Juno News - July 20, 2018


Plastic Straws!

Topics
market response to plastic straws
Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Trudeau attacks Conservatives True North's Andrew Lawton with Tanya Granic Allen

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

185.94

Word count

565

Sentence count

26

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Plastic straws are the most pressing and dangerous domestic security threat that the Western world faces. It's worse than terrorism, worse than the border crisis, and worse than any other issue facing law enforcement. In this episode, Andrew Lutton, CEO of the True North Initiative, talks about the dangers of plastic straws.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Today I'm going to be talking about the most pressing and dangerous domestic 1.00
00:00:05.240 security threat that the Western world faces. Plastic straws.
00:00:16.080 I know worse than terrorism, worse than the border crisis, worse than any other
00:00:20.120 issues facing law enforcement. If you were paying attention to the news as of
00:00:23.680 late you'd think that plastic straws were the clear and present danger facing us
00:00:28.160 all. Well, it's not quite that bad but again that's the way it's being treated.
00:00:32.800 The politics of plastic alive and well. Now I don't have a team in the whole
00:00:38.240 plastic straw battle. I'm one of these people like most if I go to a restaurant
00:00:41.920 and I'm given one I'll use it. If I go to a restaurant and I'm not given one I won't
00:00:45.920 use it. And I've seen an increasing number of restaurants as of late that aren't
00:00:50.000 offering plastic straws, major chains. You've got companies like Marriott and
00:00:54.720 Starbucks that have decided they will company-wide globally phase out straws
00:00:59.360 over the next few years. This is to me an example of the free market at work.
00:01:03.520 There's a push within society within the consumer base that says we don't need
00:01:07.840 plastic straws and we don't like the fact that they're contributing to ocean
00:01:12.240 plastic. So therefore we want companies to withhold these straws unless someone
00:01:18.880 requests them or to not offer them at all. And I think this is the greatest way for
00:01:23.360 things to work. When you look at cities like Vancouver that are trying to do a
00:01:26.480 plastic straw ban or states like California or European countries or any
00:01:31.440 number of city councils that we know are going to be going down this road in the
00:01:34.400 next year, I say why are you better able to do
00:01:38.400 what the market is already doing and doing more effectively?
00:01:41.760 See this is one of the biggest failings of Canadian society and western society
00:01:45.600 more broadly. Because we think something's bad, we think government has to be the
00:01:49.840 arbiter of that. Government does not lead, government follows, government responds
00:01:54.640 when there is a sentiment already brewing in society which means
00:01:58.000 that if the war on straws is in fact alive and well,
00:02:01.200 free market enterprise will actually meet that demand.
00:02:06.000 Now this is to say nothing of the fact that straws are getting a little bit of a
00:02:09.840 bad rap here. People in the disability community have raised concerns that
00:02:13.680 they need straws. You have other people that have pointed out statistics
00:02:17.200 such as the fact that pretty much all of the straws that end up in the ocean
00:02:21.440 and all plastic ending up in the ocean is actually coming from the developing
00:02:24.640 world. So despite those heartbreaking videos of turtles with straws stuck in
00:02:29.040 their nose, not getting a straw at Starbucks in
00:02:31.840 London, Ontario or Vancouver, BC or San Francisco, California
00:02:35.920 is not actually going to amount to a hill of difference.
00:02:38.960 But again we need to impress upon people the importance of companies
00:02:43.200 actually responding to consumer forces instead of making government the one
00:02:48.000 that is supposed to react and ban everything. The nanny state is alive and
00:02:52.000 well if we give it the power and the platform to be there.
00:02:56.240 Let's let the market decide and on straws it seems to be already working.
00:03:00.080 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lutton.