It all started in France in February 2020 when the AGEC law came into force.
Anti-Waste for a Circular Economy
or in French
Anti-Gaspillage pour une Economie Circulaire
.
Do you know what Gaspillage means? It means “waste“, i.e. the French passed an anti-waste law because that is what plastic straws mean, waste, a disposable product used for a few minutes which then decomposes in nature in thousands of years and incomplete! Yes, incomplete!
The latest studies show that there are plastic microparticles that do not break down, they enter the “food chain” and eventually end up in you. The latest studies also show that we eat as much plastic as a bank card every year. So if you weren’t impressed by the pictures on the net of marine animals strangled by plastic, trapped in plastic, choked with plastic straws, you might wake up hearing that you eat plastic every day.
By the way, about 80% of the plastic we use ends up in marine waters so you get the picture.
At the European Community level, we are part of, from 3 July 2021, disposable plastic products such as plates, cups, cutlery, drinking straws, ear sticks are banned from marketing in the territory of Member States under Directive (EU) 2019/904. More details can be found at https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/plastics/single-use-plastics/eu-restrictions-certain-single-use-plastics_en.
In Romania, on 25 August 2021, Government Ordinance 6/2021 on reducing the environmental impact of certain plastic products was published in the Official Gazette, which provides, among other things, for a ban on the marketing in Romania of plastic products such as drinking straws, forks, plates and chopsticks.
The law applies to products made entirely of plastic or partly of plastic intended for one-off or short-term use. So don’t be fooled when you go to a restaurant and are told that the straw in your drink is recyclable or that it is bioplastic, biodegradable PLA or some other invention, all of which involve chemical processes for production that are just as damaging to nature and still biodegradable in hundreds and thousands of years – and you end up eating a plastic card every year! If it looks like plastic, it’s plastic! The only plastic drinking straw recyclable is the one made of silicone having the properties of being malleable, sterilizable, etc.
So think better next time you sip a frappe or a cocktail and choose Paiul din Pai, the only natural product, which does not go through any kind of chemical process, is environmentally friendly, biodegradable, compostable and let’s not forget, Romanian!