[kragen]

from my point of view, it depends on how much of it there is and what effect it has on the environment

sand, glass, metal, and rust aren't biodegradable either, but i don't think we should ban mountains because they throw sand out into nature when they erode

plastic straws are generally polypropylene, which is photodegradable to relatively nontoxic materials

[dddssddd]

Didn't realize Mountains were pollution until you pointed it out. Thanks for your meaningful and on discussion contribution!

[kragen]

you seem to have interpreted my comment as saying the opposite of what it did in fact say, presumably for humorous effect

[marcus0x62]

Dude drank through too many PFAS-enhanced paper straws and now has reading comprehension problems :(

[chmod600]

Plastic straws strewn in a natural setting feels a lot worse than sand. I can't tell you exactly why, but I still think that "don't throw plastic around" is a good starting place for a discussion and I don't think it's productive to argue that point.

[kragen]

maybe what feels good or bad to people in a natural setting is not actually a useful measurement of what affects the well-being of nature

maybe the actual health of the motherfucking ecosystem matters more than what looks nice on a postcard

common sense is what tells you the world is flat, chemotherapy is bad for you, and lead paint and sassafras are good to eat

[yyyk]

Glass is biodegradable. Metal is so easily recycled.

I'll note though that biodegradability is not the only consideration, and there are other important advantages to plastic straws.

[afiori]

How is glass biodegradable? isn't it basically rock?

I don't think that "can be eroded to sand" counts as biodegradable

[yyyk]

Hmm..

Reading about this, you're right definition-wise (Glass is not biodegradable), but in practice Glass is degradable to safe materials - and this happens naturally - which is what we really want.

[kragen]

so is polypropylene; by this measure polypropylene is just as good as glass

[afiori]

isn't the problem with plastics that once they are underwater or otherwise out of strong sunlight they take forever to degrade or break?

In a different context it is what happens with dioxins IIRC.

[kragen]

polypropylene is indeed pretty inert when it's not photodegrading (though there are some interesting studies finding biodegradation https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:yE8AZEyCArgJ:sc... but all in aerobic environments afaik), but when it does biodegrade or photodegrade, the degradation products are pretty harmless, as with glass and sand

it does photodegrade reasonably fast if exposed to sunlight, in years rather than decades (or millennia as in glass)

because it's so inert, it's pretty harmless when not degraded unless it's been soaking in something more toxic. it's been used in human body implants, for example, but it does cause some irritation in that role (https://theperfectboobs.net/index.php?topic=27773.0 has some nsfw discussion of this and https://everything2.com/title/Polypropylene+string+breast+im... has a safer summary)

implanted soda-lime glass causes irritation in a similar way, by the way; i have a granuloma in my foot right now which is encapsulating a splinter of glass i'm biodegrading. the issue with polypropylene is that it's, believe it or not, more resistant to biodegradation than glass, at least inside the human body

the issue with polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins is not just their persistence; as pointed out above, things like glass, sand, and polypropylene are even more persistent. the issue is that in addition to being persistent, they're toxic—but not acutely so, except in extreme yushchenko-like cases