plastic waste per capita: the US is at top(if we exclude small island nations)
plastic waste in absolute terms: the US is not far behind China, with India at a distant third place.

the reduction is plastic waste generation in China is far more than that of US^1^.

so, what I mean to say is that more people ≠ more pollution. but I do agree that the problem is to be tackled with active participation of the government, which won't be there because of muh economy.

[1]: By 2016, China's overall plastic waste production had fallen to 21.60 million tons, a reduction of nearly 28 million tons (for comparison, U.S. production fell less than 4 tons during the same time period). Moreover, despite being one of the largest overall producers of plastic waste, China's per capita production of plastic waste was one of the lowest in the world in 2016 at 15.6 kilograms a year per person.

Lots of places in the US won't recycle the supposedly "recyclable" plastics, it ends up in a landfill regardless of what you do. I remember all the educational initiatives about the importance of recycling when I was a kid. Turns out it was all just propaganda to make us feel responsible for problems caused by corporations.

Oh man that's a drop in the bucket compared to medical/industrial/commercial plastic waste lol.

Maybe beverages could be served in containers that don't require a straw. I wouldn't mind being served a can or a bottle instead a cardboard cup.

Or you know, food grade stainless steel straws. No bad chemicals, doesn't turn to mush (unless exposed to temperatures of 1,400 to 1,530 °C) and fully recyclable. Some people say they are hard to wash but ive never had a problem i just stick em vertical into the silverware holder of my dishwasher and it's always gotten all the way through the straw clean.

They are cheap to produce as well. Not plastic cheap maybe but businesses could easily replace plastic straws with them without going bankrupt or anything. Easy model is just have em as an optional extra so once people already have 8 they can just use their own lol

I use my own metal straw and it works great

I was recently served a long macaroni as a straw in a restaurant. It was honestly amazing how well it worked! At no point it was mushy and there's nothing in it that I wouldn't eat with my pasta dish anyway.

Feels like to them, mother nature and environment is a hindrance to their convenience

How else do you go on a cruise while flying your jet? Checkmate, working class!

Taylor Swift going on a cruise?

Plastic is made from oil that is pumped up from the earth. This oil contains carbon that eventually gets released into the atmosphere.

The climate change is caused by carbon that is pumped up from the earth and released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Do you have enough imagination to see any kind of connection?

They said " environment", not climate.

Well, none of that matters anyways when China now emits almost twice as much CO2 as the US and is basically single-handedly not just absorbing all the rest of the world's reduction efforts, but increasing the global output enormously.

Plastic recycling is a lie.

I use a reusable metal straw

Are you living on a dumpster or really that naive, that you think your waste is staying where you leave it?

You know you could just learn to drink like grown ups so you don't need to carry around special implements? My babies could pretty much drink straight from a cup or a glass before they had turned two, you can do it too

There's a different between shitpost and shit post, you know?

We aim for the former in here.