‘Biodegradable’ drinking straws contain PFAS | Hacker News Reader

‘Biodegradable’ drinking straws contain PFAS

cen.acs.org

135 pointshammock107 comments

So, what I don't understand is chemists and industrial engineers. There are highly educated humans somewhere who sat around and said, "you know what would sell well right now is straws that looked like paper but were actually durable in water," and one of them said "oh just coat that stuff in PFAS, it'll work!"

Not only that but the product then got all the way through all the other humans required to reach industrial scale manufacture and distribution.

So a large number of people decided that it was worth exposing other humans to known toxic chemicals[1] to sell a product.

Do the people involved just not care as long as they get paid? Do they not believe that chemicals do any harm? Do they think the harm is so tiny that it doesn't matter, and the people who are concerned are idiots? I genuinely don't understand it.

1: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html

PFAS are ubiquitous in paper food containers too. One weird trick to make paper waterproof: coat it in fluoridated chemicals!

https://toxicfreefuture.org/new-study-finds-pfas-chemicals-i...

From the link:

> Four out of the five analyzed takeout containers from Whole Foods Market were likely treated with PFAS.

So for sanity, when they sell 'baking tray paper' I see in the composition that it is silicone coated. Is that baking paper PFAS/PFOAS contaminated at all?

If not, then why on earth would you not just coat all paper with silicone for waterproofing, it cannot be more expensive that PFAS based waterproofing, right?

If these chemicals aren't banned in the US, then people are going to use that as evidence that they're not harmful at the amounts you'd get from using a straw. I'd point more to the government if we're trying to assign blame.

Nobody knows how toxic they are

That's such a cop out argument it's actually disheartening to hear it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

PFAS are so ubiquitous here it’s hard to even get a clean background for a blank.

And I wasn’t arguing anything, other than we don’t know the level that they become dangerous at. The preferred contamination level would be no contamination, but that ship sailed long ago.

Environmental testing is something I’ve been involved in for 15+ years. Endocrine disrupting persistent organic pollutants are a way bigger threat to public health than climate change.

Just be glad it wasn't lead

this time around

Why is the world so obsesed with plastic straws? Are those really the most polluting item right now? Why do we not focus rather on plastic bottles for eg. soft drinks, which are the only option in many markets? Or useless double and triple packaging? Even the term "carbon footprint" is used to shift focus from "big oil" to "average joe" [0]... how many years of plastic straws is equivalent to eg. deepwater horizon oil spil?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

Virtue signaling only works if people can see you do it. So if you're a restaurant, how many noticeable things can you do to demonstrate you care about the environment without actually changing your business model, profits, or unit economics?

togo packaging:

Plastic Bags,

Plastic(-lined) Cups/Lids,

Plastic containers,

But uhh, also, we should totally charge companies the cost to clean up the waste they produce.

Or a soda... in a plastic bottle... with a plastic label... wrapped in a plastic "sixpack"... on a plastic pallet, wrapped in plastic wrap.

Isn't the point of plastic pallets that they're more durable/reusable than wood?

Well yeah, but even if they're 5 times as durable, dumping 5 wooden pallets into a forrest is a lot better than one plastic one.

Plus all the plastic inside plastic inside plastic coverd in plastic carried on that pallet.

What is the value of projecting our collective oil dependence onto the companies that provide it? Pretending it's somehow oil companies fault while not making any personal changes is delusional.

I think focusing on straws is stupid, but so is pretending that but for oil companies we'd have no problems

Our personal choice is to use fuel, because we need energy, BPs personal (well, corporate) incompetence was at fault for the totally useless (nothing good, no heat, no transport, no plastics, just damage to our environment) oil spill in 2010.

So, we, a collective of millions and billions of people are being put on pedestal for using straws (if we do, many of us don't), while one incompetent company (people there) offsets the efforts of literally millions of people.

I'm not trying to excuse oil spills, but I think it's dodging responsibility to base our whole lives around drilling a dirty fuel out of the ground and then blame only the company when these happen. Using oil entails some risk that it's going to contaminate the environment, and we are collectively responsible.

Responsibly isn't equally weighted. Regulatory capture and decades of insidious 'education' and advertising also tip the scales.

The solution is collective though. Externalities cannot be ignored forever, even if the short sighted grifters die before the world is an uninhabitable waste.

Sub out “oil” for “tobacco” in your comment for a moment.

And we don't even need straws. You can just drink from the rim of the glass at a sit down restaurant like you do at home, or a to-go drink could have a sippy lid like a coffee.

You don't need plastic bottles either... you can use glass ones... and a lot more plastic bottles are produced and thrown away than plastic straws... and they usually come with plastic labels, wrapped in plastic 6packs, on a pallet, wrapped in plastic wrap.

You could easily replace that with a glass bottle in a reusable plastic crate.

I've seen quite a few videos of flood waters carrying waste down some random (usually asian or african) rivers... didn't see a lot of straws there.

Milk shakes, boba tea, thick smoothies, and similar drinks are all awful to consume without a straw. If an establishment insists on me using a paper straw with them, I'd rather just not order them.

"Awful"? Isn't that a bit of an overstatement? Also, I get a milkshake maybe two times a year. Doesn't warrant every other drink normalizing on straw usage.

I can't be the only person that just does this when the drink comes with a paper straw.

Unfortunately, as soon as they hand out the straw, it doesn't matter if you use it or not, it's going into the trash. So often the wrapper gets wet while it's sitting on the table and they just discard every paper product left on the table.

I think they were just seen as low hanging fruit since you can usually do without straws entirely but then eliminating plastic straws got hijacked as a way of selling alternate straws.

So basically it's like most other attempts to make stuff more environmentally friendly in the US.

ESG browny points is probably a key component of that. It's dangerous to let politicians decide what is considered green. There has to be a quantifiably measurable way the impact on the environment from any single product is judged. If there isn't a clear way to do so then we should refrain from blanket banning a product.

Fun fact Tesla has the lowest ESG rating out of all of the auto companies listed https://www.indexologyblog.com/2021/05/25/update-teslas-stan....

It's interesting to see Tesla a company that spearheaded EVs ranked lower than Exxon, GM and Nike on "Environmental Social Governance".

Nike which is one of the top ESG rated companies makes luxury shoes in sweatshops by people with almost no rights as close to slavery as one can get. Telsa on the other hand pays people fair wages and does not use forced labor is less environmentally and socially responsible.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/17/your-favo...

Because they are so utterly pointless. Plastic straws are a symbol of an almost entirely unnecessary use of plastic.

And that symbolism — as seems to be the case with just about anything with any semblance of symbolic value nowadays — has become politicized and polarized, which in turn has further elevated straws' symbolic value for both sides (there's a "straw man argument" pun here somewhere).

The right is obsessed with how the left is trying to control even the most trivial aspects of everyone's lives, and the left is obsessed with how the right would rather selfishly spew plastic into the environment than to give up even the most trivial conveniences.

This feels like a tension that can exist only in the Twitterverse. I really can't imagine pre-internet society actually having strong opinions about any of this.

So is double packaging (eg plastic bottles wrapped in plastic to form a "sixpack", on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic, so plastic within a plastic within a plastic, prepackaged bananas, double packed cosmetics, toothpaste in plastic covered cardboard boxes, etc.), and it contributes a lot more (by weight of trash) than straws.

But we have basically zero impact on the first, and drinks in a plastic bottle are sometimes literally the only choice, and no politician dares mention cocacola and walmart, but we all get blamed for straws that we maybe use twice a year... in mcdonalds.

Straws are essential for drinks served with ice, in particular cocktails.

you can drink through a cocktail straw if you really want to, but they are intended for you to stir the drink to your preferred level of dilution. this is more like the least essential use of a straw. a small wooden stick would work just as well.

Definitely not "essential" for cold drinks

Since the ice cubes float on top, your nose and upper lip tends to bump into them otherwise. Maybe there’s some clever drinking glass design that could avoid that.

Nose? It's perfectly possible to drink anything without getting your nose wet.

large ice cubes that are actually square solve this problem pretty well.

Huh, not in my experience.

reusable glass / metal (or even durable plastic) are available. I use them at home all the time. I wouldn't mind them at a restaurant either, I mean we use glasses and dishes that are washed with every use when eating our why not straws?

A drink is far less likely to spill if you use a straw.

Yet somehow many of us manage to go about life without ever using a straw or spilling anything.

It's really not that hard...

Being able to be less careful, or be a less coordinated person, and yet not spill, has utility.

Not at the expense of manufacturing, consuming and disposing of plastic (or PFAS...)

I was responding to zukzuk's argument, that straws have no utility.

It is a small thing, though I do get annoyed when going to a restaurant that they just automatically throw down straws for every drink. They don’t even make them something you can request, if needed. The assumption is that they are wanted. Once they are on the table they won’t take them back. I’ve tried to express this to the servers, but they just look at me like I’m a weirdo and then next time I go there they do the same thing again.

We probably don’t need bans. Just get the restaurants to only provide straws upon request.

> Why is the world so obsesed with plastic straws?

The world? It's just the media and virtue signalers who are obsessed. Far less than 1% of the population. Sadly, these people control the megaphone and makes it seem like "the world" is concerned.

> [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

Hilarious. The virtue signalers' manifesto - "Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception."

> "Citizens see themselves as part of civil society, as actors in the political system"

Actors. Don't they just follow direction? Sounds about right.

> "I have 100% clean electricity at home because people organized to make that option and the solar and wind power behind it available."

And I can guarantee that her "clean electricity" mostly comes from burning biomass, natural gas, etc. I'd bet all my upvotes on that.

> I do some of my errands by bicycle because the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition worked for decades to put bicycle paths across the city and otherwise make it safer to get about on two wheels.

Just some? Why not all of the errands?

> That vegan options are available at a lot of fast-food chains is because enough consumers have created a profitable market for them.

Vegan options exist because wealthy industrialists want to feed people processed slop instead of actual food. The people aren't hankering for some in/anti-human diet. Billionaire industrialists who want to make more money by creating a new industry paid PR firms to push veganism to dull minds. Just like tobacco companies supported "women's equality" a century ago to breakdown the taboo on female smoking and sell more cigarettes.

The author of that article is why we have paper straws. The problem with virtue signaling is that the ends are the pseudo-virtue, not actual good. A virtue signalers feels good because he gave a bum $100, even though the bum used the $100 to buy drugs and kill himself.

The author of the article virtue signals even though she produces more carbon pollution than 99.99999999999999999% of the human population. Think about that.

From the article:

>University of Florida toxicologist John Bowden was fascinated by the durability of today’s paper straws compared with older ones that would break down quickly in a drink, and he wanted to know whether the new straws’ water resistance might come from PFAS.

>An analysis detected PFAS “forever chemicals” in 36 out of 38 brands of plant-based straws tested.

Populism doesn't work. People like to hear easy answers that making some first order change couldn't possibly affect anything else, and end up supporting leaders that promise these poorly thought out changes. It's true for all political stripes. This article is as good an example as any, if a minor one. People need to be more critical of simple "mandates" that they think will fix anything.

> Populism doesn't work

By definition, if the way to recognize it is that it sells "silver bullets" (pseudosolutions).

I got a metal straw which is nice.

The main downside is you have to rinse it, and it comes with a brush to clean which I sometimes use. However I haven’t ever actually noticed it getting dirty. I drink water / tea flavored with stevia so it might not be as clean if you drink something else.

We have plastic ones and I prefer the texture of those to metal. Reusable I mean obviously, not throwaway. Had them for years, we use them maybe three times a month (mainly after getting takeaway and requesting the drink without those awful paper straws) so probably that contributes to longevity. I haven't noticed it getting dirty either but we just run it through the dishwasher like other cutlery.

Takeaway: plastic isn't bad, just don't waste it, like every other resource from planet A...

Other cutlery only needs washing on the outside. How do you ensure the straw is also cleaned on the inside?

The dishwasher seems to do a good job at getting water everywhere, also with other irregularly-shaped objects. I never actually looked up whether anyone used some scientific method to measure the cleanliness of dishwasher-run straws, but based on that it doesn't seem dirty in the slightest also after years of use, it seems to work well enough. (And my keyboard would be higher on the priority list of things to improve thorough cleaning of, but that's probably just me.)

Edit: what about in between a fork's teeth? (Hope they're also called teeth in english, correct me if not, in that case I mean the individual prongs.) That seems somewhat similar if less elongated

Those metal straws scare me. Every time I see one, I imagine tripping or bumping into something with one in my mouth

Accidents are not common. But they're not impossible either. [1]

1: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/woman-dies-after-accidentally...

Let's get rid of straws and normalize sippy cups.

That's basically what a starbucks cup is

Genuinely curious, if it's just water or flavored tea, why do you need straws?

For thick milkshakes or smoothies and such I can possibly imagine, but I have never figured out why people use so many straws.

I've seen people drink sodas out of a can using a straw and never understood the reason.

>but I have never figured out why people use so many straws Lipstick, Teeth sensitivity, headgear getting in the way, in conjunction with a lid it helps keep the environment out of the cup, maintaining temperature, easier for children/those with motor co-ordination issues to drink. there are LOTS of reasons for it.

Quite often though, its done just because its the default option. economy of scale takes hold here...

these things almost always have plastic lids anyway, so why not build a straw like spout into the lid...

To be honest, I use it because I'm lazy and it makes it so I can drink without holding the cup.

They definitely need a brushing after smoothies, but apart from that I'm not the most worried about bacterial growth inside them. They're not used for cooking, so as long as there isn't significant biomass inside there it doesn't feel too dangerous - bacteria multiplying in food and manufacturing toxins is the thing I'm really careful about. I imagine people routinely get similar exposure to bacteria from many other sources they don't even think about.

I have tried to convince people to not purchase stuff that has non-stick properties and / or water resistance in clothes etc.

Unfortunately, people close to me don't care and now this. I have also wondered why the new straws are so much better than the old paper ones. This makes me so incredibly sad since I really try to avoid to purchase stuff with these kinds of chemicals in them among others.

Just like one hour ago I was stopping at a fast food restaurant and ate, they had these kinds of straws which I imagine contains PFAS.

Fuck. Even if you really try it seems you can't avoid it.

It seems nearly impossible to avoid these harmful chemicals nowadays, they are everywhere. It's very depressing...

Just thinking: Is it possible the (probably fast-growth trees) used in the production of these straws are the actual source of the PFAS chemicals? I mean, they are "forever chemicals".

that's a username you have there...

Wouldn't a light coating of oil or wax be enough to keep the straw intact for an hour while sipping a beverage?

They used to be waxed back in the day. They worked, but if you were careless they would collapse. I think it's a reasonable trade off, but many people hated them.

Wax defeats the entire purpose of making a paper straw. Oil would not stay in the paper.

Just use plastic, it's better for the environment anyway.

My favorite part is when the paper straws come individually wrapped in plastic.

Something like boiled linseed oil will cure solid enough to stay in the paper, though I expect the required curing times on that is prohibitive.

Why does wax defeat the purpose of a paper straw? Aren't there some biodegradable waxes?

Why are you using a paper straw in the first place? If it's so it vanishes if you litter it - a wax covered straw is not going to do that.

It will eventually biodegrade, but it's going to take a long time.

If you are worried about straws getting stuck in animals, a wax covered one will also get stuck.

The entire straw ban is the height of stupidity. Just start a "don't litter, throw it away" campaign and you'll solve 95% of the problem, without creating new ones.

The main concern is ending up in the ocean, I guess. Not sure that's supported by numbers though.

The number of straws that ended up in the ocean from countries that have banned it is indistinguishable from zero.

If people actually cared (as opposed to wanting to look like the care) they would help start sanitation services (trash collection, and proper landfills) in Asia.

Even these new, who-knows-what additive laced straws start falling apart after 5-10 minutes.

But why? What is the engineering challenge in a cheap tube that needs to survive modest collapsing pressure and contact with cold water for an hour?

Maybe wax-coated paper, or a thin foil coating on paper, or some other kind of plant matter pounded into the right shape, or something.

There is no challenge, we've invented plastic straws. The challenge is to use something that the people who are worked up about straws do not identify as plastic.

Wax is a hydrocarbon that I believe comes from oil. I don't know how it breaks down on the environment but it's not immediately clear it's actually "better" than plastic, other than maybe not being seen once it falls apart.

the waxes we should be using are the ones from plants and animals, and they degrade like any other organic compounds. paraffin wax is the petroleum derived ones - and yeah - we should try to ban those.

You do realise this article is in fact describing exactly what that who-knows-what is, right?

I don't believe it was an exhaustive list of ingredients, only one set of concerning ingredients common to most.

i think that's implied in the article, where the researcher wonders why the new straws last longer than what i think you're asking.

Great. Ordered some lunch from a kind of hippie dippie place today and they gave me one of those straws. Oh well, part of a balanced microplastics diet I guess. I'm sure my years of drinking bottled water has been far worse for me.

Why do we insist on composting or burying so much trash? Let's just burn plastic in the same high-temperature facilities common across Scandinavia. Plastic and packaging use is still only 5% of the oil going up in smoke in engines.

How is incinerating supposed to be better than burying (not composting)?

Edit: Yes, I obviously understand there's an energy release, but is finding yet another way to burn more oil and get carbon into the atmosphere really what we need at this point in time?

First, there's a lot of energy in the chemical bonds, so depending on how you're incinerating it, you can get some useful energy out of it. The Hefty Energy Bag program does this - they did a lifecycle analysis on various plastic "end of life" paths from "landfill" to "advanced plastic thermal decomposition" to "burn it in a cement kiln" - with the last one working by far, the best. At last per their analysis. If you're offsetting coal use, which is what would otherwise be burned in the cement kiln (I believe natural gas and hydrogen don't emit enough radiation because of their lack of carbons to be as useful), great.

Second, done properly (insert a lot of observations about combustion temperature here), it ends up as nothing worse than CO2, nitrogen, water, etc at the exhaust stack. Given how horribly bioreactive plastics tend to be, and their tendency to erode into microplastics given half an opportunity, this is roughly the "Flare the methane to CO2 because it's far less bad" end of plastic compared to burying it, which, at some point in the future, stands good odds of being uncovered - perhaps by a group that doesn't understand just how nasty the stuff really is.

If your takeaway is "There don't sound like any great ways to deal with plastic," good. Because there aren't.

It prevents the plastics from entering the environment.

Plastics are a material with no effective bio-degredation process so we should destroy it rather than return it to the environment. Otherwise we're just delaying cleanup.

Incineration destroys these unnatural carbon chains and returns the materials to a state usable by natural life.

It's WAY WAY better! The plastic does not accumulate, and you get to use the energy embodied in the plastic, instead of pumping more oil out of the ground.

It's one of those rare win/win things, with no downsides. Of course people won't do it because you have to "recycle" it - which is worse for the environment, but it's an emotional thing, so don't expect people to listen to reason.

+1. Burying plastic (in a place where it's safe to do so) would be a form of carbon sequestration so should be considered a positive.

Carbon sequestration isn't necessarily an end goal that is necessarily worth extra effort, even if this comment made sense beyond that.

Under what logic does "Remove oil from the ground, process it into something, and then bury that something" count as actual carbon sequestration? You've not removed anything from the atmosphere in any plastic cycle I'm aware of, and you've used an awful lot of energy in the process of going from "ground" to "ground." You'd have been better off, in every possible way, just leaving that oil in the ground in the first place.

Except for the important way, which is corporate profits.

I agree but the same logic applies to "remove oil from the ground, burn it, capture the carbon from the smoke using expensive equipment, then bury the smoke" which describes all major carbon sequestration plans if I understand correctly.

I think that both forms of sequestration (sequestering gaseous CO2 (or a solid-stabilized form of it) vs sequestering plastic) are worse than not drilling the oil to begin with, but better than letting the CO2 end up in the air.

Climeworks is doing some work with atmospheric capture and sequestration in basalt via underground water injection (I believe they site with hydroelectric plants which gives them the reinjection well infrastructure mostly for free).

You can do the same thing by grinding basalt and spreading it on fields, which... given that I live on a pile of basalt, might be useful eventually. I keep collecting the stuff to make a greenhouse with, though.

It may be better than leaving it in the air, but given all the other biological activity of plastic, I'd really rather we not use the stuff in the first place at this point.

For one, you can generate electricity. It does produce CO2, however, whereas burying sequesters the carbon.

You get energy out of it instead of wasting that energy.

Plastics are packed with energy. There are already bacteria and fungi taking advantage of that energy source. I think we’ll soon see micro-plastics being “taken care of” by a new ecosystem.

The bacteria will spread like wildfire: the environment is lush with micro-plastics. Things will evolve from there. Perhaps in the future, natural bacterial gene transfers will create plastic-consuming termites.

https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Plastic-eating_Bact...

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/bugs-are-evolving-to-eat-plasti...

Oh, heck, turns out there are plastic-eating caterpillars!

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/the-very...

In the dystopian future, we no longer have plastics because it just gets eaten, as useful as building homes from gingerbread.

People are obsessed with "recycling" plastic, instead of doing the right thing and burning it for energy. It's some kind of emotional "I'm not wasting it" thing.

scientists recently found microplastics in rain and human blood… so let’s not burn them unless the exhaust is heavily filtered

Is this only in the US or in the EU as well?

The other day I was really happy to see Pans&Co use all paper based packaging, including somewhat paper straws. Now thinking that those straws could contain these chemicals scares me a bit. Although the staws I used could only be used once or twice, they get all mushy after a bit (which is a good sign, hopefully).

Demand for straws in the EU is nowhere near the US. I'd wager the latter represents most of global straw consumption

Some quick googling shows Europe consuming ~24 billion straws / year⁰ while the US consumes anywhere between 64–142 billion¹

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/989916/consumption-of-pl...

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-b... (see Fact Check box half way through article)

Are you a bot?

It seems like you just picked up some keywords from my comment and gave out some tagently related facts but completely unrelated to my question.

How many times do we need to learn that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? Anything new that we consume or use as a tool to consume food with should be regarded as highly safe. Skeptical empiricism is the best way to achieve that.

What would be the effects of a blanket ban on single-use plastic food packaging

You can buy stainless steel straws. Reusable too.

Those aren’t very pleasant in iced drinks.

seems to good to be true... But really I worry where else these will appear if we start looking.

Its worth it - turtles can snort PFAS paper straws, no problem :)

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