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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 new straws will be bayou-degradable.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... 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.
Plastic straws? Taking up measurable landfill space? Contamination the oceans??
Most of the plastic in the oceans comes from a handful of Rivers in Asia. My guess is that it is manufacturing waste.
This is not a hard problem to solve, and it doesn't take stupid BS efforts like making a different kind of straw.
1. Implement, and actualize, heavy and escalating fines for littering.
2. Start negotiating a treaty that limits plastic discharge to oceans, similar to the existing open water treaties regarding contamination, with a comprehensive monitoring regime. Nations that fail to meet compliance goals should be fined and/or sanctioned.
Plastic straws take up a negligble amount of landfill space. If you want to reduce landfill usage, you need to start with the items that take up significant amount of space.
And if you want to reduce plastic contamination of the environment, you need to ban and monitor plastic emissions into the environment. Not shopping bags and straws in the first world only, but a global monitoring regime on ocean and sea discharge waterways with standardized sampling and metrics. Believe it or not, this would probably be cheaper than the faith-based remedies of reusable shopping bags and paper straws.
Charge $5 for the cup, don't charge for the soda, or charge a nominal amount. People will start bringing their own reusable cups or bottles very quickly.
Or (assuming they're not doing away with lids), design the lids like takeaway coffee lids -- tear out a portion to have a small "hole" for drinking.
It's pretty obvious that this is coming from the group of people who are hell-bent on restricting people's freedom of movement. How are people supposed to be able to move freely about the country if they can't eat and drink while driving?
I think it definitely needs to be start with a general plastic straw ban. Then you can have exceptions.
If you need a straw for accessible reasons, then you can request one. Heck, I know this is unpopular to say, but maybe if you really need a straw to drink for health reasons...maybe you carry a straw with you. That doesn't seem unreasonable in terms of personal responsibility. It's no different than any other health condition that requires you as a person to do something. Maybe you need to carry an Epi-Pen. Maybe you need a hearing aid. Maybe you need a wheel-chair.
If you plan to drink it slowly or on a very long road trip, then you can request one.
But for the 99.5% of people who use plastic straws over their 20 minute meal, a paper straw is fine.
I'm not an activist about almost anything (privacy, I'm looking at you!) but this is a thing I can get behind. I've been on dives and collected trash. I do a dive every year specifically to collect trash. The ocean is a pretty amazing place and the amount of litter in certain places is depressing (not hyperbole). I picked up a variety pack of silicone and metal straws and we keep those in the car. I get weird looks and have to explain it a couple times that I don't want a straw but it's not really a big deal. If I'm seated at a place, I use my mouth hole.
Paper is great and biodegrades. Washing is simple too though. It's not like anyone proposing taking something away without an alternative (like bags). We can do a pretty good job with recycling paper products too, so we don't even have to slash a bunch of forests to get there. All in all, this should be a non story.
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.
Paper straws are horrible after they get wet.
I get "plastic" cups that are really made out of some kind of corn fiber. They work great even after several refills. Why can't straws be made of the same material?
Clearly, that post must have been the last straw for you.