Just pick which one is your last straw
MAYBE it’s that you don’t want to put your mouth where other mouths have been. Or maybe you’ve been sucking for so long, sucking has become your default setting. You are thirsty. You are at lunch, and your waiter just brought you a cold glass of water. Enter the straw. “What a fine liquid-extraction device,” you don’t think to yourself, because no one really ever thinks about the straw. You finish sucking, and toss it into a recycling bin, because it is plastic, and you are a good person.
Dear good person: Straws are not recyclable.
They will sit, defiantly undecomposed, in landfills.
They will float out into the clear blue sea.
They will end up in a viral YouTube video, lodged in the bloody nostril of an endangered sea turtle.
So goes the message of a burgeoning movement that makes a specific, surprisingly bold request: Please stop using disposable plastic straws.
A growing number of bars and restaurants across the country are choosing to no longer offer straws, unless they are requested. Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins, narrator of the forthcoming documentary “Straws,” does not want you to use straws. Adrian Grenier, “Entourage” hunk turned UN Environment Programme hunk, has put out the word that he wants you to #stopsucking. Model Brooklyn Decker, hip-hop trio De La Soul, and celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson all care about this straw situation so much that they were willing to appear in yet another line-up-multiple-celebrities-ina-row PSA, in which they allow straws to be smacked out of their mouths by a giant octopus tentacle. Exit the straw. It’s not that the straw is the worst plastic, or the most prevalent plastic, or the most deadly-to-aquatic-life plastic. It’s because the straw is, as Grenier puts it, a “gateway plastic,” insidious in its seeming innocence, in our inability to see it for what it really is: Unnecessary, toxic flotsam, contributing to a mass of plastic garbage that will one day – by 2050, experts predict– literally outweigh all the fish in the sea. The straw should be an easy thing to forfeit, on the long list of pollutants worthy of boycott.
But a wet tentacle-slap might be what it takes to separate us from our personal plastic pipettes - because it turns out we are bizarrely attached to them. It is estimated that Americans use, and then dispose of, 500 million straws every day.
A habit so thoroughly ingrained in our shared psyche must have an explanation for it. Laziness? Clumsiness? Germaphobia? And yet . . . if we’re all a bunch of germaphobes who don’t trust the cleansing power of industrial dishwashers, why doesn’t this aversion apply to restaurant mugs or wine glasses?
We’ve heard the excuses: You need the straw to keep your iced coffee from staining your newly whitened teeth. You don’t want to reapply your lipstick. You don’t want to splash the interior of the car. Sure, fine - but does that really account for all our straw usage?
A straw might be many things – a personal preference, a modicum of control – but in the realm of conscious thought it is mostly nothing, which is what makes it such a tough habit to break: You never even remember picking it up in the first place.
The very first straw, patented in 1888, was simply one man’s way to avoid getting mint leaves stuck in his teeth. Marvin Stone, a Washington, D.C., manufacturer of paper cigarette holders, was said to have gotten the idea for a paper drinking straw as he sipped a mint julep through a stalk of rye grass. Irked by the grainy residue left by the crumbling plant stem, he tried wrapping strips of paper around a pencil and then gluing them together. His inspiration became an industry, as he opened his first drinking-straw factories in downtown Washington.
The bendy straw followed in 1937. Then plastic straws began replacing paper in the 1960s. Then came the crazy straws, extendo-straws (for juice boxes), extra-wide straws (for milkshakes and bubble tea), straws in every shape and colour.
“Straws are the industry standard,” says a waiter at Commissary, a busy lunch spot in Washington. Commissary’s manager boasts that the restaurant is proudly “green certified” - its beef is grass-fed, it draws upon wind power, its napkins are “unbleached.” But as much as the management would like to get rid of straws, there are other factors to consider: Kids. Customers with injuries or disabilities, who don’t have the use of their arms. People with sensitive teeth. — WPBloomberg