this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2022
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Environment
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one place where i dissent from this ban is on plastic straws, which affords almost no tangible environmental benefit (they contribute a negligible amount of plastic waste, especially compared to other single-use packaging) relative to the cost they impose on disabled people, but otherwise this demonstrates how simple it can be to get people to make more sustainable behavioral changes.
I think I might be misunderstanding.. Could you explain how the plastic straws benefit disabled people compared to the biodegradabe alternatives?
In my neck of the woods, people lost their minds at having to abandon plastic straws, so I consider it a good stepping stone away from single-use in general.
there are a number of disabilities for which alternatives to plastic straws range from simply not useful to actively dangerous--nor do any of the alternatives have all the benefits^1^ for disabled people as a plastic straw does--and as mentioned they contribute rather negligibly to overall plastic pollution, so the wide consensus in the disability community is that plastic straw bans should either not be implemented or have significant carve outs for disabled people:
^1.^ taken from this blog post, which is one of many you can find on this subject: https://creakyjoints.org/advocacy/plastic-straw-bans-bad-for-people-with-disabilities/
Seems to me that making plastic straws available only to those who specifically request them on account of need is an easy fix, even if some nutters want to pretend to be disabled in order to get a plastic straw it'd be statistically negligible