Posted on 08/09/2019 3:46:51 AM PDT by Libloather
London (CNN) - McDonald's has reportedly admitted that its new paper straws, rolled out last year to help "protect the environment," can't be recycled - unlike the plastic versions they replaced.
**SNIP**
But the fast food giant acknowledged on Monday that the new versions are too thick to be processed by its recyclers.
"While the materials are recyclable, their current thickness makes it difficult for them to be processed by our waste solution providers, who also help us recycle our paper cups," a McDonald's spokesman told the UK's Press Association news agency.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Back in the day, we didn't have super sized drinks.
That actually makes a lot of sense. Burn the paper at a plant, boil water, make steam, turn a turbine, make electricity. Now you have electricity from a product that would have ended up in a land fill.
The problem is that there is not a lot of available land fill space CLOSE enough to where the population lives. There is plenty of potential landfill space in Wyoming, Montana, etc. However, there is not much space left on Staten Island.
They make wood pellets that people like me burn in their pellet stoves in the winter from compressed sawdust. Why not make fake fire logs of something like that from recycled paper or cardboard.
With the increase of online commerce, the largest volume in the trash stream is actually cardboard. It is about twice as much in cubic yards/volume as anything else. The other components being mixed paper, glass, plastics, aluminum cans , scrape metals, construction debris and lastly general mixed trash.
Replace paper bags with plastic bags anyone?
“Back in the day, we didn’t have super sized drinks.”
Good point. Also didn’t have as many super-sized people.
McDonald’s is poison garbage, anyway.
Ha...... Recycled straws?
Pissing in the ocean
America’s problem is not getting rid of straws. Americas problem is not getting rid of progressives.
Any one progressive causes more harm than all the discarded plastic strawss
The largest recycler in California has closed their doors.
No it is not
Your visious slander is not only made up but is untrue
Your post is therefore fake travesty
The fact is the ONLY item in the trash that actually has value are aluminum cans.
Of course, many states have a $.05-$.10 deposit. However, even states that do not, there is still a value for scrap aluminum. There is a Anheuser Busch container recovery plant right down the street from me that is buying truckloads of aluminum everyday. Aluminum is actually much easier to recycle than other metals. Anheuser Busch needs a lot of aluminum to sell their product.
“you’ll have to just hold out your hands and the cashier will dump the burger and fries in your hands.”
You mean like in England where they dump a hot load of greasy fish and chips in your hand with only a thin piece of wax paper separating?
We really should be burning a lot more of our trash. By the time you sort it, ship it some where, process it and then convert it back into a useable product you are creating a lot more pollution than if you just burned it on site.
I used to live in Wilton, NH. They still have a grandfathered by the state trash burning plant. They still separated out a lot of recyclables. However, what was left was burned on site. They actually had an employee sort through the aluminum cans, bag them up and take them down(10 miles away) to Mass and turn them in for the $.05.
I was referring to the Chinese polluting the Pacific Ocean with plastic.
I am not a big fan of recycling but I’m not against it if it is cost effective by the market. There should not be a single taxpayer subsidy spent for it. At the same time, we don’t want to go back to the days when you could light Lake Erie on fire because we didn’t care for the environment at all.
So I will tolerate recycling if it makes market sense. Generally, it doesn’t.
Because recycling generally costs more than it is worth, the US has been paying the Chinese to do our recycling for us. We stupidly pay them to haul off recyclables, and in turn they promise to recycle it. Then they get into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and they shove it all off the ship.
This has resulted in large accumulations of non-biodegradable plastic accumulating as monolithic “islands” floating in the ocean, which is damaging to fish.
So the unintended consequence of this rabid stupidity is to turn relatively innocuous landfill plastic into a serious oceanic pollution problem.
Put another way, liberals destroy everything they touch. But if it means liberals can’t do more damage with plastic straws, I don’t have any problem with using paper straws, just as I would rather see more widespread use of paper containers for fast food, instead of non-biodegradable plastic and foam containers.
I am not an environmentalist in the least. I am not much of a conservationist. But if a cheap, convenient substitute can be used in place of something that hurts the environment, I say lets use it.
It has been a small inconvenience since I have had to bring cloth grocery bags shopping for food since California banned plastic bags and started charging for paper bags, but in my heart I know that using the same reusable cloth bags for my shopping does a nice job of reducing waste while not costing me another penny or really causing me any inconvenience — only when I have to walk back to the car when I forget my bags.
B$ we used them for years before Plastic was even though of. They are easily recycled into CO2 like any other hydrocarbon.
This is how liberals protect the environment.
“While the materials are recyclable, their current thickness makes it difficult for them to be processed by our waste solution providers, who also help us recycle our paper cups,” a McDonald’s spokesman told the UK’s Press Association news agency.
If they’re implying that their recyclers can handle the bottom of a paper cup, and the curved area where it attaches to the cylinder of the cup, but cannot handle a paper straw, I’m going to have to call B.S. and ask for proof.
If thickness nor curvature disqualify cups, why would they disqualify straws?
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