les lycéens ont pensé au bambou, mais c’est très cher, et finalement, explique Aurea Salon, chargée de com dans la bande, ils ont découvert le plastique végétal à base de maïs. Du coup, ils ont opté pour le nom de PopStraw parce que pop fait référence au popcorn, donc au #maïs, et straw, paille en anglais.

    Désagrégation en six à neuf mois

    Une entreprise en Île-de-France a été sollicitée pour fabriquer leurs pailles pour pouvoir les proposer à la vente. En quelques mois d’existence et grâce à des commandes via la plateforme de vente Etsy, ils ont généré pas moins de 2 000 euros de chiffres d’affaires. A 15 ans, âge où on le fume plutôt, le maïs, on dit chapeau. Un bon relais médiatique les aidant pas mal, ils ont des commandes du Luxembourg, de Suisse, de Grèce, de l’Italie, de Belgique. « Notre plus gros client pour le moment est un restaurant réunionnais qui nous a commandé 15 000 pailles », explique à Infodurable l’un des lycéens.

    Sur leur site, est écrit « pour que des pailles intelligentes ne soient pas la mer à boire ! » et d’ailleurs, à propos de mer, les jeunes ont reversé 10% de leurs fonds à leur partenaire, The Sea Cleaners, un bateau développé pour nettoyer le plastique des océans. Leurs pailles, compostables et résistantes à 50°C max se désagrègent en six à neuf mois.

    Bas les pailles

    Le dossier « à mort les pailles en plastique » avance encore un peu, après diverses initiatives dans le monde. Miami les a interdites en 2012 dans les restaus en bord de mer, Seattle lance une campagne de sensibilisation, une journée internationale anti-pailles a été lancée en février, une anthropologue, Mounia El Kotni, a lancé l’association Bas Les pailles et Bye Paille est une page Facebook dédiée à cette juste lutte contre les 8 millions de tonnes de déchets, selon l’association Surf rider, qui finissent dans la plus grande poubelle des sociétés modernes, l’océan. Plus aucune excuse pour sniff, euh boire à la paille.
    Emmanuèle Peyret

    Leur site : http://www.popstraw.fr

    #pollution #plastique #paille #écologie #environnement #popstraw

    • Super !
      Ils vont pouvoir intégrer une école de commerce, et si leurs parents ont les moyens, erasmus.

      La suppression de la feuille plastique qui entoure les pacs d’eau, et autres lots afin de forcer à l’achat, ils(elles) ne se sont pas encore aperçu que cela polluait bien plus.
      Il est vrai que l’idée n’a pas encore été lancé par bilération.

  • Actions de protestation contre les emballages plastique samedi dans 100 supermarchés Belga - 1 Juin 2018 - RTBF
    https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_actions-de-protestation-contre-les-emballages-plastique-samedi-dans-100-

    Des organisations de défense de l’environnement organiseront samedi dans 100 supermarchés de 27 villes du pays une « Plastic Attack ». Les clients déballeront leurs achats à la caisse et y laisseront le plastique. « Nous voulons surtout sensibiliser les supermarchés », précise Vanessa Debruyne, co-organisatrice. « Nous ne sommes pas contre le plastique, mais la plupart du temps nous en faisons usage tout au plus 20 minutes alors que ce matériau met 100 ans à se décomposer. »

    Des militants et bénévoles d’associations prendront d’assaut samedi les supermarchés de 27 villes, principalement en Flandre. « Au niveau politique, la volonté grandit d’introduire une taxe, mais les gros distributeurs s’y opposent » , soulignent les organisateurs.


    L’action sera menée à Bruxelles, Gand, Ostende, Anvers, Hasselt, Eeklo, Louvain, Bruges, Malines, Alost, Geel, Hamme, Ypres, Lokeren, Courtrai, Tongres, Vieux-Turnhout, Tirlemont, Kasterlee, Termonde, Zwevegem, Lommel, Genk, Tamise, Saint-Nicolas, Bornem, Landen et Hannut. Une « Plastic Attack » aura également lieu dans d’autres pays.

    #plastique #pollution #environnement #déchets #santé #catastrophe #supermarché #hypermarché #plastique #pollution #consommation Bonne #idée #hipster #egologie #Plastic_attack