The European Union Parliament has decided, in a fit of virtue signalling, to entirely fail Chesterton’s Fence. For they’ve decided to ban single use plastics. Without actually thinking why it is that we use plastics in the first place we cannot work out whether we should still be using them now, can we?
The European Parliament on Wednesday backed a wide-ranging proposal to ban the use of single-use plastics across the European Union.
The ban includes a full prohibition of plastic plates and utensils, cotton swabs, straws and drink stirrers and calls for reduced use of plastic cups and other similar food packaging products, according to the BBC.
This isn’t sensible. Why is it, for example, that we make straws out of plastic in the first place?
One MEP said, if no action was taken, “by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans”.
The European Commission proposed a ban in May, following a surge in public support attributed to documentaries such as David Attenborough’s BBC Blue Planet series.
It’s also true that near none of the plastic that is in the oceans comes from the European Union. It’s not even straws and the like from other places either. A goodly half of it is fishing equipment:
EU lawmakers added polystyrene fast-food containers and products made of oxo-degradable plastics, which critics say do not fully break down, to the list proposed by the EU executive earlier this year.
Waste from cigarette butts, which can take over a decade to degrade in water, would also have to be cut by 50 percent in 2025 and by 80 percent in 2030. EU countries would also have to collect fishing gear polluting beaches.
Collect waste, sure. Deal with it by burning or burying, why not? But not using the stuff in the first place? Hasn’t anyone bothered to think through why we started to use it?
Well, no, obviously not, and thank the Lord we’re leaving these maniacs, right?
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Oh, just let 'em do it. I want to see what happens when millions of tons of food is rotting because its wrapped in packaging that rots faster than the food, and the anti-plastics bitch-fighting the anti-food-wasters.
They had a go at banning PVCs in the late 1990 until they realised it was in practically everything and it would destroy the economy.
Then the idiots decreed ethylene oxide should be phased out to sterilise medical devices, instead gamma radiation would be used. But then it was explained to the loonies that many plastics degrade and become brittle when they are exposed to em radiation which is why etox was used and the banning of etox would remove about 80% of medical devices from use.
So here we go again.
I think the problem is none of these clowns lived in the days when we did not have plastics and had to rely on glass, metal, paper or cloth for packaging or do without. The days before supermarkets, when people shopped daily for perishables as few had fridges or freezers, so packaging was not so important.