Friday, April 12, 2019

2076 Plastic Straws in the Wind... and the Landfill




There are two competing themes here.  “You’ll get my plastic straw when you pull it out of my cold dead mouth” and “If you put a year’s worth of plastic straws end to end, the line would reach the newly photographed black hole.

Seattle banned ‘em.  Nobody got hurt. But neither has it sparked the onset of birds and butterflies, beautiful toddlers frolicking in parks on cloudless sunny weekend afternoons.

Now, New York is considering similar legislation.   And it probably will pass.  And we’ll never get to see the first straw in the end-to-end line reach the black hole.

More often than not, New York is where West Coast trendiness goes to die.  But NY beat every other big city to the punch when it comes to congestion pricing on its busiest roads at their busiest times.  Seattle is thinking about reversing the west-to-east direction of prevailing winds by adopting a similar plan.

What the New York media have pretty much moved to the back of the bus is this: London’s already doing it. And there are stiff fines for failure to pay.

Now back to the straws.  There are a lot of them in the kitchen here at the Wessays (™) Secret Mountain Laboratory and Hideaway.  We steal them all the time. And we re-use them, and that other no-no, plastic grocery bags.

But here’s something the youngest among us don’t realize:  those lard-building sugary drinks taste better through paper than they do through plastic.  So… a win-win situation. Less plastic in the landfill, no overstuffing of the black hole and tastier ways to fertilize the growth of your pending obesity.

Digression: Coffee-to-go tastes better in plain paper cups than it does in paper cups with plastic lining.  But we digress.

Many restaurants have already converted to paper.  It’s easier and faster to do when you don’t yet have to.

No drink is tastier than a thick strawberry milkshake poured from a cold metal container into a drinking glass that’s real glass and sucked through a paper straw.

What will we do with all those plastic straws here at the lab? Probably open a straw museum to go along with our world-famous collection of cocktail stirrers from defunct New York and New Jersey restaurants.

SHRAPNEL:
--National Enquirer Shocker!! The hedge fund that owns this thing has put it up for sale and reports say a buyer has been found.  The Enquirer is trump’s trumpet.  And the moneymen know that’s bad for the rest of their businesses.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Comments? Send them here: wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2019


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