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McDonald's To Test Plastic-Straw Alternatives in US Later This Year (usatoday.com)
Under pressure by environmentalists, McDonald's has announced that it will start testing alternatives to plastic straws at select locations in the U.S. later this year. From a report: The burger giant also announced that it will adopt more eco-friendly paper straws across all its 1,361 restaurants in the United Kingdom and Ireland, a region where the company started testing the alternative to plastic straws earlier this year. The regional rollout begins in September. Single-use straws are the scourge of the packaging-waste world because they don't easily biodegrade and aren't really necessary for most people when it comes to gulping a soft drink. The activist group SumOfUs estimates that every day, McDonald's alone dispenses millions of plastic straws that customers soon discard, leaving them to litter beaches or clog waterways and fill trash dumps.
... the company started testing the alternative to plastic straws earlier this year
Some of us Slashdoters are old enough to remember a time before plastic straws. Yep, such a thing existed. Guess what we used, youngsters? That's right. Paper straws.
So you might say that plastic straws are the alternative to paper straws, and not the other way around.
When I was a young whippersnapper, we would drink drinks by pressing the rim of the glass to our lips and tipping it up at an angle calculated to bring the liquid just in contact with the aforementioned lips, between which we would then slurp the aforementioned liquid.
I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.
// This is not a sig.
Almost everywhere. Straws are typically made of polystyrene (#6 plastic if you go by the numbers). Very few places will accept PS for recycling.
That false statistic was based on a phone survey conducted by a nine year old kid.
Do you guys care about reality at all? It doesn’t seem like you do.