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.
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.
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.
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
You’re discounting transportation and manufacturing (energy) costs.
Reusable only works if it’s manufactured fairly locally and actually gets recycled, which a lot of stuff doesn’t, even if it’s made from glass or metal.
We need to move away from packaging altogether.
Bring-your-own-container is the only way.
Theres a plastic lining in aluminium cans too. So glass is the way.
It’s quite thin for aluminum, and the downside with glass is the high energy cost of melting it. I’d like if we went back to washing and reusing bottles, but I suppose that’s a big shift in processing capabilities.
Not 100% win though:
Glass bottles of lemonade, iced tea, soft drinks and beer contained on average around 100 microplastic particles per litre, which is between five and 50 times more than plastic bottles or cans. Source
Forgive any ignorance or arrogance on my part, I’m not a materials scientist at all, but wouldn’t the plastic caps on plastic bottles also have the same deleterious effect?
I didn’t read anything in there about them exploring the source of the plastic particulates in plastic bottles. Whether from the bottle or from the cap too.
and tin cans. i think with tin it might be wax though
Some poorly made reusable shopping bags rip or otherwise break before they get used enough times to break even with the single use disposable plastic shopping bags they are supposed to replace. Especially the cheap ones bring given out as freebies.
That’s bullshit from the oil companies. They did a “study” that concluded that, but if you read the methodology, they made the assumption that the reusable bag would be unusable after 20 uses.
Meanwhile I’ve been going to the grocery store every week for quite a few years using the same bags without much issue. I’ve had one strap on a bag break after ~10 years of use, so there’s that I guess. Still haven’t thrown it out, keep meaning to repair it which I never get around to doing.
Anyway, if you read between the lines of the study conducted by the oil companies, if you reuse the bag more than 20 times (half a year of going to the grocery store every week) you are reducing plastic waste.
No, that’s no bullshit, we just recently had a reusable shopping bag’s handles literally rip off after only the third use…
Consider buying less shitty bags then.
It was a donation from a food bank, but thanks for the thought.
Also, how do you know what bags are and aren’t shitty? Do you have a list of such bags, with weight limit capacity, plus age limit before the threads start to come loose or dryrot?
Didn’t think so.
Most of my bags are given to me by boomers that can never remember to take their bags to the store and just buy more. I think I’ve only actually bought one shopping bag about 25 years ago, which is the one that had it’s handle tear off after about near to two decades of service. I don’t put more weight in the bag than a plastic bag would be able to carry. I have a fabric tote bag and a backpack to use for heavier stuff. I just exercise some common sense with my shopping bags, I guess.
Are you claiming that disposable plastic bags would never have the handles tear off (or the bag just split open) if you put too much weight into them? I think the same rules apply to either, it’s a mess either way if you put too much weight into a single bag, so… don’t do that.
Still waiting on straws made of dry pasta. Biodegradable, strong, edible if you really want
Wouldn’t those significantly alter the taste of whatever they’re sitting in?
Could we do Twizzlers instead?
bucatini is a pasta coffee swizzler basically if you want to try that. makes damn good pasta too
The real trick all along was always reducing your consumption of disposable products.
I mean waxed paper cups aren’t super, they are likely better than plastic, but the wax is likely a fossils fuel byproduct
Yup, just looked it up from your comment because it made me realize that I had no idea what wax was actually made of.
Paraffin wax is a colorless solid derived from petroleum, coal, or oil shale, consisting of hydrocarbon molecules
It is also a mixed material which makes it difficult to recycle
I’ve never seen the one on the right. I’m guessing this is an American thing?
Fuck people for trying anything, I guess.
But what if I enjoy feeling morally superior to people who are trying their best?
You hit them with a signature look of superiority as you sip from your metal straw.
I’ve had paper straws served in plastic packaging!
Corporations are bad and therefore I cannot make any changes myself!
Are they not cornstarch PLA? That’s biodegradable, indeed hot-compostable, and not a plastic
Glad to see somebody else notice this. I find getting a large plastic cup with these “disintegrate halfway though” paper straws bloody ridiculous.
I never had an issue with the paper cups. He’ll, I’d be more than happy if more places offered discounts to fill your own and I could just keep a clean tumbler in my bag/car.
I’ve never seen the thing on right in my life. In the EU both cup and straw are paper
