Paper and bamboo straws contain PFAS chemicals more often than plastic straws do (opens in new tab)

So what I do now is not even worry about the order, but when the drinks arrive I strain out all the ice, to stop the melting and dilution process. Unfortunately I still see an appalling amount of ice displacing the volume of beverage.

Also, I have a beard, and so a straw is the best thing to prevent milk or soda or whatever soaking into my facial hair.

Currently I have a vast stockpile of plastic straws, because I usually order two drinks but use one straw. Mostly, the only sustainable, crap straws are the ones I've purchased separately.

but you waste a straw instead. i don't see any net benefit wrt this particular aspect

Wait have you ever gotten an illness that was attributed to a rim of a beverage glass that wasn’t also present in the rest of the beverage?

Because banning them is highly visible and enshittifies life in general (paper straws are fucking garbage and everyone knows this) without solving the actual problem (pollution should trend downwards).

This makes environmentalists happy, because making life worse for everyone is their goal (actual progress on the problem means they lose relevance/social power and nobody ever destroys their own meal ticket); and it makes the greenwashers happy, because it makes most people think something's being done even when it isn't (and can continue to sell truthy solutions that feel good but don't work, plus the profit and power that comes from having massive capital stores in an economic context artificially driven to zero-sum with environmentalism as the excuse to impose it).

I'm all for action against excessive packaging (as long as we don't cause food waste, i.e. by banning the plastic keeping fruits and vegetables edible for much longer) but nested plastics seems to be rather rare in my experience. Even sixpacks of cans come in cardboard packaging these days. It's been months since I last saw nested plastic packaging.

I've never seen any law specifically targeting straws. Most of the laws target single-use plastics, such as plastic cutlery and plates. The people focusing on straws seem to be "the damn liberal environmentalist communists want to make your life worse" types of media.

Meaning they are not being careful to distinguish between PFAS as included by the manufacturer, and PFAS that comes later.

So all the PFAS they found - is that just PFAS from the local water supply? If so the entire research is called into question.

(I highly doubt glass straws are being marketed as easy clean - the coating doesn't stay, you have to reapply it, so I doubt they would bother spending that money on straws for something temporary.)