Do you really need an extra bedroom? Do you really need a car? Do you really need that extra pair of socks? Do you really need that coca-cola? Of course not. People obviously want it. Quite the slippery slope you're walking.

Are you comparing a car with a straw? Really? Trust me you will be perfectly fine without a straw! Try it sometime.

If everything has an inherent carbon footprint, ie. harmful to the environment, then yes, we can compare a straw to a car.

Have you ever gone on a vacation? I'd wager that flight you took is 10000x worse for the environment than whatever reduction in your lifetime straws. Trust me you will be perfectly fine without going on vacation!

I really underestimated how passionate people are about straws. Do you have a blog per chance where you compare different straws and their manufacturers? Would you rate them on thickness, quality of plastic, how quickly liquid travels from beverage to mouth? Do you prefer straws wrapped in plastic or not? Can you describe the different subtle mouth feels?

I’m not passionate about straws. I’m just passionate about stupidity and critical thinking.

It seems odd to me that someone would question whether straws are essential, but have no problem with vacations.

I also am offended when people expressing any interest are deflected into “why don’t care about this so much?” It’s not important how passionate GP is about straws. Address the content of their message, not whether they are super interested in a topic or not.

I'm not sure where I wrote I like straws. It's more of a "I don't like the logic regarding straw bans".

>Can you describe the different subtle mouth feels?

Yes, paper feels way worse to drink out of, objectively.

Do celebrities really need private jets? No, the regular folk need to use shitty straws.

You can buy a reusable metal straw if you want to.

I liked the idea of metal straws but ive about busted out a tooth or two with them more than once since I got them and never use them now.

We should ban private jets too.

"Trust me you will be perfectly fine without a straw!"

You can be fine without a lot of things. In the early 1950s, after the war, my grandpa raised a 5-head family in a single room. Two of the kids went to a university, no serious diseases etc.

The average living standard can be reduced surprisingly low before you run into any issues. Once the city you live in has good sewage system, enough doctors, enough food and not a major problem with drugs, the life expectancy will be reasonably high even with five people per room and one car per twenty families.

Another thing is that people won't vote for that.

Isn't that private bedroom quite a big luxury, and many groups perfectly manage to survive living multiple persons per room... So why not force everyone to give up their private bedrooms?

We are at a point in society where we can't simply keep doing what those before us did. We are killing the planet, and every plant and animal on it, including ourselves.

Yes, life is about to get less convenient and we have to give up some luxuries.

It doesn't matter if you don't like it, it a fact.

"We are at a point in society where we can't simply keep doing what those before us did."

Sure we can. And we will. The choices of most of the world's population surely disagrees with this.

"Yes, life is about to get less convenient and we have to give up some luxuries."

I don't think that's the case, but we will see.

For the record, ideologically, I'm on your side. Realistically, I just don't see a world where the majority of people change.

The stop using the plastic straw argument applies to people who don't like straws. Tell the same anti-straw folks to stop traveling, stop having pets, no more children. You see where this goes - It just doesn't work.

There are laws against plastic straws and plastic bags.

There are laws against chemicals that are known to cause environmental harm.

There are laws against vehicles that pollute too much. Soon there will be laws against cars vehicles that pollute at all.

All we have to do is make laws, and more and more of them are coming.

Again, it doesn't matter what an individual wants.

Your trust in laws is fascinating

For humans, laws and rules are meant to be overstepped : this is how our species got so far : by considering rules, laws and traditions, and say "well, whatever, I will try it my way and see how it goes"

And how is that working out?

In recent months dozens of shops got multi-million dollar fines from the EPA for "deleting " diesel emission equipment. Now it's unheard of in the US.

It works.

We can though. There's a lot of fearmongering but the reality is climate change won't kill us for longer than we'll live.

There's also a lot of gradient in the effect of environmental laws. As an example my family still has tons of plastic bags that get reused over and over again until they become unusable or land as a trash bag. I don't know the math of it all but considering we buy plastic trash bags anyway we might as well get them from shopping instead of buying them separately. I have no idea what the global impact has been on plastic bag production but it could be interesting to see, assuming such a statistic exists.

> There's a lot of fearmongering but the reality is climate change won't kill us for longer than we'll live.

I really don't like this take when I see it.

Do you care about just the next 50 years, or the next hundreds+? Do you have children/grandchildren? Do you care about an increase in the quantity and impact of natural disasters? The resulting increase in death, suffering, insurance premiums? What about more unpleasantly hot days? Less snow on the ski slopes?

All of that stuff is important to me, even though it almost certainly won't kill me personally. It's just such a no-brainer that the environment and climate is something to cherish and protect. Even if you're generally pro-environment, referring to environment-protection measures as fearmongering only makes it harder to enact them and increase their scale.

I don't mind environmentalism and I also see why people prefer to portray a picture of "you will die" instead of "your grand grand grand kids will die" but I also personally dislike it when people skew the picture to push their agenda, even if it is good and pushed entirely out of their love and care for others.

It might be due to me being surrounded by automotive enthusiasts but the general view of recent environmental laws in my circles is that they exist mostly to motivate spending and move some local pollution somewhere else. It's kind of the combination of nonsensical laws and short term effect exaggeration that offends people, making them stubborn/resistant to accepting things that actually make sense. It's probably offset by people who get a sense of urgency out of it but I withhold my right to dislike it.

we're just in different cultures/societies/circles then. around me, no one's portraying "you will die", and I don't feel at all surrounded by nonsensical environmental laws. if anything, it's the opposite. why aren't builders in my city taxed more for using materials with worse environmental effects? why aren't extremely inefficient vehicles taxed more highly? why such little investment in bike lanes?

those are the nonsensical laws i see

> the reality is climate change won't kill us for longer than we'll live.

That depends heavily on where you live.

3.6 billion people live in areas that are at a very high risk from climate change.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...

> There's a lot of fearmongering

If you have better credentials than the WHO and leading climatologists around the world then I'd love to hear about them.

Generalizations and platitudes, you can't even argue with this pie in the sky nonsense.

It slips both ways though. I suspect banning incandescent bulbs is probably a good change, even though there were people who obviously wanted them.

> You can just not use a straw. This thought process is the problem. Solutions must benefit all parties. Telling one party to go without and deal with it creates resentment.

>Solutions must benefit all parties.

but solutions never benefit all parties. Laws tend to tell some group what not to do, so most laws will inconvinience someone. You just need to figure out who the law and targeting (and REALLY targeting, not just what PR says) and then follow the money from there.

Less energy would be used by creating straws that are both convenient and good for the environment, like agave fiber straws.

Solutions can benefit all parties in any context (and the best ones do), but environmental protection is unique because the solution must benefit all parties. This is because, while some will sacrifice for the sake of the world, some will not. Convenience compels the lazy to change. No amount of coercion, or threat of force will change that.

Perhaps it would be more useful to unban plastic straws, and then ban unsolicited straws.

It's rather tedious to take a straw out of a drink, dry it off, and find somewhere to put it.

I can agree with this. Straws upon request makes more sense.

This is, in fact, how I think we should have handled plastic bags. The plastic bags themselves are fine. But the customer should have to actually request one.

I can't tell you how many times I bought one small item I intended to carry out of the store with me, and the cashier just automatically put it in a plastic bag. "Oh, I don't need a bag," I'd say. The cashier would then proceed to take the item out of the bag, and throw the bag away.

(No animosity intended towards the cashiers, who have difficult jobs. But we should have a better process.)

Sure, but not forever. My city banned plastic bags in grocery stores and I was annoyed and resentful because I used those when I cleaned out my cats litter box. However I got over it.

I am forever haunted by the death of a woman by a metal straw where it impaled her in the head when she accidentally fell in her home.

As soon as I saw people were using metal straws as a replacement for plastic straws, I thought... that is a terrible, dumb idea. Yet people still buy them. It's pretty nuts.

There are now perfectly functional composable straws, but people still need to compost them.

Impaled through the eye, my god.

The odds of something like that happening are so astronomically low that you’re better off spending your energy looking up for falling pianos.

Or the guy that died of a rare bacterial infection that he got from using his dirty metal straw he never cleaned /s

There are also silicone and glass straws. Plus a metal straw with a bend in it may be safer than a straight one. I was expecting someone else to have mentioned silicone straws already, I'd heard of them before in other straw discussions. Had to do a search and make sure they really existed.

I pretty much loathe paper straws. Their texture is nails on chalkboard to me. I hate that they get soggy. I hate that they collapse in anything thick like a milkshake or smoothie. I will more likely go without than use a paper (even the modern paper) straws.

And I don’t like going without. I like straws. I like their utility. I like the way they work in the car. They let me rate limit the beverage flow rather than something else, such as the ice dam at edge of the cup.

I’m also a big fan of ice.

The closest solution I’ve found are lids with small openings. Starbucks coffee lids are good examples, but they’re also “strawless” cup lids with a small lid over a hole.

They’re not a replacement for straws, but they’re not awful like paper straws are. Some leak though. Puts them lower on the fun scale.

Not a big fan of the stainless steel ones either to be honest.

Do people really need the things they drink with straws?

There’s two ways I generally think of this:

1) who knows what is actually essential. I can’t judge what others truly need and don’t know of an objective board who can. Is art necessary? Is coke necessary? Are luxury vehicles necessary?

2) people choose what’s needed by buying them and prioritizing their money toward it. So by existing and being purchased that’s proof enough of necessity.

I’m sure as hell not carrying and keeping clean a collapsible metal straw on the off chance that I’ll want to drink a drink one day. It seems like the mental stress of that would outweigh the negative impact of a thousand plastic straws (not to mention the energy spent to create the collapsible metal straw in the first place). It’s important to keep in mind all the tradeoffs and not to create negative overall effects from the aim of improving only environmental effects.

The paper straws are awful products. They taste like paper and disintegrate quickly even though they are still covered in plastic. Wood utensils in comparison were an adjustment but they work fine.

I have been avoiding lids and straws for two decades now, because they are wasteful, but when I have need of a straw and lid it's nice if they work.

Paper straws are an improvement. Just not perfect.

I cannot speak to cost, but wax, paper/cardboard performs well enough for just about any food related purpose. Not suitable for shakes? Make them thicker.

I've never met a single person who likes using a paper straw over a plastic one. They feel weird in your mouth, they get soggy, and they fall apart. I fail to see how adding more paper material would fix the issue.

Plastic straws perform better than your average paper straw, no argument there. I think the talking point is a lot of people do not care that much and paper straws are good enough.

Wax would help way more for most use cases, but the added material would help for thicker mediums.

Waxed paper straws are a thing and are almost as good as plastic straws. I am not sure why they are not more common. Pretty rare actually.

Minute amounts of wax will be ingested into the body with every use. It will be similar to the current situation with microplastics (mostly polyester – coming from the sportswear and clothing in general that fray at the microscopic level) that have been detected in human body organs pervasively and are being investigated for their side effects on the hormonal system.

Moreover, wax is not one chemical compound but is a broad term for a variety of very different chemical compounds shoved under the «wax» umbrella term due to sharing same properties: being solid, lipophilic and malleable. Anything that shares such properties is a wax.

There are four broad categories of wax:

– Plant based (e.g. soy, carnauba, castor, jojoba, tallow and others)

– Animal based (beeswax, lanolin – from sheep, Chinese wax – from insects)

– Petroleum (paraffin and microcrystalline)

– Mineral waxes (peat and ceresin are most important ones).

Other than beeswax, long term health effects of ingesting a wax are unknown. Plant based waxes can't be completely purified and will contain miniscule amounts of potentially harmful phytochemicals that may have a detrimental effect on the human body. Animal based waxes are already known to cause irritation in some people and are likely to mess up the hormonal system in the long term. They can just a have a rancid or a funny smell – sufficient to be unsuitable to put in one's mouth.

Petroleum based waxes… Food-grade paraffin wax has been used in foodstuffs for a while since it passes the digestive tract unchanged, yet it is an open question whether it also creates microparticles that settle in the body and have a potential to affect our health. Impurities in petroleum and in waxes overall are a major source of concern, and it is a matter of time when somebody unscrupulous quietly swaps out a higher grade product for a cheap and nasty one.

The bottom line is that long term health effects of the wax ingestion on the human body are unknown, and – by extension – wax coated paper straws are probably not a solution, not a safe one anyway until proven otherwise.

Metal straws are the most inert ones, but even then aluminium leeching into food through cookware has already been implicated as a potential contributor to the onset of Alzheimers and steel has an amount (albeit small) of nickel in it… it just never ends.

The reason we use plastic straws is because we've ALREADY used paper straws and consumers preferred the plastic ones. Especially now that all of our drink portion sizes are gigantic and straws tend to sit in drinks for hours.

That and they are cheaper to produce. Now we're learning more and more that using plastic for everything is not just bad for the environment, but also bad for our health. Consumer sentiment is shifting accordingly.

For the record, I'm in camp, "Don't care that much, whatever straws are fine". I'd be happy if as a society we could just get people not to litter like other developed countries manage to. I have a lot of junk which ends up in my front yard (people tossing garbage from passing cars) and my backyard (a river where all kinds of styrofoam, plastic cups, plastic bags, etc. all wash up). If all the junk was biodegradable it wouldn't hang around my yard and require me to pick it up (or I could at least toss it on the burn pile).

I'm in camp "I would rather gulp it right from the glass", which seems like a better stance anyway. But I heard that some people really need straw, and if I'm in that position I'll 100% ask for the plastic one everytime.

Then again if only <1% of people use plastic than it used be, we're already winning very much.

If you really want to get rid of plastics, stop recycling them and start burying them.

If you have sensitive teeth a straw is really needed with some drinks.

And putting a collapsible one back in your pocket after it's sticky is a bit disingenious.

I'd prefer focusing on better recycling than replacing by worse alternatives (eg PFAS coated paper)

I would suggest either rinsing it in a bathroom somewhere, and/or carrying some sort of pouch or container you can stick it in so you don't dirty your pocket. Then you could clean it at home. In a pinch you could probably pour water from your water bottle on/through it outside if you carry a water bottle already. Could also wrap it in a handkerchief if you carry anything like that.

I don't normally carry any of that stuff to be honest. I don't usually even wear a coat. Just my phone, keys and sometimes a wallet.

I live in Spain so 80% of the year I don't use a coat. And water I would just buy when I need it :)

When I go hiking I do bring those things but then I don't come across places that sell iced drinks :)

That sounds like a lot more effort than just avoiding places that give you shitty paper straws instead of proper plastic ones

It doesn't have to be a life-or-death issue in order to moderately annoy someone. In fact, straws are not a life-or-death issue, so it annoys people when they are treated as a life-or-death issue. And nobody has ever been annoyed into agreeing with a political view. Politicians should understand these kinds of regulations just create new opponents and entrench people already against you.

I never use straws.

Straw bans irritate me because they’re such transparent bullshit - and so many people prop it up as actually real, useful, and ‘helping’.

Similar to folks pushing homeopathy as real medicine and getting folks to nod along so they can sell it to even more suckers.

The whole country seems to be devolving to scam artists selling increasingly ridiculous feel good scams to everyone to boost our numbers.

I consider it yet another paper cut in the ongoing erosion of rational thought and pragmatic thinking in the public sphere.

Straw bans alone? Not hurting anyone too bad.

The overall direction is going to get a lot of people killed though.

Yes, it is annoying, and its not about the straw. Its 100% about vapid environmental policies that do nothing for the environment.

-The soil quality is going to hell, is it the fault of nitrogen fertilizers? It probably doesnt help, but far worse is the over farming of corn, which is the direct result of farming subsidies that shouldnt exist.

-The chemical train crash in east Palestine Ohio? Operating per EPA regs; a company that had actual liability for harm would never transport chemicals without insurance, and the insurance company would base the rate on everything you would want them too, like installed safety features, rail upkeep, and training; instead, they are off scot free because they are protected by the people who are supposed to regulate them, as is only natural.

-We are decades behind in energy infastructure because of nuclear alarmism.

-Flint was an inside job, the government poisoned the people there and said it was safe.

-I almost forgot paper straws, which are also terrible for the environment and even worse for humans.

-We always ignore the biggest polluter, the pentagon.

I could go on all day. If the EPA set out a few basic guidelines like "hey, make sure people wear respirators!", "dont dump chemicals into the river!", no one would complain. Its just, that will never be the federal government of the united states.

I almost never use straws, but I know elderly people who like straws because they reduce their risk of spilling whatever they are drinking.

Metal straws are sturdy, but they get uncomfortably hot or cold depending on the drink.