What country do you live in ? Are straws necessities there ? I live in France and I can't remember the last time I used a straw - must have been a couple of years ago...

I tried drinking coffee through a straw one summer because it’s supposed to protect your teeth.

I’m pretty sure I’m at a greater risk of throat cancer now, and other than that I’m not too sure why you would want them.

If that's a concern, the more practical solutions are to 1) brush your teeth after drinking coffee or 2) don't drink coffee.

I do choose to drink coffee and don't brush immediately after and accept the risk to my teeth.

I was worried about the effect of soda on my teeth so I stopped drinking it.

Which is why it's not recommended to use a straw with hot beverages, only cold ones.

hot drinks != use straw

cold drinks = use straw

My teeth hurt if I drink icy beverages without a straw. I think it can also contribute to tooth staining, and probably cavities if it's a sugary drink.

There are people with disabilities that make it difficult to impossible for them to drink without using a straw. Until plastic straws were banned, they were transparently accommodated by the existing systems.

Now, they're shamed for or outright prevented from using the accessibility devices that allow them to actually, y'know, consume necessary and lifegiving liquid.

Straws were originally introduced for public health reasons, so that your mouth need not touch a surface previously touched by someone else's mouth (and which was not well-cleaned).

I'm not aware of any studies confirming or denying their advantage in the era of modern food safety standards.

So in what way have you been harmed then, if you are using a reusable straw rather than one that would otherwise end up in a landfill or require recycling? We have metal and silicon ones we use - chances are our family will never need a disposable plastic or paper straw ever again, so I fail to see how we’ve been harmed in this ban.

At the same time, I don't miss them. Turns out that I never really needed them in the first place. Sure, some people might need them, but I imagine the vast majority of people don't really need to use a straw.

It's a bit unfortunate for people with mobility issues who needed straws though. They benefited from it being a common thing and how they'll need to pack their own or something.

Same. All cold brew coffee lately seems to come without straws and I don't miss them. I do carry around a reusable straw, one of the singular swag items from a conference that I've used. It's really a small trade-off from what, for me, must have been 1000 plastic straws used annually.

You drink 3 cold brew coffees a day? Your environmental impact would be so much better just skipping one coffee a week than all of your plastic straw usage.

This is what bothers me is that it prohibits me from using straws for a nonissue.

That one-time use plastic straw - an object that no one strictly needs and has many alternatives - will persist in the environment indefinitely and will cause harm to ecosystems.

You can think that's OK (I guess), but you can't pretend that preventing permanent harmful waste is only about feeling good. It's about preventing permanent harmful waste. Feeling good can be a little bonus I suppose.

No it won't if it's in a properly managed landfill. This is the misconception that anti-plastic fanatics have. Plastic doesn't kill fish when it's trapped underground forever.

Straws in the ocean were dumped there by careless people. Since you care about the environment, there's no way you're using a paper straw so you can continue dropping it into the stormwater drain without the problems that you used to cause when you dropped plastic straws into the drain. The very people who choose paper straws are the ones that can't make any difference because they weren't the problem in the first place.

I absolutely can think it’s ok. I purchase and properly dispose of single use plastic items. Nothing wrong with that.

Where exactly were plastic straws "banned?" As far as I know, the ban was on providing them without their being specifically requested.

Santa Monica also has a complete ban on plastic straws, and LA City has a ban on providing them to dine-in customers unless specifically requested (https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-plastic-straws-...). LA County has a similar rule but allows for the business to ask the customer if they want a plastic straw.

San Francisco. Non-plastic straws only (so paper or even bamboo is fine), although there are a few businesses trying to work through their existing plastic stock on the down low.

It's not just useless. At least one person has already been killed by a reusable straw. (Fell on metal one while using.)