>>The researchers sampled 39 brands of
straws made of paper, bamboo, glass,
stainless steel and plastic. Of those, 27
were found to contain PFAS, though
the concentrations were low.
So basically nothing new. I was actually surprised they didn't find tons of pfas in paper straws as those stuff are lined with waterproof coating. On a tangent, paper straws are a symbol of everything that's wrong with current climate politics; we have to deal with inferior products, while the actual corporations responsible are free to act with impunity. All these edicts banning stuff such as plastic straws are passed on high from the ivory towers of conventions filled with politicians and successful businessman, flown in on private jets and driven the last mile in photogenic electric cars, to talk about what the lower classes do and do not deserve to have.
Single-use anything can be a climate change problem (besides being an obvious pollution problem). Single-use means new onrs being constantly manufactured and used ones being constantly destroyed/recycled. All of those are energy intensive processes, not to mention the energy use for constantly getting more raw materials. More energy use means more GHG emissions.
Making plastic straws is not energy-intensive and the miniscule amount of electricity used can be trivially obtained from renewables.
You all are grasping at straws. Of all the things in the world to want to stop making from oil, plastic straws have got to be at the bottom right before medical supplies.
I'm not saying plastic straws are the problem, I'm saying single-use things are a problem. Straws, not matter the material, are just one tiny part of that.
And I'm definitely not saying they're significant, but saying this is "not a climate change issue" is just plain incorrect.
Every time plastic waste or PFAS comes up, it seems like straws are mentioned. Am I the onky one who never uses a straw? What do you all find you get from them that you wouldn't get from just drinking out of a cup?
this is not a practical answer but it's an actual answer..
Straws are useful for drinking lemon water, and maybe other drinks which have the wrong kind of acidity that can damage tooth enamel.
The straw can help to prevent the liquid from making contact with the teeth as you're drinking.
So, there's 2 different untested theories there, I am careless spreading around without having tested either of them myself, because I have unusually strong teeth, which is an uncommon but not rare thing.
I bought a pack of glass straws and a single thick plastic one that I walk with a couple years ago when they banned them in my country, one of my better "investments", it comes with a small cleaning brush but if you rinse them right after using you should be good for the most part. Especially if I buy a drink in public no way am I putting my lips on a carton or can.
Glass and stainless steel straws are really good. Only had one glass straw break in 3 years and that's because I dropped it. Especially the glass ones actually look better in your drink than any plastic or paper straw. Most importantly they don't melt if I drink slowly and don't leak anything in my drinks.
I can't recall when I last used a straw. Years ago. I don't drink soda or sugary drinks often though and that seems to be where they're most popular. It's probably good to avoid both. Soda in moderation. I'm pretty sure that straws encourage consuming those drinks in much larger quantities than you would otherwise.
Somehow gone unmentioned but straws are independence-enabling devices for a decent swathe of the disabled population, especially those who struggle with swallowing, with fine motor control of their hands or lack muscle enough to hold a full container of liquid to their mouth.
I used to demand no ice, and it worked ok in sit-down+waitress restaurants, but on GrubHub they will ignore that every time.
So what I do now is not even worry about the order, but when the drinks arrive I strain out all the ice, to stop the melting and dilution process. Unfortunately I still see an appalling amount of ice displacing the volume of beverage.
Also, I have a beard, and so a straw is the best thing to prevent milk or soda or whatever soaking into my facial hair.
Currently I have a vast stockpile of plastic straws, because I usually order two drinks but use one straw. Mostly, the only sustainable, crap straws are the ones I've purchased separately.
Maybe I use a straw once a year? It seemed reasonable to teach my daughter how to use a straw as part of her occupational therapy. Other than that and the rare (especially these past few years because of covid) restaurant outing, I don't use straws. There are some people for whom straws are the easiest way to drink, though, and there are many people who like using straws, so it makes sense to care about the health effects (from raw materials to disposal) of straws.
I mainly use them when I get an iced coffee. Makes it easier to drink with the ice and minimizes spillage risk (those sippy cup lids that stores use now always leak for me).
If I’m at a restaurant or home I rarely use one. Some cocktails at a bar also benefit similarly but others just a stirrer suffices for when it comes improperly mixed.
When bartending, they’re used to taste a drink if the bartender wants to ensure it tastes right before serving.
I've got some flurosis on my front teeth, they've been sensitive to cold since I got my adult teeth. So for cold drinks it's far nicer to not be in pain by using a straw than it is to try to contort my lips over to protect them.
If I’m getting fast food then I’ll have a lid. If I’m at a sit down restaurant they will bring me one anyways. A few mixed drinks are preferable with a straw in my opinion and that’s usually the only time I grab one at home. I hate metal straws.
Do your uber drivers actually let you drink In-n-Out milkshakes in the back seat? Is the an in-app feature I can select? As drinking strawless on I-880 would be like being a DUI.
The usual higher attention priority in a social setting like restaurants and driving are other people/vehicles and straws allow attention to be directed to them rather than making sure a drink is not over tilted and contents spilled and also are cheaper for single use than a more easily washable and secure sippy cup lid.
Straws might be preferred for social convenience so you can focus more on the person sitting next to you than on drinking the drink in front of you. Straws can be less messy and avoid the risk of spilling a drink.
There are also accessibility reasons to need to use a straw. And some people prefer the taste of a drink with a straw.
>so you can focus more on the person sitting next to you than on drinking the drink
I never felt this was a big effort. Is this like people driving automatic transmission that assume it's dangerous to drive stick because it's "distracting"? It's not distracting once you get used to it.
Most of these things if you do them often enough will not require any mental energy.
Straws mechanically help drinking in many situations.
I'd argue you shouldn't be driving in those many situations (say, daily commute). But I'd rather a person's morning coffee be sucked than sipped behind the wheel.
My father taught me at a young age to never use a straw as it makes a guy look effeminate. I know it is the advice for everybody, but it stuck with me, and I guess I am healthier for it.
i suppose that it is theoretically possible that someone drinking from a glass/cup leaves something sticking to the rim that does not get cleaned off.
but if i would take this consideration seriously then my conclusion would be to not consume anything at this place rather than assuming that the rim of a glass is the only place that is less likely to be clean.
What's most likely is a poorly trained waiter/waitress uses an eagle claw grab to hold the glass as it's moved and served. That means their fingers, god knows where they've been, touch the rim of the glass I am about to sip from.
I've seen this happen everywhere from the cheapest joint to the poshest of posh establishments that I view it as simple inevitability so long as humans are involved in serving.
Frankly, to me it sounds a bit excessive to worry about such things. We live in a very sterile society to start with, so I see no reason to take any extra precautions. I wash my own hands and don't think what others are doing with theirs.
Lids that can be directly sipped from are common for hot drinks - like a single use coffee cup. Increasingly more common for single use packaging of cold drinks due to the whole straw thing.
The obvious solution seems to be dropping straws entirely until manufacturers can get their shit together like they did during the wax-on-paper days.
Reusable bamboo/metal straws are always an option of course (or even a requirement people with for certain disabilities) but for most people throwaway straws are the most ridiculous luxury people get upset about being taken away from them.
Why pick straws though? There are plenty of similarly environmentally harmful and even less useful things that we ignore (like all the excessive nested packaging for some preprocessed food products).
Because banning them is highly visible and enshittifies life in general (paper straws are fucking garbage and everyone knows this) without solving the actual problem (pollution should trend downwards).
This makes environmentalists happy, because making life worse for everyone is their goal (actual progress on the problem means they lose relevance/social power and nobody ever destroys their own meal ticket); and it makes the greenwashers happy, because it makes most people think something's being done even when it isn't (and can continue to sell truthy solutions that feel good but don't work, plus the profit and power that comes from having massive capital stores in an economic context artificially driven to zero-sum with environmentalism as the excuse to impose it).
Banning straws has to be the tiniest, least impactful change we can possibly make to reduce unnecessary plastic waste. It's a perfect representation of how we're all doomed because nobody wants to give up the tiniest bit of luxury when it comes to attempts to fix global problems.
I'm all for action against excessive packaging (as long as we don't cause food waste, i.e. by banning the plastic keeping fruits and vegetables edible for much longer) but nested plastics seems to be rather rare in my experience. Even sixpacks of cans come in cardboard packaging these days. It's been months since I last saw nested plastic packaging.
I've never seen any law specifically targeting straws. Most of the laws target single-use plastics, such as plastic cutlery and plates. The people focusing on straws seem to be "the damn liberal environmentalist communists want to make your life worse" types of media.
> I've never seen any law specifically targeting straws
Well.. come to Europe.
But to be fair yeah, I think they banned most non biodegradable single use utensils.
Straws just turned out harder to replace compared to plates and forks. The plastic coated paper straws which are just as bad (if not worse) in most ways are just a perfect illustration why this policy wasn’t thought out that well.
Which law targeted straws specifically? The 2019 directive on single-use plastics (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/904/oj) targeted a wide variety of single-use plastics related to food consumption.
Yes most of the time if they are cheap and not certified without.
Same for almost every grease resistant paper these days.
And true for dental floss, and restauration soaps and....
It is just everywhere.
Would you mind explaining why you are surprised by this result? I'm a layman but as I understand it PFAS are known to be able to absorb into glass at the very least from extended exposure to aqueous solution, as such it is common for water PFAS sampling instructions to specify not using glass to hold samples. [1,2,3,4]
Additionally, PFAS surface coatings are often intentionally applied to glass to make it more hydro or oleophobic. [5] It stands to reason that PFAS could either be applied on purpose to glass straws, ('easy clean!') or for some other product in the same factory.
The PFAS sticks to glass, but doesn't absorb into the glass. Meaning the PFAS isn't coming from the straw manufacture, but rather later - perhaps during washing.
Meaning they are not being careful to distinguish between PFAS as included by the manufacturer, and PFAS that comes later.
So all the PFAS they found - is that just PFAS from the local water supply? If so the entire research is called into question.
(I highly doubt glass straws are being marketed as easy clean - the coating doesn't stay, you have to reapply it, so I doubt they would bother spending that money on straws for something temporary.)
Points taken on methodology, don't have enough knowledge to speak much further on it constructively but I would say my intuition is that "stuck to" is not that much different to "absorbs into the outermost layers of" although I would like to know more about what's going on molecularly, and will look into it. I'm also not sure the distinction between PFAS introduction in manufacturing vs washing/distribution is that important to this study - does that distinction matter to the end user of the straw who is looking to reduce PFAS intake?
On coatings: If you're a glass factory who has been pumping out say, PFAS coated glass beakers for years and then you decide to get into the straw game, why not coat those too if your beaker customers like the coating? Doesn't seem like much additional cost at 'shipping container scale' if you're running the coating shop anyway. And, I believe polymeric glass coatings can be attached 'for life' these days. Again I'm not an expert but I believe they are applied to smart phones, solar panels, exteriors of buildings, etc.
Cynically, a coating doesn't even have to stick around to be important enough to spend money on. Maybe it falls off immediately but just keeps the straws smudge free during packing with 20% less time on washing or something. Given the social understanding to wash new food grade stuff before use, I don't believe is a situation out of the ordinary.
I'd like to know more about all this as someone who uses glassware for ingested items - will do more research.
> I'm also not sure the distinction between PFAS introduction in manufacturing vs washing/distribution is that important to this study
Because one applies to everyone, and the other only to those people who live in the same place as where the test was performed.
Controlling for contaminants is like rule one of this kind of study.
> If you're a glass factory who has been pumping out say, PFAS coated glass beakers for years
You're not. Those are not common things, they are specialty items. And most likely applied elsewhere, not as part of a glass factory anyway.
> And, I believe polymeric glass coatings can be attached 'for life' these days.
If that were true then the PFAS isn't leaving the glass to go into the human, which just calls the study even more into question. But I doubt there are any coatings in the first place (on glass), the PFAS came from elsewhere. (On the paper straws though, I totally believe the PFAS was applied deliberately - but this study is not where I'm learning that.)
This patent seems to suggest that hydrophobic coatings on reusable drinking straws are a thing. They apply it to make the straws easier to clean for reuse.
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP3738479B1/en
Okay, so "absorb" sounds like it's not be the exact right word. I am a layman here. But how long does it take for the outer few layers of glass to achieve a level of PFAS density which is meaningful to people seeking to use those outer layers? Do diffusion calculations offer insight into this?
Yes, that is surface diffusion. When anything lands in the surface that is ‘adsorption’. Then those molecules can either surface diffuse, desorb, or go somewhere else :)
Usually water is adsorbed on everything we interact with.
It's a bad idea to use stuff that is not certified as food safe for food. Not only because some chemicals may come loose, but also because you might have bacteria growth in unexpected areas.
Myself, I prefer metal straws, with came also with a tool to clean them.
I'm sure the stuff you hold in hands for hours,
and which absorb chemicals into your
bloodstream directly by skin diffusion,
is far more safer than what is allowed
to pass through the digestive system.
This line of thought makes no sense, the plastic pen designed to sit in your hand was crucially NOT designed to be in your mouth directly touching mucous membrane.
Perhaps skin diffusion has been taken into account somewhere but this is not carte blanche to up that dosage by some unknown exponent by shoving unknown, non-food grade plastic (whose constituent parts you don't even know) into your mouth
Well, i know you wouldn't want to mix plastic with anything
hotter than room temp, but diffusion with cold drinks is minimal
for hard plastics like Polypropylene that most ballpoint pen barrels consist of.
Polypropylene (PP)
https://www.acplasticsinc.com/informationcenter/r/fda-approv...
Polypropylene is most often used for single-serve containers like yogurt cups, but also shows up in reusable containers that can store leftovers. On top of being one of the FDA approved food contact materials, it's microwave safe and nonvolatile, meaning it will not react with any type of food you store in it, whether it's acidic, basic or liquid.
Are you certain the barrels are made of polypropylene?
Bic pens are composed from polystyrene in their barrels for example, being the most sold pen in the world I'd take note and carefully research whether you've been looking at the materials list for the correct part.
For example, polystyrene meets the stringent standards of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Commission/European Food Safety Authority for use in packaging to store and serve food. The Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department recently reviewed the safety of serving various foods in polystyrene foodservice products and reached the same conclusion as the U.S. FDA.[108]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene#Safety
No shit. Paper straws literally need a plastic coating to work. It’s the dumbest invention ever. At least do compostable plastic straws over paper.l, and even that’s not great.
I see no issue with plastic straws that are then used by peaker electric plants.
Compostable plastic is a complete scam, it just means tha me industrial composters will break the plastic down into small microplastic fragments with heat.
So basically nothing new. I was actually surprised they didn't find tons of pfas in paper straws as those stuff are lined with waterproof coating. On a tangent, paper straws are a symbol of everything that's wrong with current climate politics; we have to deal with inferior products, while the actual corporations responsible are free to act with impunity. All these edicts banning stuff such as plastic straws are passed on high from the ivory towers of conventions filled with politicians and successful businessman, flown in on private jets and driven the last mile in photogenic electric cars, to talk about what the lower classes do and do not deserve to have.