It has come to my attention that in England and in the U.S. a large campaign has started against the use of plastic straws. News programs and ads are used to warn the public about their responsibility to take care for the environment.
Drinking straws thrown - source: Wikimedia Commons
And I'm getting sick of it. Not that there's an effort made to make people, or I should say consumers aware of the endangered environment and of their role in polluting our oceans. It's the way in which it's always the individual consumer is made to be the guilty party. Now I admit immediately that I did something similar in my post about bottled water when I mentioned how much pollution that habit causes. But ultimately it's the industries that should come up with better solutions: like better tap water in this particular case.
But now we are being told that we shouldn't use plastic straws anymore because the environment... Well, let's look up some facts about the real plastic pollution in our seas. The biggest patch of plastic pollution in our seas is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. When looking on the internet for information about it's composition I find this:
As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today.
[...]
The study also found that fishing nets account for 46 percent of the trash, with the majority of the rest composed of other fishing industry gear, including ropes, oyster spacers, eel traps, crates, and baskets.
source: National Geographic, MARCH 22, 2018
The fishing industry is to blame for the most part for all the plastic in our oceans. Not that we don't share any responsibility; that's not why I'm angry here. It's the coordinated effort to blame the consumer, the individual for all that's going wrong in the world, and the expertise with which they do it; we all tend to fall for it. And it's yet another campaign to distract from real problems, thereby preventing real solutions to ever emerge. Trust me: the fishing industry is killing our oceans, not only with their enormous pollution, but also with their overfishing. In reality, when it comes to the environment, there's no way individual consumers can make a real impact.
The War Against Plastic Straws I Fortune
In the video above you see a perfect example of how we're being misled; big companies get to "lead by example", granting them some much needed free airtime, free advertisement one might even say, and then on just the right moment we're pointed towards the suffering oceans. Well, we know that the oceans need saving from a whole other type of abuse than consumers sipping a Coke at the McDonald's... Less than one tenth of a percent of the plastic in the oceans is from straws, and that's being generous as I'm just "guestemating" here and I am sure it will be even al lot less that that. If you search for some more of those adds and videos, you'll see they all have the exact same recipe. Another war against something to distract from some other thing.
It's the producers and the way we define growth that will have to change to put a stop to this ever accelerating rate of destroying nature. The economy of perpetual growth, and of glorifying and blaming the individual at the same time, needs to stop. The drive for more profits and more economic growth have brought us here. I guess it's idle hope, but I really wish this was the last straw.
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