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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.
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'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.
I partially agree, the problem isn't the plastic straws, it is the lack of collection and recycling .
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The problem isn't plastic straws, the problem is plastic. Straws are just a really frigging easy place to start dealing with the problem.
Clearly, that post must have been the last straw for you.