There are places that have started handing out the biodegradable cardboard straws. Other places have just gone to lids with the cutout.
The “reusable straw” thing is just dumb. Maybe, just maybe, women might carry one in their purse, but I can’t think of many dudes that will shove one in their pocket.
In Starbuck’s case many of their drinks just don’t “work” without a straw so they must feel particularly threatened by the ban.
I’ll all for protecting the environment and shit, but taking away my straws is going too fucking far. That shit might get me to vote Republican.
So was this straw thing actually proposed by the only republican in Seattle who knew that the libtards there would go for it, effectively killing the business of that evil Christmas hating Starbucks?
They’re not taking away your straws, you get to keep the One True Straw for all eternity!
This is the future that liberals want.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L8OS5WG/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I28H2AS4YDRSQP&colid=24LDMW1B2EQ4E
My wife got one of those straws from Starbucks last week. It wasn’t thick plastic. It was a compostable straw that stayed perfectly durable for over an hour and then started to disintegrate long after she was done using it.
Sounds like one of those corn straws.
I’ve used corn plastics before and they weren’t any different than regular plastics. They said they were more biodegradable but they never “started to disintegrate”. I wonder if they’ve gotten better.
Here, I found info:
Across Microsoft’s campuses we’ve had exclusively compostable forks / spoons / knives / to-go containers for 7-8 years now. There have been a few different generations of them.
The first were way too “soft” - you could literally chew into the fork itself without much effort, and spoons would melt if you let them sit in soup. But by the 2nd and 3rd iteration they work identically to plastic ware, and they’re great now. Hopefully they’re really as compostable as they claim!
Weird. The one I got was definitely not biodegradable and the barista clearly said “reusable” - twice, in fact, because I asked him what it was. I wonder if some Starbucks are making do with what they have before they get their cardboard/corn straws?
You could say that was… the last straw.
Recently I reached into my deep desk drawer spot for a plastic bag and found a pile of flakes. I dont remember seeing decomposing plastics in action until then.
That was skin.
:) 345
My daughter is majoring in environmental science, and the straw thing has always been a big issue with her.
Basically everyone reckons that since they are plastic, they can be recycled… and they can, it’s just polypropylene after all… BUT small pieces of plastic are typically sorted out of the system on their way through the conveyor belt (anything smaller than a fist falls through holes), and of course the last-ditch electromagnet won’t pull it out into the ferric metals bin, so it goes off to the landfill even if you carefully take your time and try and recycle it.
The real problem with straws is similar to the problem with plastic bags: they simply end up as pieces of pollution outside a landfill more than other plastic items. Most beach communities will tell you straight up that straws and plastic bottle caps are the two biggest offenders in terms of ocean refuse. They’re easy to lose, they blend in with the grass, they sink into the sand, whatever. Then they get into the ocean and degrade into the micro-pellets that can poison the sea life… assuming that some dumb sea turtle doesn’t think it’s a floating blade of grass and try and chow down on it.
For me the big issue with straws is just that they are useless waste. I personally don’t ever use a straw for anything that isn’t extremely viscous (like a milk shake), so practically any time I am issued one (at the drive-through, in my water glass at a resteraunt) it’s just… a waste since I take it out of the glass. Even when a resteraunt give you a straw in the little paper cover, they’re NOT going to re-use that thing if I leave it on the table; that would be unsanitary. So they chuck it, unused. So it’s oil that was taken out of the ground, refined, extruded, packaged, and transported (all using more petrochemicals) so that someone could throw it away without it doing a damned bit of good for anybody.
My daughter’s big crusade (and it is a true crusade for her, she’s very passionate about it) is not to ban straws, but to have the local resteraunts change their policies about issuing them. She just wants the wait staff to ASK the customers if they want straws or not rather than to issue them automatically. So far she’s been pretty successful, at least with the higher-end places in her college town.
I’m concerned about the plastic we can’t see, the microbeads being washed downstream into the oceanic food chain, and the new find, where 80% of all potable water on the planet contains plastic microfibres whose lifecycle is man made textiles > clothes > machine washing/drying > air > clouds > rain
I am a staunch supporter of rape victims and punishing rapists to the greatest extent possible, but we cannot void the rights of people accused of heinous crimes. The severity of a crime does not change whether someone committed it.