Paper straws are often touted as alternative to plastic, but they're toxic
xatakaon.com
xatakaon.com
While I think it’s reasonable to actively try and reduce straw usage, I’ve found many people who would reasonably continue to use them. -shrug-
I can see if you are elderly or disabled or require extra assistance, then a straw would be essential, but for 99% of able-bodied adults? Why do restaurants even bother?
- You can place the cup on a table and continue to drink it without taking your hands off your burger, or getting salty fingers on your cup
- Tipping a drink up makes you take your eyes off what's in front of you, so it's more awkward to do while walking
- Tipping a drink up makes you take your eyes off what's in front of you, so it's more dangerous while driving. Plus it can bash the bottom of the cup into your roof or sun visor if it's down.
- My McDonald's Coke Zero tastes better through a plastic straw. I don't know the science behind it but it enters your mouth differently and I like it more than sipping from a cup or a can
Drinking it out of the can is drinking Coke as Coke intended; however, my theory is that pouring canned over ice may dilute it, but it cools it and the CO2 evaporation rate down lower than the mixed McDonald's coke, making the McD's coke tastes bubblier and fresher. Also, McD's water filtration system versus the frozen gravy cubes you're using.
Straws also are more sanitary because I don't want to put my lip on the edge of a cup that could be contaminated.
Cup contamination? Do you also refuse to use forks and spoons as they could be contaminated?
Drinking out of a straw (usually a black one) looks more mature than slapping a plastic top on it like at Blaze Pizza or Starbucks.
I guess whether it looks more mature is truly a cultural thing. In most of the world, straws are strongly associated with children. But maybe in your society, they're not. You may argue that the plastic top cups look like "sippy cups" that make you think of children, but they're fundamentally different items, unlike straws.
Note I am in the US hence the restaurants mentioned.
At least in Europe and East-Asia, it's unheard of for any nice restaurant to have straws except for kids. And it's not like women there don't wear lipstick. The image of going for a candlelight dinner and drinking from a straw is something straight out of a comedy sketch to me. I guess if it's a certain kind of cocktail, but that's the only exception. And even then the majority of cocktails won't have straws.
I truly have not been this confused by any HN thread and I've been reading this place almost daily for years.
Now fine dining is on the extreme end, but a nice sit down restaurant to me implies something at least halfway inbetween a McDonalds and fine-dining, and at that halfway point I'd never expect straws.
1) lipstick (and the effort put into applying it)
2) health reasons (not trusting the cup's sanitary credentials)
3) children (no idea why, but I have kids, and let me tell you: they want straws. Plus prevents spills if you tell them to leave the glass on the table)
How about we give up paper straws instead?
(For what it's worth, I have no problem with people wanting to accessorize their bodies with lipstick. I don't see beauty in those things, but I have no problem with others seeing beauty that way. Ultimately it is a choice though, as people can also decide to be beautiful through their grace, words, actions, etc; not what some company tells them they need.)
>Ultimately it is a choice though
That's my point, context independent
> want vs need is almost entirely subjective
People need water if they want to live. Somehow you managed to picked the one need which is literally the single biggest need for life as we know it to exist, making it quite the opposite of "entirely subjective".
A statement like "I think pretty paint on lips is just as important as water because everything is subjective" is not making the point you think it is.
Which did I say? "almost entirely subjective" or "entirely subjective"? Where did I write the quote "I think pretty paint on lips is just as important as water because everything is subjective"? I remember writing "context independent" tho as to indicate it's not about lipstick its about semantics of defining a need
People have preferences. Some people like eating out, some people like using straws. Why are we judging people over something like this?
Also, if you drink a fizzy or bubbly drink with glasses then it fizzes onto your glasses when you drink without a straw.
Also also, drinking something other than water via a straw is better for your teeth.
The effect is not measurable and it was a knee-jerk reaction to a viral video rather than data driven. It acts as evidence that environmentalism has become mostly political rather than scientific.
Which is all you really need to know about why they did it.
The vast majority of people dispose of their trash correctly, and if you're worried about your own plastic waste ending up dumped into the Pacific via third-world recycling then doing it on-continent would result in cleaning up more than just straws.
But that act of sorting and shaming others for not doing it definitely makes a certain subset of people feel better about themselves.
This was just virtue signaling so people could feel better about themselves.
Maybe we should treat straws as a wonderful accessibility product that most people shouldn’t use regularly.
If you’ve ever bought a Starbucks iced drink you know that really the only beverage the company sells that needs a straw is a Frappuccino. All those years of selling straws and all Starbucks needed to do was put a properly shaped/size hole on the lid.
Not only are there much bigger priorities, but it's also ridiculous in some forms, and that creates another type of distraction from what actually matters.
Reduction of straw use matters just like the same as the reduction of any type of disposable use. Anything produced with the sole purpose of being discarded is an issue.
Maybe we can make an argument that it’s a greenwashed lazy half-step to eliminate straws or provide less effective straws while still selling disposable cups, but at the same time it isn’t just one little plastic straw we are talking about here.
A company like Starbucks that has over $20 billion in revenue…divide that by five bucks as a rough average cost of a drink and assume about 1/4 of their product sales are cold drinks and you’re looking at a company that would potentially be producing multiple billions of straws every year if they hadn’t eliminated them as a default inclusion.
Imagine a billion straws in a room and how much material that would be.
The sheer scale of many of these businesses and the human population itself is why very small steps like saving a bit of plastic on the screw cap of a soft drink or replacing straws with a hole in the lid make a huge difference to consumption and waste. I personally don’t think its productive to look steps like that with too much cynicism.
On top of that the corporation gets to enjoy the cost savings so it’s really a win-win. Obviously companies shouldn’t pat themselves on the back and consider the job done but I don’t think the world becomes a better place if Starbucks hypothetically added straws back to the waste stream.
Some of them are like 90% as good as a regular plastic straws without any of the danger and cleaning annoyance of a metal straw.
Then the last time I went they had moved onto paper straws like everyone else.
There are some issues with some of the brands, but generally they're fine.
Stainless Steel Straw - Mass: 15g - Energy: 900 KJ per straw (60GJ per ton of stainless) - Composition: 18% Chromium (Cr) 8% Nickel (Ni) 74% Iron (Fe) - Note: High chromium content, which can be hazardous
Plastic Straw - Mass: 0.5g - Energy: 10 kJ (25MJ/kg for HDPE)
90 reuses needed to break even. Now include the energy for washing and the chance of losing the stainless one. Plastic looks like a winner here.
I truly have not been this confused by the comments on any HN post before and I've been reading this place almost daily for years. Is it completely the default to drink from a straw in the US?
Let's say you're at a business lunch. People drink from straws? I just can't picture it. Or is it because people only order water or alcoholic drinks at such lunches?
Do "fancy" places never serve any carbonated drinks whatsoever? Including something like "artisanal kombucha" or whatever they can ask a premium for? If they do, then are those always served with straws?
I'm seeing reasons like hygiene, lipstick and so on. But I know that even in the US, plenty of people drink wine, and they definitely don't do so with a straw. And places serving wine must have a decent overlap with women wearing lipstick, statistically.
I was thinking back, I just went on a 2 week vacation in NZ and was eating out a lot. I ordered soda a couple of times and was never given a straw. The kids did get straws a few times with juice drinks.
It's a cultural/learned thing but people don't realize that so they get cross about it, one way or the other.
It smells like a premeditated astroturf-driven regulatory capture campaign.
OTOH I have used a couple of types of "biodegradable" straws, from mango peel or sugarcane or something, and they were 100% fine.
If only there was a way to drink without using a straw
https://cdrnys.org/blog/disability-dialogue/grasping-at-stra...
People with various disabilities or age related also frequently require lots of other assistive devices but that doesn't imply that they need to be used as the default for every single consumer. My grocery store doesn't hand every shopper a wheelchair instead of a shopping cart just because some percentage of the population requires them.
> DO offer wheelchairs
You see the difference, right? We can do that for straws.
Strange choice of example. Electric wheelchairs are available at most stores of a certain size. Wheelchair reserved parking is available at all almost all stores.
(in California)
When you go to the grocery store, what is the DEFAULT option available to you? Is there a corral of hundreds of wheelchairs with one waiting for every shopper?
Just because something should be available does not mean it should be the default.
There are also your steel/aluminum/titanium, glass alternatives, I find those potentially dangerous (i don't want to stab the roof of my mouth or crack my teeth against a metal straw and i don't want a glass straw breaking off in my mouth).
Perhaps someone else will come up with an even better alternative (a stiff silicone?)
I don't think anyone is saying that we should ban 100% of all straws which are made of plastics, they are more concerned with decreasing the amount of 'single-use disposable' straws made of plastics.
So anyway, I'm not really opposed to straws. If you need one for your fancy drink, or your designer mustache, go ahead. But also most straw usage seems unnecessary to me. Pulling out these edge cases seems like what-about-ism.
Hell, no. All it takes is one trip on something walking out of the coffee shop, using a straw because of sensitive teeth, and I’m possibly dead or paralyzed.
Paralyzed because of a stainless steel straw - all it takes is one time and the public will correctly reject the concept forever.
> Fatal Accident With Metal Straw Highlights a Risk
> The disturbing death of a woman in Britain renewed a debate that has followed bans on plastic straws around the world.
https://www.today.com/health/health/metal-straw-punctures-th...
> Metal straw punctures 4-year-old’s throat, artery to brain: How his life was saved
> The freak accident highlights the danger of metal straws, especially for children, doctors say.
Glass could do this to you just as easily.
Glass, unless it’s a wine glass, most likely just gives you a bunch of cuts. Might need surgery, but better than paralysis!
Steel straws aren’t an option. All it takes is one kid getting a steel rod through their face, a $10 million ad campaign, and giving your child one will be likened to child abuse. This is easily foreseeable.