Thread by @bopinion

Restaurants and bars are replacing their plastic straws with reusable metal variants.

But there's a hitch: customers keep taking the metal straws home with them bloom.bg/2k2uq8V

🥤 Eliminating plastic straws offers a case study in how simple solutions are sometimes even worse than the problems they were meant to solve bloom.bg/2k2uq8V

Rarely has a minor consumer product received more vilification than the plastic straw.

You use a plastic straw once and toss it, but it stays with us forever, sitting in a landfill, floating in the sea or harming wildlife🐢 bloom.bg/2k2uq8V

🚫 That's why some governments have introduced plastic straw bans.

This seems like a reasonable thing to do, despite the fact that plastic straws comprise only a small part of the total volume of plastic disposed of each year bloom.bg/2k2uq8V

If metal straws are getting stolen before they've been used enough, they may well be worse for the environment than their plastic peers, writes @skominers bloom.bg/2k2uq8V

Not only are metal straws expensive to replace, they're also not providing their intended environmental benefit.

The metal variants require mining, plus large amounts of energy to convert into sheet metal and then fashion it into a cylindrical tube bloom.bg/2k2uq8V

🛍️ What about reusable bags?

You need to use a reusable bag almost 40 times to break even with plastic or paper bags in terms of environmental costs. Most of them get lost or neglected before that milestone bloom.bg/2k2uq8V

So what's to be done? Economics offers a straightforward answer: instead of banning plastics, the right strategy is to tax them.

A 7 cent tax on all grocery bags in Chicago was associated with a 42% drop in usage bloom.bg/2k2uq8V