The final straw
In Plastic or paper? The truth about drinking straws, Ally Hirschlag wrestles with the conundrum of substitutes for plastic straws. Everyone knows that for every plastic straw used, a baby turtle dies; so they're being replaced with environmentally-friendly alternatives made from paper or bamboo.
Except those environmentally-friendly alternatives may be alternatives that aren't as environmentally-friendly as people assume. For they may contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain. Oh, shit!
The article's over 1700 words long, so that's quite a lot of reading to do if you actually believe that straws are an unnecessary and poncy affectation, and the best alternative to plastic straws is to use none at all. That, after all, is why lips were invented. It's also why I refuse to wash up my wife and daughters' reusable drinking straws when they leave them in the kitchen sink. Everything else, fine; drinking straws, not. What a shit I am.
Even our straw-sucking correspondent got there in the end, bless her little cotton socks.
So, it's far from a simple choice. The scientific evidence is mixed, depending where you look for the harm on the environment. Every expert I spoke with said it's instead better to refuse straws altogether if you are able to. Then you can sit back and enjoy your drink.
Ally Hirschlag, Plastic or paper? The truth about drinking straws, BBC Future
Most notable, however, is that this is one of those few BBC articles in which editorial changes are acknowledged. I've noted this phenomenon before; but, to my recollection, it usually happens in magazine features such as this one, rarely in developing stories to be updated news stories.
* This article was edited on 7 November 2023 to make clear the disputed validity of the statistic of 500 million straws being used each day in the US.
Ally Hirschlag, Plastic or paper? The truth about drinking straws, BBC Future