Why plastic straws are being axed by McDonald’s

Fast-food giant to replace single-use
plastic straws with paper ones from September as environmental
fears grow

One-Minute Read

The burger chain currently gets through around 1.8 million
plastic straws every day in the UK alone. From September, these
will be replaced by paper straws, manufactured by Welsh
start-up Transcend Packaging and Huhtamaki, at its plant in
Belfast.

“Reflecting the broader public debate, our customers told us
they wanted to see a move on straws,” McDonald’s said in a
statement.

The fast-food giant is the latest company to move away from
single-use plastic products, “which can take hundreds of years to
decompose if not recycled”, the BBC reports.

Paper straws were the default in bars and restaurants until the
1960s, when they were overtaken by plastic. Britain now uses an
estimated 8.5 billion a year, while the US gets through more than
500 million a day, according to The Daily Telegraph.

Figures from the US-based Ocean
Conservancy’s TIDES data
system show that plastic straws are the 11th most
common item of rubbish found during oceanic clean-ups, making up
about 3% of recovered waste.

Straws are usually made from type 5 plastic, or
polypropylene, which can take up to 200 years to degrade and “will
never be fully off the Earth”, says the blog Get Green Now.

“To make matters worse, the degrading of plastic releases
chemicals that are toxic to wildlife and the environment,” the blog
adds.

And although type 5 plastic can be recycled, this “does not
happen nearly as much as it should”, Metro says.

Even when plastic straws are recycled, they are generally
“too lightweight to make it through the mechanical recycling
sorter”, which means they “drop through sorting screens and mix
with other materials and are too small to separate, contaminating
recycling loads or getting disposed [of] as garbage”, says campaign
group For a
Strawless Ocean.