Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
Set aside the asinine idea that those cups were "paper." Absolutely nobody has a choice in what McDonalds serves them. McDonald's stocks what it thinks is profitable. And zero people falsely believe they're "saving the planet" by consuming McDonald's products.
i remember the great plastic transition of 1995. on the trek though GRAND UNION to buy macaroni salad ingredients and store brand chips, i asked my mom why there were so many plastic bottles, and she replied 'we're like pioneers' and she referenced little house on the prairie, and i still didn't understand what she was getting at, so she slapped some sense into me right in aisle 13 and i pretended i understood so she'd leave me alone for five minutes.
a few weeks ago my MD said that i have colon cancer and i assume that's from pounding cases of fruitopia when it was in vogue but who am i gonna sue? is big plastic a thing?
i tried to tell my mom it was her fault but when i tried to call all i heard was a dial tone. i thought that was weird at the time because cell-phones don't have dial tones but my therapist said i was hallucinating; she still won't prescribe me xanax.
Fair point. IIRC though the primary reason for banning plastic straws was not CO2 emissions but wildlife protection, as plastic straws are (or were) the single most frequently found foreign object in the stomachs of dead sea turtles.
The irony of this post using McDonald's cups isn't lost on me. Where does their meat come from I wonder...
Farm animals, fake meat is too expensive.
Always get a chuckle out of the conspiracy that mcdonalds uses fake meat. When the reality is so, so much worse.
Its all 100% real meat. McDonald's just ruins it that hard.
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.
I'll take a PLA cup over a paper cup lined with PFAS, BPA, etc.
There should really be a law that people should be able to bring their own reusable drink cup for any drink.
But then they might get extra drink! Unconscionable!
if people knew just how little the typical fountain drink cost, cups and straws included, they would riot over the costs.
I went to a fancy restaurant recently, the kind that charges $15 for a side salad and $30 for a plate of noodles, and the straw that broke the camels back for me was that she charged me $3 for every refill of the 12 oz of soda they give you.
I went to a diner recently and they had posted signs that they are going to start charging for refills after the 2nd one
charged refills of fountain drinks is just pure exploitative robbery.
Yeah like this is supposed to be an upscale restaurant but they’re acting like a beggar on the street. They even had the gall to charge the customer for the 3% credit card fee. I’m supposed to spend $70 a head but they can’t afford a $3 fee for the table. Unforgivable lol
I think larger merchants can negotiate lower swipe rates, but even 3% means they are getting more from the charge than the transaction costs them.
Yeah, I don't know if it's still true but years ago basically the cost for the cup and straw for the business was greater than the cost of the drink itself.
So if anything bringing my own container would save them a good chunk of the cost of a fountain drink.
There is actually a bit of sense in there. Paper cups weren't simply paper - its tetrapak-like material with plastic coating inside. They are notoriously hard to recycle. Plain plastic cups on the other hand are made from single material, most likely PET. Moreover, they are transparent, without colouring additives.
There are two reasons why colour in plastic makes it harder to recycle. First, pigment is a completely different substance, which behaves differently from plastic itself. It makes it harder to "re-melt" into stable material. If you ever 3d printed anything with matte/gloss filament, you'll know that it is more finicky than plain one. Second, uncoloured plastic can be coloured into anything, while other needs to be either sorted by colour or mixed with strong dye (black, gray, dark brown, etc) to have consistent colour.
PET itself is pretty easy to turn into something new, actually. A workshop near me had a live demo of the whole process - chipping it into small pieces, feeding to the heated tube, and then injection molded into trinkets. Industrial grade processing usually have "turned into pellets" step in between, but it's basically the same.
Plastic-covered paper, on the other hand, should be somehow separated first, and then handled with two different approaches - one for paper, another one for plastic film. Doable, but much harder. Paper straw can probably decompose by itself, without any special conditions.
UPD: Be wary that recycling is not a panacea. There's multiple videos about how recycling plastic isn't actually a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68zjxTTl5Ik for example.
Jeff Bezzos:
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.
I was always given to understand that the straw thing was because plastic straws get out and fuck up wildlife, but that message seems to get buried in handwringing over climate change so often that I suspect bad actors are at play spreading all these memes.
This image looks like right wing corpo propaganda to me. Not only does it divert the attention away from the handful of megacorporations emitting 80% of all green house gases, it is attacking a moderate leftist – who admittedly causes a relatively large amount of greenhouse gases.
But Taylor Swift is not making most of those flights on a personal basis. It’s to provide a service to fans. So in that sense we can regard the emissions as those of Taylor Swift the company. And in that sense they are much lower than many other companies who we often give a free pass.
So, yes hold the big emitters responsible, but let’s start with the 57 on the list and work our way down to Taylor Swift.
There needs to just be a blanket, punitive, 100+% tax on any and all single use plastics that are not medical devices. Obviously there's lots of other bigger environmental issues that need to be tackled but this really seems like a pretty obvious one imo.
They'll just pass all the additional costs (plus a little extra profit because why not) onto the consumer
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.
And really, we're just making them actually pay for some of the externalities they're getting a free ride on.
But it wouldn't be making them pay for that because they would pass that cost onto the consumer as they always do.
And yeah, if they have to, they switch. To a more expensive material. And guess who pays for that?
We all pay for it anyway via the negative impacts. It should be the consumers buying the thing that pay for it. Why should society at large be paying for the negative impacts of a product not everyone is buying? Makes no sense. If your product is causing a big environmental impact, that needs to be paid for by the company making the product and the consumers buying it.
There's so much plastic lining that paper otherwise everything would get too soggy anyway. Yay for glass and metal. Reusable beats disposable, no matter what it's made of
Ppl have been mentioning the plastic in the paper cups but I haven't seen anyone mention that large cups used to all be Styrofoam. Some places all the cups were Styrofoam. And that was god awful for the environment. They were amazing though. Getting a giant sweet tea in a cup that never sweated was phenomenal. Shame they suck so bad.
I remember biting the rim of a Styrofoam cup and leaving imprints of my teeth
Paper cups used to be lined in wax. Plastic is technically unnecessary.
Many people don't understand why plastic straws are considered more harmful than plastic cups. The key issue is that straws are far more likely to escape waste management systems due to their small size, allowing them to pass through filtration screens and enter waterways. As a result, they reach the ocean at a higher rate and pose a greater threat to marine life, including sea turtles. Larger items like plastic cups are generally easier to capture and contain before they become environmental hazards.
paper straws are quite literally a strawman project against environmental pollution. they do not actually solve environmental pollution while pretending they do ..
Still waiting on straws made of dry pasta. Biodegradable, strong, edible if you really want