Fair point. IIRC though the primary reason for banning plastic straws was not CO2 emissions but wildlife protection, as plastic straws are (or were) the single most frequently found foreign object in the stomachs of dead sea turtles.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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Ironically, I think my drink from BK yesterday was paper cup and paper straw so.
I'll take a PLA cup over a paper cup lined with PFAS, BPA, etc.
There should really be a law that people should be able to bring their own reusable drink cup for any drink.
But then they might get extra drink! Unconscionable!
if people knew just how little the typical fountain drink cost, cups and straws included, they would riot over the costs.
I have seen the amount of organizing a peaceful protest takes. I have seen how much the police charge to riot. Americans would never.
Yeah, I don't know if it's still true but years ago basically the cost for the cup and straw for the business was greater than the cost of the drink itself.
So if anything bringing my own container would save them a good chunk of the cost of a fountain drink.
yeah, last time i checked the cost of the water, syrup, cup and straw were like..20 cents (this is with their economy of scale, bulk buying, etc etc), for a big 64 ounce drink. admitted that was before trump ruined the economy, but i doubt they are still not making absolute bank on fountain sales.
But the branding!
They won't, the McD machines have preset settings to dispense an exact amount of drink every time, they don't measure it by hand.
Plenty of places--many McD's included--have the soda machienes out in the dining area for customers to self-serve, probaby because the fraction of time it takes for an employee to fill the drink cost more than the soda itself.
I know a thrifty fella who knows the specific refill policy of each of the 5 nearby McDonalds; there's a lot of variation between stores.
There needs to just be a blanket, punitive, 100+% tax on any and all single use plastics that are not medical devices. Obviously there's lots of other bigger environmental issues that need to be tackled but this really seems like a pretty obvious one imo.
They'll just pass all the additional costs (plus a little extra profit because why not) onto the consumer
Seems like you just hate freedom and small business's.
How about a child's freedom to not have microplastics in their brain?
No. Children are part of a conspiracy to replace us. To gut our cultures and force every single one of us out sooner or later. Better they stay property, or you know they would.
If you hadn't say this I'd have assumed everything else was unironic, well done lol
Uh uh muh fredomz
You had leaded gasoline for way too long and it shows
Yeah! Muh freedomz! You hate em!
Ppl have been mentioning the plastic in the paper cups but I haven't seen anyone mention that large cups used to all be Styrofoam. Some places all the cups were Styrofoam. And that was god awful for the environment. They were amazing though. Getting a giant sweet tea in a cup that never sweated was phenomenal. Shame they suck so bad.
I remember biting the rim of a Styrofoam cup and leaving imprints of my teeth
I use a metal, glass lined, vacuum insulated cup. Awesome, doesn't sweat, is reusable and recyclable. I've used it for about 8 years now, the 25 euros have been well spent.
Paper cups used to be lined in wax. Plastic is technically unnecessary.
paper straws are quite literally a strawman project against environmental pollution. they do not actually solve environmental pollution while pretending they do ..
its actually propaganda, a campaign by the oil/gas industry to avoid reducing thier own emissions or pollutions, thats why many countries arnt very keen on reducing it. they funded things like "how to reduce your carbon footprint, use less gas, or electricity" plus all those climate protesters you heard about defacing historic places, are funded by them.
i was watching some animal videos one day, and the presenter was promoting this "carbon footprint" company, and the commenters called it out that these companies are funded by the oil-gas industry, luckily the youtube channel listened and stopped promoting them.
Paper cups still have a plastic lining, and it's related to PFAS chemicals iirc
Go back to them being wax coated.
As do metal soda cans to keep them from corroding
There is actually a bit of sense in there. Paper cups weren't simply paper - its tetrapak-like material with plastic coating inside. They are notoriously hard to recycle. Plain plastic cups on the other hand are made from single material, most likely PET. Moreover, they are transparent, without colouring additives.
There are two reasons why colour in plastic makes it harder to recycle. First, pigment is a completely different substance, which behaves differently from plastic itself. It makes it harder to "re-melt" into stable material. If you ever 3d printed anything with matte/gloss filament, you'll know that it is more finicky than plain one. Second, uncoloured plastic can be coloured into anything, while other needs to be either sorted by colour or mixed with strong dye (black, gray, dark brown, etc) to have consistent colour.
PET itself is pretty easy to turn into something new, actually. A workshop near me had a live demo of the whole process - chipping it into small pieces, feeding to the heated tube, and then injection molded into trinkets. Industrial grade processing usually have "turned into pellets" step in between, but it's basically the same.
Plastic-covered paper, on the other hand, should be somehow separated first, and then handled with two different approaches - one for paper, another one for plastic film. Doable, but much harder. Paper straw can probably decompose by itself, without any special conditions.
UPD: Be wary that recycling is not a panacea. There's multiple videos about how recycling plastic isn't actually a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68zjxTTl5Ik for example.
UPD: Be wary that recycling is not a panacea. There's multiple videos about how recycling plastic isn't actually a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68zjxTTl5Ik for example.
Yeah, there’s a reason “recycle” is only number three on the “reduce, reuse, recycle” list. Recycling is the last (and worst) option, and only really makes the list because it’s hopefully not contributing to landfill issues. It’s not the very first thing people should rely on.
I've heard of the phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order", and in looking that up TIL there's even a bit more to it:
this would be a legitimate argument if any of the plastic was actually recycled ... last time i checked it all goes into the incinerator to make electricity out of it.
the recycling of plastic is difficult, not because melting and re-shaping the plastic itself is difficult (it is not, it's trivially easy); the problem is that you basically never get correctly-sorted garbage. when you get "plastic waste", it has at least 20% things in it that are not plastic, including food waste, aluminum, paper, etc. some even throw toxic batteries in it, chemicals (soap), pharmaceuticals ... then there's the risk of infections on the plastic (viruses, bacteria, fungi). there's absolutely no chance that you're just gonna take plastic waste and mold it into a new shape that's food safe. best you can do is to mix it with concrete and use it as a construction material in road construction.
edit: the video you linked is really watchable.
I've worked with plastic recycling in West Africa at one factory, and just sorting plastic waste by hand is a decent job for a few dozen marginalized women because it demand real human level work.
The reason why is pigment and color. They could recycle yellow into yellow or tan, red into red, green into green. But blue and black were the deal breakers. Black being probably already recycled plastic that uses black pigment to mix colors.
Everything after the sorting is trivial. Shredding, re-peletizing, molding, all easily done.
Even if you perfectly sort the plastic out, it can only be recycled about 1.5 times before the structure changes so much it's not suitable for the original use. Plastic recycling is a scam.
yeah btw this is because it's not purely-sorted input. mixing is up with other plastics is what leads to the molecules to not properly align and that's what makes it brittle.
Many people don't understand why plastic straws are considered more harmful than plastic cups. The key issue is that straws are far more likely to escape waste management systems due to their small size, allowing them to pass through filtration screens and enter waterways. As a result, they reach the ocean at a higher rate and pose a greater threat to marine life, including sea turtles. Larger items like plastic cups are generally easier to capture and contain before they become environmental hazards.
Then they reach the ocean where they account for 0.2% (-ish?) of the plastic out there, 50% of the plastic in the ocean is fishing equipment (nets, etc.) for which we did… absolutely nothing.
And no, I'm not advocating in favor of plastic straws. I wish the rules worldwide would have been to make cups and straws mandatory complementary fees. Everyone would bring their own re-usable cups. Then onto disposable cutlery, etc. We managed to ban plastic bags at supermarkets, sure we could get a habit of carrying cups.
Because at the end, the better solution is not to recycle wastes, it's to stop producing them.
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There's so much plastic lining that paper otherwise everything would get too soggy anyway. Yay for glass and metal. Reusable beats disposable, no matter what it's made of
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