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With their ads earlier this week that they will stop using plastic straws, Starbucks and American Airlines have joined the rising tide against these ubiquitous disposable tubes. Like the city of Seattle, companies such as Alaska Airlines and a growing number of environmental groups, Starbucks has reported growing concerns about rising plastics in the United States. the world's oceans in their decision to implement change. Although these devices account for only about 4% of the roughly 8 million tonnes of plastic dumped each year in the world's seas, environmental groups such as Conservation International see this initiative as a "significant action to protect our oceans" .
it is clear that customers can live without them, this raises a question: why do we use disposable plastic straws in the first place? And how have they become so ubiquitous that they represent the whole problem of disposable plastics?
Although historians are not sure that the first civilization is caught by straws, great apes have shown a propensity to use tubes for their consumption. Thus, "drinking tubes" in one form or another have probably been used by humans for thousands of years. The oldest confirmed use of straw has been found in an ancient Sumerian tomb dating back to about 3,000 BC. On its walls, members of the royal family drink beer through long cylindrical tubes; among the offerings to the dead, there are drinking utensils in the form of lapis lazuli precious stones.
The commoners of antiquity until the mid-nineteenth century used more accessible materials for their straw-plants with a natural tube-like form, such as ryegrbad, dried reeds or, unsurprisingly , just straw. Although useful for consumers up to a certain point, these natural straws tended to break or disintegrate during use, forcing a drinker to use multiple straws to finish a single drink , or imparting an earthy flavor to any beverage.
A Marvin Chester Stone, owner of a paper cigarette factory in Washington, DC, in the late 19th century, did not approve of this trend of disintegration. As the often quoted legend of the straw story says, Stone was so disturbed by the grbady residues that he met while sipping his mint juleps that he decided to invent a alternative more acceptable to natural straw. At some point in the 1880s, he wrapped a few strips of paper around a pencil, glued them together and covered the whole thing with paraffin wax – and the rest is the story of the drinks.
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Although specialized (and more durable) drinking devices have been floating around American cups for at least 30 years – an A. Fessenden has filed a "tube patent application" in 1850 while an E. Chaplin had created a "drinking tube for the disabled" rubber – the invention of Stone became ubiquitous, as a "cheap substitute, Durable and impeccable for natural straws commonly used for the administration of drugs, beverages, In the decade following Stone's patent application in 1888, his paper and wax straw became a reserve item for the growing number of soda foundations that began to reshape the landscape of the American restaurant.
s key to the popularity of Stone's artificial straw. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, public health activists were waging a widely publicized war against the "public drinking cup," a metal or glbad cup left in the public fountains for all those who had thirst. These common cups were condemned as a source of many deaths and illness in American cities, but disposable cups were incredibly expensive at the time. Instead, the drinkers were handled with single-use artificial straws that were less likely to spread the disease.
Paper straw undergoes very little change in the decades that followed Mr. Stone's infamous mint julep. in the 1930s thanks to an inventor in San Francisco named Joseph Friedman. It was only in the 1950s that straws acquired their now infamous plastic luster. The economic boom that followed World War II meant more money in the pockets of consumers and a dizzying array of brilliant new products for them to spend it on. The plastic became less and less expensive to produce at that time, as were the fast food dishes, each accompanied by soda in take-away cups with reticles that easily tore the finer paper flakes. Over time, plastic straw has surpbaded paper as standard in restaurants across the United States and, ultimately, around the world.
Today, it is estimated that the United States goes through hundreds of millions of straws every day (although the exact number is hard to count.) The World Watch Institute claims that these straws could surround the 39, whole of Earth twice and half every 24 hours. And while more natural or reusable alternatives to plastic straws are appearing more and more on the market, it is clear that the world still has a huge dependence on straw, which marks the health of the planet and the quality of the experiments. consumption. If the great apes use them, it is unlikely that humans will be able to go long without drinking tubes in one form or another, but perhaps the lesson of the straw story is that it does not matter. is that a matter of time before the next iteration
Emelyn Rude is a food historian and the author of Tastes Like Chicken: A History of l & # 39; favorite bird of America
A version of this article appears on July 23, 2018, issue of TIME
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