I'm a little confused by the wording of "ban the sale of plastic straws and other single use products". Would single use paper/other material straws be allowable? Are plastic straws that are meant to be washed and reused being banned too?
I don't see this being enforceable or practical, cardboard straws end up going all mushy after a short time, there is a reason we switched to using plastic.
Also banning plastics in general is stupid, just enforce the switch to biodegradeable or easy to recycle plastics, it isn't fucking rocket science.
Just use metal straws instead
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/912l4SVUM1L._SL1500_.jpg
You would never be able to trust a restaurant to keep these sanitized.
Or just... don't use straws?
Hang on. Isn't toilet paper single use?
I hope you have plenty of socks.
its weird they never came put with a wax paper straw tbh, the cup, the lid, and the straw could all probably be made from paper products, the lid is gonna be tougher but possible
Fast food restaurants should form a reusable cup/straw incentive where if you bring a cup you bought from the organization, you get free/discounted refills so they can buy less cups and straws. It would be a group of different companies so your cup works at many locations and you only need one. The cups could be a selection of styled hard plastic cups like the Tumblers that are popular in the states, with a metal straw and little cleaning brush.
Wax paper straws have been around forever, they are not great though, particularly with hot drinks they end up turning to mush.
Surely there's a better option than just banning them? I mean I know a guy with muscle atrophy and the only way he can drink anything on his own is with a straw. An extreme example but still. What about requiring service providers to charge for them, like they did for plastic bags?
I know coffee chops like Costa do that already so it shouldn't be too difficult to do.
Not sure whether there's much truth to it, but there's the belief that using straws with fizzy drinks helps prevent tooth decay. They're also useful for people with sensitive teeth and people who have braces
Just move to plant based alternatives or recycled stuff such as:
https://www.vegware.com/
Don't like it when fizzy drinks hit my teeth, even if they don't completely protect your teeth it makes it feel like it does.
I fully understand this. I worked in a McDonald's and the straws and shit come in packs of ten thousand plus at a time. Just the fact that many have been manufactured for one store churned my stomach. When I went down the rabbithole and realized there's hundreds, if not thousands, of McDonalds outlets across the world, I realized just how absolutely monolithically vast the wastage of material in our society really is, and just how utterly unfathomable the damage we're doing to the planet is.
straws don't use that much plastic lol, they're literally elongated holes. it'd be better if these stores offered a (monitored) place to chunk your plastic
No joke I had a moment like Tuco in the graveyard in Good/Bad/Ugly when I walked into the McDonald's stockroom for the first time. I literally swivelled on the spot for a solid minute just taking in the sheer volume of fucking plastic shite in this one drive-thru storeroom. The sheer enormity of it across the globe struck me and I just stood there like a termite at Versailles, utterly in awe of the terror I was privvy to.
They don't, however there are so many of them that the amount adds up.
The reason the 'plastic problem' is so huge is because we have billions of things that 'don't use that much plastic' adding up to 'a whole absolute assload of plastic'
This place where no airborne dirt or bugs exist sounds dreamy, you should show pictures.
Oh come on, how hard is it to drink without a straw
Never thought so many people would be attached to straws
Imo straws are only necessary in cold to-go beverages that are not in cans or bottles, or for people who need them for reasons (sensitive teeth, medical condition making drinking difficult, etc)
It isn't, unless you're on the road, or disabled or frequently in an activity where straws conserve fluid or to prevent things attracted to metric shit-tons of corn syrup or sugar from flying into your drink getting wet and pissed and injecting venom directly into your mouth/tongue.
What's the point of drinking fizzy drinks through a straw if all the sugary taste doesn't even reach your taste buds?
lemme tell you 'bout plastic waste and break down my thought process, for real.
in the summer of 2015 i worked three weeks at a McDonald's. i was sacked at the end of the third week because i refused to work in dangerous conditions, and in my short time there i realized just how fucking awful the western mentality really is in regards to "disposable" items.
it's a tuesday and i'm working the till (register), we run dry on cups and cup lids and so i, the greenhorn gal, get told to go out back to get some since i've never been out back before. i shrug and go "sure" thinking it'll just be a store cupboard like no other. nothing different. nothing special. that's how all fucking great journeys start, right? all odysseys start with a simple objective. We-He-Hell anyway, i get out there and i find the box of cup lids and i crack it open. but then something kinda sticks with me. see i like reading box labels. most people i know all across retail always just crack the box open to take a look. but me, i pride myself on looking at box labels cos i'm a stupid fucking idiot.
and i look at this box label and it says "MEDIUM CUP LIDS - 2000PC" and i'm like "what, that can't be fucking right". now i've always had issues with number scales, but i know that More Than Three Digit Mean Big Thing, and that's how i've always functioned. so when you get to three zeroes i'm more than a little fuckin' perturbed by the scale of what we're handling. and i look in the box and, shit i can't count that many, but i can definitely see like a thousand fucking lids in there. I turn to my left. "MCFLURRY SPOON - 10,000PC". to the right. "DRINK STIRRERS - 25,000PC", up. "COFFEE LID, 2,500PC", down, left, right, up, anywhere I look I just see a fucking cardboard tomb. this fucking REAM of goddamn fucking plastic and paper shit that has just been shovelled into boxes. thousands and thousands of these little fucking items, that every day, you and i just use and throw away because, shit, no big deal, right? i mean i never really think about it i'm just like "eh, it's a straw"
but now i'm spinning around like Tuco in the graveyard at the end of Good, Bad, and Ugly like i'm fucking looking for Arch Stanton and his two hundred grand of Confederate gold. fucking swirling around and around looking at all these boxes in just abject horror of what i'm seeing. cos what's going through my head isn't the simple, sane "wow, that's a lot of shit." or "jeez that's a lot of crap", it's "holy fuck, how big does this get?", cos across the globe McDonalds runs 36,899 outlets as of 2018. from Minsk to Michigan they cover the fucking planet like saturation bombs. there are hundreds of thousands of employees, billions of customers, and hundreds of items at McDonald's. people go in and out of there every day, some several times a day. it is an interglobal empire. and just one of several identical fast food behemoths.
so that's what's going through my head. this one shitty drive-thru i'm working at, right near my house, has all this. hundreds of thousands of little plastic pieces of shit that are going to be used for one meal, maybe not even a meal, maybe just a drink or a snack, then tossed in the garbage to be cast into a landfill where it'll sit until there's nothing left on Earth but fucking skeletons. or worse, it'll get blown out to sea and meet its friends in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which, for the record, is bigger than my entire town.
were it just the store i work at it would be bad enough.
but there are 36,899. across the globe. in Bogota. in Hong Kong. in Cairo. in Tel Aviv.
thirty six thousand eight hundred and ninety nine. and all of them are receiving hundreds of the same, identical boxes. the same boxes that contain hundreds of thousands of fucking plastic crap that might not even all get used. some of it might just get thrown in the trash. maybe they'll change the dimensions of some of them and the old stock will have to be trashed. maybe the store will close down. maybe it'll just split on a delivery, become unsanitary, and have to be disposed of. maybe it will never see its purpose of bringing food and drink to someone's mouth.
and that's why i'm fucking horrified by this shit, because the sheer enormity of it is unbelievable. it's fucking monolithic. i feel like Tuco in the graveyard, the lust for gold being overcome by the sheer amount of horror at just how many confederate graves i'm staring across.
only instead of graves, they're mcflurry spoons.
addiction/behavioral reinforcement
Apparently McDonald's serves 68 million people a day, most of which probably had a drink lid. Now factor in Wendy's, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell, etc. There's a torrent of waste oozing off the shores.
Then you have independent stores, supermarkets, cafes, coffee shop chains, private offices providing styrofoam and plastic cups, doctor's offices providing water coolers.. etc etc. It's just a fucking cacophony of plastic.
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