This is one of those essays that leads you along a pretty rough path.
So, if you haven't noticed both in the US and in Europe....plastic straws are fairly negative now (like plastic bags). McDonalds wanted to get ahead of this situation and have some positive stories to tell. They were going to dump plastic straws entirely.
Leading out of McDonalds-UK, straws were all going to paper. They'd gone and done some bare essentials research, and then bought a number of pallets of paper straws to start this new program.
Then, this odd development occurred....they discovered that paperstraws simply don't work well with milkshakes. Maybe it's the thickness of the paper, or the absorption level of the straw....but it simply doesn't work.
Added to this misery, the people who do recycling for McDonalds-UK.....looked at the waste product left, and made the decision that these recyclable straws are NOT recyclable. So they go into the regular waste....not the recyclable waste.
What happens now? No one says much. Maybe they could go to bamboo straws, or maybe just dump straws entirely.....handling you a plastic spoon for the milkshake.
The amusing side of this is that the environmentalists getting into the middle of this whole business....just made it a bigger mess than it was already.
