Me too. I got silicone straws and they are great.
I went with glass. They seem to work well.
Those sound like good options for straws. I hate whenever I go to a restaurant and they use paper straws. They get soggy too easily, and it feels weird in my mouth when I use them.
I tried metal straws but I prefer the silicone ones.
Gotta confess, I’m dubious about cleaning inside a straw. Especially with milky coffee, which is where i care most about getting a straw. When shops stopped giving out straws, i bought a lot of those coffee stirrers that you can sip through, and a small plastic container to carry a few with me.
The total volume of straws i use in a year is totally inconsequential compared to plastic use that’s hard to avoid, like getting takeout food. It’s probably comparable to the amount of plastic i use from buying peanut butter at the supermarket. I am careful to dispose of my straws in trash that should take it safely to a landfill. I really don’t get the focus on plastic straws.
And paper straws were replaced for a reason.
The straws I got came with a little brush, once I lost that, I just used pipe cleaners. I rinse the straw, use the brush, then put it in the dishwasher. When I take it out, I then rinse it again and use a pipe cleaner to make sure there’s no soap residue.
Seems to work pretty well.
What I’d like is just a silicone tip. I didn’t much like silicone straws, but it would be nice to have something other than glass that is actually coming into contact with my teeth.
My mom likes to stuff plastic grocery bags in a drawer, so that if we need a smaller bag for something, we have one. It’s pretty convenient IMO, would definitely recommend trying it.
That seems like a lot of work.
Not really. You just gotta make it a habit.
Let me rephrase: That seems like an awful lot of work to keep a tiny bit of plastic out of a landfill, where it won’t do anyone any harm. If you are using a lot of water, or worse, heated water, it may even be using more raw energy than the cost of making a plastic straw. So if you are mostly relying on the dishwasher, no marginal cost. But if you are running hot water through it as you scrub and rinse it, that’s a real environmental cost.
Far better to just drink without a straw.
Ooh, yeah, that’s totally fair.
Do we know how long microplastics last?
Often the time span given for “decomposition” of plastic is only the time given for it to break into small enough pieces that the human eye doesn’t easily notice them.
There are just too damn many of us, aren’t there?
However, that looks to me more like an argument for actually re-using glass than for not using it at all. Apparently sand’s still available enough to make new glass cheaper than reusing it; maybe that financial cue could be jiggered.
Actual Mason jars? Have you priced those things lately?
Those are a readily salable item; even if the vendor won’t take them back, which they probably will. They can easily be sterilized; they’re made for it.
Easily dealt with. Use the money raised to increase the allotment of SNAP benefits, and the income level required to get them.
You know lots of consumers who want to have to cut much of what they buy out of annoying plastic bubbles, and to have to pull bits of plastic labels off much of the rest of it?
Is that a really tall exhaust tower in the picture, and if so, why? Do they test the exhaust for toxins?
That’s a pretty controversial subject in Upstate NY. There are a lot of complaints from people who are living near one of the landfills attempting to continually grow out of their originally-permitted bounds because of the waste being shipped in from, among other areas, Manhattan. They stink to high heaven – I occasionally have to drive by one, and agree with this – and there are concerns about what people are breathing in along with the stink; plus the exhaust and other problems from the trucks hauling the stuff.
“Just bury it somewhere else” isn’t a solution.
– I’m a bit puzzled about the need for straws in the first place, except for a small percentage of people with medical conditions who can’t easily drink without one. I grew up in a world in which a straw was something you drank ice cream sodas through, and wasn’t used to drink anything else; and if I get handed one with coffee or water or some kind of soda that doesn’t have a lump of icecream floating in it, I find the straw to make it harder, not easier, to drink than just drinking out of a cup or glass. Some drink containers seem to be now designed to only work well with a straw; but aside from the issue of disposal problems caused by the containers themselves, I don’t see why they can’t be designed to drink out of without straws.
But then, the only reason I can see to design the mustard containers so that it’s impossible to get all the mustard out (at least, without washing it out with vinegar into potato salad or something similar) is in order to try to force people to buy another one sooner.
I wonder about how much trouble I should go through to clean something before putting it in the recycling bin. For example, a jar of peanut butter is never going to be completely clean, no matter how careful you are to scrape out the last bits. (Other stuff, like jelly, will dissolve if you fill the jar with water and let it soak.)
You could use dish soap and a sink sprayer hose to completely wash it out.
I have a scrubber brush that’s used solely to wash out containers for recycling. They soak for a bit in the dishwater that first soaked other dishes.
(I reluctantly admit that the scrubber brush is plastic.)
Sure, you could, but how much soap and water are you going to use to clean out that jar? What is it worth versus the amount spent on the soap and water?
I run containers that might be recyclable through the dishwasher. That not only makes it slightly more likely they can be recycled, it also means my trash doesn’t smell.
(Using the word “trash” broadly, to include everything i plan to dispose of.)
It’s like two seconds under the tap and I run the brush through it for another two seconds. And I don’t use hot water, I’m just looking to make sure that everything is rinsed away.
I pretty much never eat out, so that’s not what I use straws for. I do however, occasionally make shakes and floats, and those are hard to drink without one.
I think straws became a target for ire recently because of the sea turtle with one stuck in it’s nose (you can google the story). I have always felt they were un-necessary, but my MIL insists on using one at every meal. She says it’s better for her teeth, because the Coca-Cola goes past her teeth and right to her tongue (dubious). She also uses one for a glass of ice water (SMH). I agree in the larger picture abstaining from a straw wont make a difference with the problem of plastic waste, but I feel it’s a good habit to avoid them because they are wasteful, single-use plastic items.
Another thing we do is decline plastic forks and such from take-out, as well as leaning toward restaurants with less plastic in their take-out process. And, as a child from the 80s, I still cut-up plastic six-pack rings LOL.
Not sure where you are going with this, but sure, most consumers would rather have packaging that protects the item they purchase than not have packaging. It could be easier to open, granted, but that’s a design issue, not a plastics issue. I’ve seen lots of packages made from plastic that were very easy to open.
Not sure what you mean by labels, why would I take the labels off? Could you give an example of what you are talking about here?
In any case, I am talking about things like bags, straws, food containers, bottles, jars, and the like. When I go to the store to buy shampoo, any packaging that is not plastic is going to be more expensive and inferior.
How would you design it differently, and what material would you use, in order to get it all out? And would that cost more than the quarter ounce of mustard that is left with current designs?