To me it doesn’t seem that paper straws is about the resource consumption or oil used or anything like that. I think you have completely misunderstood the purpose.
Even with the order of magnitude increase in resources used it’s still insignificant, as you touch on.
What’s not insignificant is that in the contexts where straws are used.. fast food and coffee shops and such, they’re all too likely to be just thrown out into nature rather than being properly disposed of.
Any material in that category needs to be biodegradable. That’s just a hard requirement in my opinion. So plastics is just not a suitable material.
Yes, there are other sources of plastic pollution that are much worse in volume. Though they tend to end up in other places. We need to work on all the sources of plastic pollution in parallel.
(Unless we go the other route and do massive bioengineering of microorganisms to let them break down plastics)
from my point of view, it depends on how much of it there is and what effect it has on the environment
sand, glass, metal, and rust aren't biodegradable either, but i don't think we should ban mountains because they throw sand out into nature when they erode
plastic straws are generally polypropylene, which is photodegradable to relatively nontoxic materials
Plastic straws strewn in a natural setting feels a lot worse than sand. I can't tell you exactly why, but I still think that "don't throw plastic around" is a good starting place for a discussion and I don't think it's productive to argue that point.
Reading about this, you're right definition-wise (Glass is not biodegradable), but in practice Glass is degradable to safe materials - and this happens naturally - which is what we really want.
polypropylene is indeed pretty inert when it's not photodegrading (though there are some interesting studies finding biodegradation https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:yE8AZEyCArgJ:sc... but all in aerobic environments afaik), but when it does biodegrade or photodegrade, the degradation products are pretty harmless, as with glass and sand
it does photodegrade reasonably fast if exposed to sunlight, in years rather than decades (or millennia as in glass)
implanted soda-lime glass causes irritation in a similar way, by the way; i have a granuloma in my foot right now which is encapsulating a splinter of glass i'm biodegrading. the issue with polypropylene is that it's, believe it or not, more resistant to biodegradation than glass, at least inside the human body
the issue with polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins is not just their persistence; as pointed out above, things like glass, sand, and polypropylene are even more persistent. the issue is that in addition to being persistent, they're toxic—but not acutely so, except in extreme yushchenko-like cases
Even with the order of magnitude increase in resources used it’s still insignificant, as you touch on.
What’s not insignificant is that in the contexts where straws are used.. fast food and coffee shops and such, they’re all too likely to be just thrown out into nature rather than being properly disposed of.
Any material in that category needs to be biodegradable. That’s just a hard requirement in my opinion. So plastics is just not a suitable material.
Yes, there are other sources of plastic pollution that are much worse in volume. Though they tend to end up in other places. We need to work on all the sources of plastic pollution in parallel.
(Unless we go the other route and do massive bioengineering of microorganisms to let them break down plastics)