Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws, But Accidentally Ends Up Using More Plastic

Last updated on: July 13, 2018 at 1:45 pm by Martha English

Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws, But Accidentally Ends Up Using More Plastic 2018-07-13T13:45:07-05:00 Martha English

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Do you hate plastic straws?

If not, you aren’t “woke,” as this is now the main litmus test, apparently. Environmental activists believe that if you give up using a straw, it’ll save the planet… in spite of a serious lack of evidence to support this theory. However, that doesn’t matter to the leftists. Reason magazine reports:

In July, Seattle imposed America’s first ban on plastic straws. Vancouver, British Columbia, passed a similar ban a few months earlier. There are active attempts to prohibit straws in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco. A-list celebrities from Calvin Harris to Tom Brady have lectured us on giving up straws. Both National Geographic and The Atlantic have run long profiles on the history and environmental effects of the straw. Vice is now treating their consumption as a dirty, hedonistic excess.

Not to be outdone by busybody legislators, Starbucks, the nation’s largest food and drink retailer, announced on Monday that it would be going strawless.

By 2020, all single-use plastic straws will have been eliminated in all of their 28,000 stores worldwide. (That is, in fact, a lot of stores.)

So how will people actually, you know, drink these beverages?

The cold drinks with fancy new strawless lids that the company currently serves with its cold brew nitro coffees. (Frappuccinos will still be served with a compostable or paper straw.)

But here’s the kicker:

Yet missing from this fanfare was the inconvenient fact that by ditching plastic straws, Starbucks will actually be increasing its plastic use. As it turns out, the new nitro lids that Starbucks is leaning on to replace straws are made up of more plastic than the company’s current lid/straw combination.

Right now, Starbucks patrons are topping most of their cold drinks with either 3.23 grams or 3.55 grams of plastic product, depending on whether they pair their lid with a small or large straw. The new nitro lids meanwhile weigh either 3.55 or 4.11 grams, depending again on lid size.

(I got these results by measuring Starbucks’ plastic straws and lids on two seperate scales, both of which gave me the same results.)

This means customers are at best breaking even under Starbucks’ strawless scheme, or they are adding between .32 and .88 grams to their plastic consumption per drink. Given that customers are going to use a mix of the larger and smaller nitro lids, Starbucks’ plastic consumption is bound to increase, although it’s anybody’s guess as to how much.

In response to questions about whether their strawless move will increase the company’s plastic consumption, a Starbucks spokesperson told Reason “the introduction of our strawless lid as the standard for non-blended beverages by 2020 allows us to significantly reduce the number of straws and non-recyclable plastic” as the new lids are recyclable, while the plastic straws the company currently uses are not.

Image Credit: poolie on Flickr

Hat Tip: Reason Magazine

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