The War on Straws Is Coming to a Bar Near You
Jennifer Call was aghast recently when the server at her go-to Asheville, N.C., pizza spot delivered her Diet Coke.
It was missing the straw!
The server explained she had stopped giving them out automatically. Having worked in food service, Ms. Call says, she has memories of lipstick lingering after dishwashing.
“Let me see your glass racks,” she says, “and then I’ll decide if I don’t want a straw.” Besides, she says, drinking through a straw is more fun. She requested one and got it.
Ms. Call, 30 years old, was caught up in a war on straws declared by a growing cadre of bartenders, liquor companies, celebrities and environmentalists. They argue too many of the plastic drinking devices—from big soda straws to little cocktail numbers—end up in the ocean.
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Celebrities such as Mr. Grenier have pushed the cause on social media, encouraging people to #StopSucking. A California lawmaker has introduced a pending bill that would outlaw servers’ giving plastic straws to diners by default, and several U.S. cities are banning them or curtailing their use.
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It isn’t clear if the efforts are crimping the straw market. The Plastics Industry Association doesn’t have straw data. Straw maker Fuling Global Inc. says it supplies about 5 billion straws a year to some of the country’s largest fast-food chains and estimates U.S. consumers use 20 billion plastic straws annually. Fuling CEO Xinfu Hu says that the company has made prototypes of biodegradable plastic straws and thinks the government should promote use of such straws.
Mia Freis Quinn, a spokeswoman for the association, says the plastic straw’s detractors should focus on finding ways to recycle and recover them. Plastic straws, she says, play vital roles in everything from her children’s class projects to personal hygiene. “My dentist says if you’re not drinking water, you better be using a straw.”
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The straw that stirred the drink, by many accounts, was a fourth-grader in Vermont named Milo Cress, who in 2011 decided to quantify how many straws end up discarded. “I just started noticing the vast amount of straws that would come with every meal,” says Mr. Cress, now a high-school junior. “You wind up with piles of straws on the table.”
He and his mother called straw manufacturers and estimated U.S. diners throw away 500 million straws daily, or more than 1.5 a person. The figure became the go-to straw statistic, appearing in hundreds of media reports, corporate sustainability initiatives and on the National Park Service website.
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A soggy straw was what Jason Rammelsberg, 43, ended up with in Seattle, where plastic straws will be outlawed come July. The software-company manager’s encounter with a paper straw wasn’t bad for 10 minutes—until it started absorbing his Coke Zero. “Kinda near the end, I just said forget it, took the lid off and drank it like a man.”
Some bars use metal straws but say patrons like to steal them.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-war-on-straws-is-coming-to-a-bar-near-you-1521469968?
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