Do people actually drink hot coffee through a straw?
This weekend my family went down to Wilmington NC to visit my daughter, who is doing an internship at the nearby Wrightsville Beach. Because we asked my daughter to come up with suggestions as to how to spend our time, the whole weekend was filled with the metaphorical hugging of trees.
We spent our first night cleaning up a small spot of wetlands next to a moderately busy road. So rather than drinking a beer and watching the sunset, I was wearing heavy gloves and constantly bending over to pick up fucking cigarette butts… something that I am apparently too old to do for even a short period of time. My main takeaway from the evening is that the litter density was pretty close to what was cited by the California study in the Reason articles above: mostly cigarette butts, then drinking straws, then cups, then random crap.
Later that night we watched a documentary largely produced (and mostly starring) the singer Jack Johnson called “Smog of the Sea”. Catchy tunes; decent cinematography; a bit too preachy for my tastes; it did nicely make the case for preventing plastics from being dumped in the waterways.
The next day we visited the local sea turtle hospital where, again, the big talking point was the fact that many of their patients were there because the turtles’ stomachs were filled with bits of plastic that they cannot digest or pass; they then can’t eat enough to sustain themselves, get weak and end up washing ashore. Turns out that turtles are dumb as stumps - when your survival strategy is “I’m too big and rigid to eat”, you don’t need to develop a massive brain. The down-side to that is that they’re not bright enough to stop chewing the plastic straw that they mistook for sea-grass.
But back to the subject at hand – Wilmington seems to have done the banning of plastic bags and straws through community action rather than laws. North Carolina (as Armando will tell you) is a bit odd – several places (like the Outer Banks) banned plastic bags, and then the State made those bans illegal because… a clean environment is against God or something. So Wilmington pretty much did the “polite shaming” thing: the “hip” grocery stores and convenience marts just sort of all agreed to stop providing plastic bags because their customers didn’t want the litter back. Those that do provide them quickly found that a majority of their customers would ask for the paper alternatives, so it wasn’t really cost-effective to provide the plastic anyway.
Likewise, pretty much all the restaurants in Wilmington stopped providing plastic straws automatically – the servers will sometimes ask if you want them, and if you say “yes” they’ll provide them, but if you say “no” you get a sunny smile and warm “thank you!” My daughter and her environmental clubs are partially responsible for the latter change.
When I was a young lad, I thought the coffee stirrers was a mini “coffee straw”. So maybe?
i would think most straws would be used for the cold coffee drinks sold by Starbucks. I can’t imagine drinking hot coffee thru a straw.
Jesus Christ.
Clearly they should be wrapping plastic straws in paper instead.