Suck it

I’ll seriously never understand the need for a sippy straw.

The only, ONLY person I asked who had a rational reason for their straw usage was in a bid to protect his teeth from acids in soda and juices.
That being said, I can only look back to college years, but he had GREAT teeth.
I'm closer to 40 than 30, and well, I need a lot of dental work I can't afford.
Maybe he was on to something.
- My response would be to reevaluate soda and juices.
  That would have a much more profound impact on your oral health. Probably your overall health too.
- I just skip soda alltogether..or any sugary drinks 95% of the time
  Edit: why i actually wanted to comment - my teeth stil suck
- Genetics also play a lot when it's about dental health and longevity. Base-level dental health is negatively correlated to bone health for whatever reason, also if you have fragile nails you're more likely will experience bad teeth in your later life regardless of how much you brush, floss, etc.
Me neither, but I learned that :
kids really like it, you can bubble and stuff,
it is useful when you drink from a can cause the border can be soiled (by rat piss or other tasty stuff, by the way if you drink from a can you should always wipe it with a cloth or clean with water before putting your mouth on it),
a guy I know who can't use his hands, so his only way to drink without help is with a straw

Conservatives back then: "If you need a straw to drink, you're a baby!"

Conservatives now: "If I can't have my plastic straw, I'll literally cry!"

So the original conservatives were right and we lost our maturity by allowing society to 'progress'?
- It's more of a contrarianism thing. They hate liberalism (by liberalism I mean not the modern moderate-conservatism/neoliberalism, but the foundation ideology of our democracies) more than anything, and they temporarily adjust their ideology to appear more counter-cultureish. See their sudden pro-pornography and pro-female objectification shift when the first gamergate happened, their anti-porn activism moved to more pseudo-secular orgs like NCOSE and Collective Shout. They started to shift back to anti-porn during the Vaush folder-reveal drama, and even faster after the second Trump victory.

I am also team, "It's a cup, use your mouth, drink from the cup". No use...no waste.

You shouldn't use paper straws because the glue holding it together contains carcinogens, which you then take into your body as you suck down your drink.

Admittedly, killing yourself is very green, but should probably be avoided.

It’s a cup, take off the lid and drink

I like the noodle ones! They stay strong for hours then you can just throw them away or crush them. Not sure if they’re actually noodles but they’re similar.

My friend keeps worrying they're not gluten free though. I just skip straws when we drink, I don't find straws really useful and also out of solidarity.
- Even if they weren’t, would there be enough transference to matter? Not sure

How do we feel about metal straws? I like the taste

I really like those lids where the front opens as you tip it, and closes when you put the cup on the table. No straw needed.
\ I wish they weren't plastic though, not seen a biodegradable version yet.

When my grandma died last year I found a still closed bag with real straws. Made of plastic. Like two hundred or so. Now my kids get one every once in a while and get told to cherish them because those are the last we are gonna get.

Actually real straws are made of, well, straw...
Plastic don't age well be careful, I throw out an old pack of straws cause it was breaking in small pieces, I guess my kids had their dose of micro plastics
I still have a drawer full of them and I wash them until they wear out ~~because I'm gross~~ because I hate how cold the metal straws get when they're sitting in ice
- Silicone tips on metal straws solve this issue.

Here's the secret they don't want you to know: You don't need to use a straw at all. Forgo the lid and voila! You've got a cup!

Tip the cup enough, ice attack
- Have you considered not being a small child?
Less spillage with a lid when on the move

Bamboo straws are nice, metal straws are the best, and they might look super nice.

Oh mais c'est une communauté francophone, les pailles en bambou c'est bien, les pailles en métal c'est le mieux, et y'en a des très classes !
- Oups, c'est un dommage ce qu'il a inundé avec des comments anglaises quand le topic devenu populaire.
  (Je suis en train d'apprendre la français et je ne sais pas si je suis écrire correctement).
  (Je preferé aussi les pailles en métal, d'ailleurs.)
- Je n'étais pas sûr non plus que ce soit une communauté française...
I like glass the most because they dont have a "taste".
- Didn't even know glass straws were a thing, don't think I've ever seen one.
- Yea, I always fear they might break though
Pas de paille, pas de problèmes.
But don't you have to be adamant about cleaning them, especially if you aren't drinking plain water?
- Yes, I do realize that sounds like an extremely lazy concern.. :-/

: Quand j'étais petit, les adultes ne buvaient pas avec une paille, c'était que pour les enfants au restau ou à des anniversaires.

I never had this issue with a paper straw.

I didn't for the longest time, until I did.
I'm not a big straw user, but same, never understood what people do with straws that grinds their gears so much with the material change.
Maybe there's different qualities around the world's markets?
- I can tell you that some get soggy faster than others. Some are unusable after sitting in a glass for more than 30 minutes; others I haven't had any issue with.
- Yeah I’ve heard places wanted to make the switch but just went super cheap or the manufacturing wasn’t there right away.

There is no good reason why we don't have good straws from natural materials consumers wouldn't differentiate to plastic ones.

It's so little material development and so much lobbying & a bit of logistics issue.

Non degradable stuff from "natural" materials would have the same issues. It must break down in water.
- But it doesn't have to do it in the timespan of 47 seconds.
- Bamboo is pretty good. Pasta straws are also okay.
  Metal or glass are the best.
- I know a place with raw noodles straws. It stay hard long enough to drink, and it's fun.
- Your thinking about materials is a bit flawed there.
  You have biodegradable bags that can hold water for days (5+year old tech). Same for weather-proof packaging. Nowdays that is not the issue, it took (only) a couple of years but companies have developed good alternatives.
  Even those cardboard ice cream tubs from like 10+ years ago can hold water for months (had it outside & left it when I noticed how it didn't let the water go yet - it was the less waxed outside of the packaging that gave out first).
  Three is a huge difference between dissolving in water immediately or after months - or even never: eg cellulose ("wood") doesn't dissolve in water as such, but it's eaten by a huge number of various bacteria (which ofc doesn't happen within hours of using the straw).
  Cardboard straws getting soggy is just a design flaw of that specific product that (it seems?) gets sold anyway, bcs consumers don't demand better & rather blame the gov doing good than the bar/restaurant/store not giving two fucks (or just bcs profit) & ordering actually viable stuff.
  Another example - several decades ago the paper industry developed those little transparent/seethrough windows on envelopes from celuloze (~paper) just bcs they just wanted to ditch the plastics industry. And nobody noticed.
- We have compostable plastics now though. They feel slightly different than regular plastic, but they’re still durable and work well while using them. They’re all over Seattle thanks to the single use plastics ban.

la paille a même des couleurs françaises

(avertissement : traduction)

Actually plastic straws are the best. They can be recycled. But stupid people are throwing them away into ocean. Who is guilty in that? Big corporations and governments who don't want to recycle trash properly.

Because trash is being dumped in unsafe ways. Or just put into the ocean because it is cheaper. You can export trash to SEA and they put it in bad quality dumps that get flushed into the ocean when storm season strikes.
Fun fact: in my area, straws can only be recycled at the "Center for Hard to Recycle Materials," and even then they have to be separated out from all other plastics. You can imagine how that affects the rate at which they get recycled, I assume!
recycling is last on the list of reduce, reuse, recycle. also recycling plastic often just isn't effective. the better approach is to make things out of inoffensive materials into products that you can reuse.
first of all you need to sort plastics properly (and there are dozens of types you'll commonly encounter), and then you need to make sure to sort out all the plastics that are bonded or laminated to anything else. you can't really separate those kinds of plastics from their partner materials properly on an industrial scale, as in there's like one factory that can properly recycle tetrapaks into recycled material in the world for example. every other waste management facility either incinerates the plastic or adds them to a landfill. recycled plastic is in the single digit % of all plastic products.
due to the expensive recycling process it's almost always cheaper to use fresh new plastic instead of recycled material. not to mention that when recycled plastic is contaminated with different plastics eventually its usability as a material decreases.
Guess who provided those taking points for you to repeat so religiously ...
Recycling not only doesn't work on any scale bcs logistics, it also introduces extra harmful (carcinogenic) chemicals, so you shouldn't drink from recycled plastic straws anyway, and degrades the material so it's not even sustainable.