by Peter Immanuelsen

For years now, we have been told to stop using plastic straws and instead use paper straws because they are supposedly much better for the environment.

The EU went ahead and banned plastic straws years ago. Anyone who has used a paper straw will likely agree that they aren’t pleasant. After just a short time, they get soggy, taste horrible and dissolve in your mouth. An overall terrible experience.

Now it turns out that the propaganda about paper straws being better for the environment was completely false. Have we then been drinking from the useless paper straws all for nothing? That seems to be the case.

A study commissioned by the South Korean government looked at regular plastic straws and compared them with paper straws and some other straw alternatives. What they found was shocking (or not so shocking, depending on who you ask).

The study did a full life cycle assessment on straws, so it was very thorough. They looked at a range of different categories, like climate change, ozone depletion, human toxicity and more; and they found that plastic straws scored best in 10 out of 16 categories.

Plastic straws had the lowest impact in categories including climate change, acidification, particulate matter and toxicity to humans.

Note, they did not measure potential leeching of chemicals from straws into drinks, rather, they measured based on emissions and resource use among other things and how this could affect humans.

The issue of toxic chemicals in paper straws is a different issue, which I will get to later. And let me tell you that the paper straws don’t do very well there either.

The incredible thing here is that plastic straws scored lower on greenhouse gas impact than paper straws: with the thing that climate activists have been so concerned about, namely CO2, the plastic straws score better.

Paper straws had a worse CO2 score than plastic strawsL making them is energy intensive, more so than making plastic straws.