“Sustainability” is one of those buzzwords that has become more popular among youthful environmentalist types than munching on locally-sourced avocado toast and sipping on slow-roasted, rude lattes in a vintage-themed eatery surrounded by obscure band sticker-clad fixed-gear bicycles. Fads come and go, but those backed by socially-minded science and a fair bit of disgust for the non-sustainable seem to stick around. Now, the popular thing to do is to become outraged over the worst environmental tragedy to ever have befallen human civilization – straws.
Oh, the pain! Straws, those evil, cylindrical liquid transfer units. But, great news! As Reason puts it: “2018 will forever be remembered as the year that hating plastic straws went mainstream,” culminating in government and business alike to find an answer to this tragedy.
Forget plastic bag bans, forbidding straws is the real way to heal the Earth…man.
City councils in the hippest of cities around the country – Seattle, Portland, San Francisco – have been attempting to prohibit single-use plastic straws from their municipalities, even teaming up with world-famous EDM (electronic dance music) DJ Calvin Harris to get people to cease consuming the wasteful plastic products.
“In the fast-paced environment in which we operate, it’s easy to lose sight of wider social issues on which we have an impact,” says Variety. Between tweeting the latest Kardashian faux pas and tip-tapping on our computer phones, all of us, hand-in-hand around the world, must tackle the staggering issue of plastic straws, which have apparently created an environmental disaster of epic proportions.
The research behind the effects of these drinking tubes of death is shoddy at best. Actually, no – it’s terrible. The National Park Service (NPS) claims Americans use 500 million plastic straws every day, all of which end up in the esophagus of an infant Hawaiian Monk Seal. NPS received their figures from the recycling company Eco-Cycle. When Reason asked where Eco-Cycle got their research they said they were relying on facts and figures analyzed by the “Be Straw Free Campaign” from 2011.
The research was done by nine-year-old Milo Cress who – now at the bright-eyed age of 16 – boasts the fact that the National Restaurant Association has endorsed his study, apart from the fact that it was done by his nine-year-old selfcalling people on the phone to see how many plastic straws they used.
Nevertheless, let’s digress…
The California (no surprise here) state legislature is now trying to pass an anti-straw bill to clean up the West Coast and ensure that long-haired, bearded surfer bros don’t have drinking straws sticking to their board wax as they bomb some bitchin’ swells. Though, some advocacy groups even want to criminalize the use of plastic straws.
Have a milkshake at an In-and-Out Burger? Want to use a straw? Criminals. Criminals I say!
Not so fast California, Seattle, Portland, and anti-plastic tree-huggers, Starbucks will not be outdone on the social awareness game – they’re too “woke” for that. The coffee giant announced last week that they would be going – wait for it – strawless. Yes, no more wretched, hedonistic, anti-Earth consumption for you $12 coffee drinkers.
“This is a significant milestone to achieve our global aspiration of sustainable coffee, served to our customers in more sustainable ways,” said Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson.
The company says it’s on a mission to eliminate every single single-use plastic straw at its 28,000 stores worldwide by 2020 – a noble cause for the betterment of society, leaving the Earth teeming with smiling sea animals for our great-grandchildren’s, great-grandchildren’s, children’s, children.
Instead of getting pompous, bourgeois drinking straws with your venti-iced-skinny-hazelnut-macchiato, with sugar-free syrup, an extra shot, light ice, and no whip, Starbucks says that baristas will be topping all its cold drinks with fancy new “strawless lids” that the company currently serves with its cold brew nitro coffees. Though, frappuccinos will still be served with compostable or paper straws for those obnoxious, environmentally-unfriendly, patronizing snobs.
Celebratory confetti and the trumpeting of eco-angels rang down from the heavens as Starbucks’ announcement was greeted with all-embracing, overenthusiastic praise. Blue whales cheerfully bellowed in unison, hawksbill turtles worldwide joined flippers in agreeance, all because the Earth will now begin to heal from centuries of fossil fuel burning and the pillaging of natural resources, allowing the delicate Tasmanian fruit bat to sleep a little more soundly.
But, wait – there’s a inconvenient caveat missing from the common jubilee brought forth by the notion of a strawless world. Starbucks, in fact, will actually be increasing its plastic use.
*GASP*
The lids the company uses on its nitro brews are made up of more plastic than the diabolical single-use straws. Currently, Starbucks patrons are having just about all of their cold beverages topped with either 3.23 grams or 3.55 grams of plastic product, differentiating between a small or large straw, respectively. Meanwhile, the new lids weigh either 3.55 or 4.11 grams, depending again on lid size, with the weighing of products done by a brave soul from Reason.
Due to this unfortunate, yet seemingly overlooked fact, plastic consumption by Starbucks and the expensive coffee-loving hipster patrons will be increasing their plastic consumption under the strawless scheme.
When pressured to give an answer for the increase in anti-environmental plastic consumption a Starbucks spokesperson explained, “the introduction of our strawless lid as the standard for non-blended beverages by 2020 allows us to significantly reduce the number of straws and non-recyclable plastic,” being that the new lids are recyclable, while the plastic straws are not.
Let’s be honest with ourselves here – most, if not all, of those fancy lids are going to wind up at the dump. Then, contrary to the problem the lids were created to solve, they will end up as a hat for some endangered sea mammal.
One may say, “of course, this is a price we all must pay to get 500 ‘bajillion’ straws out of the world’s oceans.” True, but the real concern environmentalists must have is the weight of plastic used, not the number of plastic objects used, or whether or not they are recyclable.
Micro-plastics, the tiny pieces which are the remnants of larger plastic objects that enter the ocean, which end up in the bodies of sea creatures, are the main problem – which is the aggregate weight of plastics. Yes, National Geographic photos of a wearisome turtle with a straw stuffed up its nose are extraordinarily depressing, but straws alone are just a minute portion of plastic in the world’s oceans.
Reportedly, the Associated Press has stated that single-use plastic straws account for about 2,000 tons of the nine million tons of plastic that are estimated to enter the oceans each year, equaling just two one-hundredths of one percent of all plastic waste. Considering the U.S. is responsible for just one percent of all plastic waste entering the oceans, according to Reason, the problem surrounding plastic drinking straws looks about as small as the back wheel on a Starbucks patron’s Parisian penny-farthing bicycle.
Of course, this requires logic to understand, which straw banners obviously do not possess – relying only on false figures from a nine-year-old child to justify ridiculous bans on feeble straws.
Experts have stressed that to truly address the problem of marine plastic pollution will require going after the source of the pollution, mostly all the uncollected refuse from poorer coastal countries that are not host to developed waste management systems.
As mustache-twirling street artists debate this over no-foam, tall, non-fat lattes in a background bathed in the soft sounds of a Nora Jones acoustic album, one issue that will not come up is that fact that while plastic straw bans may look good on paper, they do little to help the environment and actually makes things worse. To combat this, maybe the newest fad will be plucking free-range plastic out of the oceans and making conflict-free drinking apparatuses.
