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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

straws

McDonald’s Joins Starbucks in Recyclable Cup Challenge

Fast food giant McDonald’s announced today that it is joining the efforts of Starbucks and Closed Loop Partners to spur development of a recyclable and/or compostable cup. The golden arches will contribute $5 million to Closed Loop’s NextGen Cup Consortium, which follows the $10 million Starbucks committed to the project back in March.

According to Closed Loop Partners, which invests in sustainable consumer goods and recycling technology and launched the Center for the Circular Economy, 600 billion paper and plastic cups are distributed worldwide each year. To help combat that waste, Closed Loop developed the NextCup Consortium and Challenge, an accelerator program to identify and commercialize “recovery solutions for environmentally friendly single-use hot and cold paper cups.”

The NextCup Challenge launches in September of this year and is “open to suppliers, innovators and solution providers with promising ideas to recover single use cups.” Awardees will get a grant of up to $1 million and will enter a six month accelerator program to scale up their solutions. Those interested can find out more here.

Five million dollars is a rounding error for a company like McDonald’s which had revenue of $5.14 billion in the first quarter of this year. But it’s a positive step for the company, which has 37,000 locations worldwide supersizing drinks on a daily basis, to join the public chorus about the negative impacts of single use cups and straws on the environment.

Reducing drink waste has become a hot topic during this hot summer, and with good reason. Plastic is junking up our oceans and becoming a huge environmental problem. Last week Starbucks announced that it would be phasing out single use plastic straws in all of its 28,000 locations by 2020. Celebrities are rallying against straws and cities at home and abroad are enacting plastic straw bans.

All this focus on waste reduction? I’m lovin’ it, and can’t wait to see more of it.

It’s Sorta Silly How Much I Heart My Stainless Steel Straws

OK. Look. When you are a blogger covering any beat 24/7, there comes a time when your brain needs to stop providing analysis and context to news events and just write about something small and yet totally satisfyingly cool.

Which is why, dear readers, I am writing to you about my straw.

Well, it’s not just any straw; it’s my stainless steel straw, which is part of a four-pack of stainless steel straws that I use every. Single. Day. It’s dumb, but I actually love my little metallic sipping cylinder.

For some self-indulgent context: rather than a hot coffee, I drink iced tea every morning. Preferably PG Tips with a splash of soy milk. For some reason, the whole experience is better with a straw, as drinking it straight out of a glass just feels weird to me for some inexplicably dumb reason.

It was also totally dumb that I used a single-use straw for as long as I did. Plastic straws have quickly become public enemy No. 1 and persona non grata at Starbucks, Hyatt, the whole city of Seattle and a whole host of other places.

This is good news, because Starbucks alone was pumping one billion plastic straws into our world every year. Plastic straws are part of a bigger plastic problem that, if we don’t do something about it, could lead to there being more plastic than fish (by weight) in the ocean by 2050.

The problem with giving up plastic straws, as with so many things in our modern world, is their convenience. It’s so easy to pop one into the top of your cold brew or frappé without any hassle. Plus, the alternatives aren’t always great. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb, recently wrote:

“Paper straws can get soggy quickly. And biodegradable straws made of wheat or bamboo can cost 5-6 times more than straws made of regular plastic. Which means they might fly for fancier coffee shops and cafés, but it might take a while for fast food chains who are ordering millions and millions of straws per week to roll them out in huge numbers.”

It’s true that at scale, there aren’t a ton of great options at this very moment. But on a more micro level, in your home, you can make the switch for less than ten bucks — and I highly recommend it. I picked up a pack of the Sipwell Stainless Steel drinking straws on Amazon for $6.98. They are dishwasher safe and even come with their own cleaning brush.

It’s weird to say that a straw works great, but the Sipwells do. Because they are metal, the straws turn cold when dunked in my morning iced tea, which is a small detail, but a nice one. And I’m so used to them that getting a disposable one when I’m out feels wrong. (Though I haven’t started carrying around a metal one around with me in a tiny case. Yet.)

There are other options as well. The aforementioned Catherine Lamb prefers glass ones as her go-to for reusable sipping. While those are pricier, they are definitely prettier.

I’ve read people on Twitter complain about how there are so many legitimate problems in the world, and we are focusing too much attention on how we slurp our sodas. But I think that’s almost the point. In a world where there are so many big problems that are beyond our control, changing the style of our straw is something we actually can do. Immediately. And if everyone makes this small change, it can actually have big results.

And big results when it comes to reducing waste is news I definitely want to cover.

Starbucks to Eliminate Single-Use Plastic Straws

I was just at Disneyland this past weekend, where the temperature hovered around 100 degrees. That is a very fast way to get a very real sense of exactly how wasteful single-use plastic straws are, as you see tens of thousands of people slurp down sodas and iced coffees then toss them in the trash.

To help combat this waste, Starbucks announced today that it is eliminating single-use plastic straws from its more than 28,000 locations by 2020. According to the press announcement, this will remove more than one billion plastic straws per year from Starbucks stores.

Replacing the straws will be a new strawless lid for all iced coffee, tea and espresso beverages. Basically, Starbucks is building an adult sippy cup. These strawless lids are already available in 8,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada. Straws aren’t completely dead, however, as the company will make compostable plastic and paper ones available for people who request them.

This move by Starbucks could push the growing wave of anti-straw sentiment more into the mainstream as our oceans and environment pile up with plastic junk. The European Union has proposed a ban on single-use plastic items including straws, while Scotland and the United Kingdom have each launched plans to ban plastic straws. Here in the U.S., Seattle (home to Starbucks) became the first major American city to ban single-use plastic straws starting the first of this month.

According to the Washington Post, Starbucks is the largest retailer to commit to eliminating straws. And while there, I saw that Disneyland Starbucks locations were already using the new strawless lids. Hopefully other food retailers at the park will make the same commitment to make the “happiest place on Earth” a little less wasteful.