After posting the long thing above, I went for a bike ride and in the middle of it, realized what I was trying to express and how to do it much more succinctly.
My worry about a 100% ban on anything is that it often leads to unforeseen side effects. My questions about straws and jars were attempts to ask what side effects might end up worse than the cure.
Again, I don't know.
Are there alternate renewable materials like hemp fiber that we can make straws from besides plastics?
Yes, but are the better? I dug out the article from the discussion with the local climate action group that I mentioned. This is what they had to say:
For example, reusable bamboo drinking straws and two reusable sandwich storage options—beeswax wrap and silicone bags—never reached the break-even point in any of the three environmental impact categories assessed in the study: energy use, global warming potential, and water consumption.
https://www.futurity.org/sustainabilty-reusable-products-2591682-2/That helps me understand my initial uneasiness even better and to restate what I said above as "If you optimize against any given single metric (renewable in this case) you necessarily make compromises on other metrics that may be more important (carbon footprint)."
> Is a single-use plastic container worse than a single-use glass container?
Yes if we are defining better as which screws up the oceans more.
And there's the same problem. It begs the question for me of whether or not that's the right metric.
Let's look at both of those.
1. Renewable.
Well, we now know that we simply cannot afford to burn all our fossil fuels in vehicles. So the fact that it is not renewable is not really a problem, is it? If we convert our crude oil into hyrdrocarbon polymers and bury them in the ground, is that not a form of carbon sequestration?
That thought, which would have seemed heretical and immoral to me not long ago, has been growing in my mind. I don't know the answer to my question, but more and more it seems to me to be a reasonable question (whereas five years ago I would have thought of it as a ridiculous question).
Meanwhile, wood is a renewable, but only over relatively long time spans. So should we pull carbon out of the ground, use it, then put it back in the ground or should we make our materials with renewables that involve cutting down a tree that is actively sequestering carbon?
That is a ridiculous choice. One of my brother's dictums is "Anytime you have to choose between two options, you probably haven't thought about your options long enough." And so clearly there should be a better option, but as a thought experiment, in that case I would choose the single-use product over the renewable.
2. Ocean plastic.
Most of the ocean plastic from the US in the last couple of decades (i.e. since we stopped sending garbage scows out into the ocean to dump it) is the result of us shipping our plastics to "recycling" facilities in China and, more recently, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia (or Turkey and Kenya if you're in the UK). Paradoxically, if we had simply been throwing all our plastic away in quality landfills far from the ocean, we actually would have less plastic in the ocean.
So from that perspective, for places like the UK and US, proper sequestration of plastic waste is not that hard, whereas getting to carbon neutral is very hard. If the plastic has a much lower carbon footprint than glass and we have quality landfill practices, perhaps that's better.
3. Energy.
One other factor is that as energy becomes more carbon neutral, a lot of equations change. Then we stop caring if glass takes a huge amount of electricity to run high-termperature foundries and we stop caring if it takes a huge amount of energy to collect it and clean it. At a certain point, if the energy inputs are carbon neutral, then all that matters really is whether the materials are common, inert, renewable.
Since I was a kid, I always wondered whether some day we would mine our landfills. It seems like with cheap energy and good robotics, that could become a reality. The challenge then will be the chemistry of separating out the basic elements into usable materials.
Anyway, as is my wont, I've probably gone on too long, but these are issues that I have been rolling over and over in my head without satisfying asnwers. It's much on my mind, but without good conclusions. And ultimately, I would like to make rational decisions, but there is also an emotional component - it feels wrong to throw something away when there's a reusable option even if an analysis by an academic team tells me the reusable option is less good. It still feels bad.
