There's so much plastic lining that paper otherwise everything would get too soggy anyway. Yay for glass and metal. Reusable beats disposable, no matter what it's made of

There is actually a bit of sense in there. Paper cups weren't simply paper - its tetrapak-like material with plastic coating inside. They are notoriously hard to recycle. Plain plastic cups on the other hand are made from single material, most likely PET. Moreover, they are transparent, without colouring additives.

There are two reasons why colour in plastic makes it harder to recycle. First, pigment is a completely different substance, which behaves differently from plastic itself. It makes it harder to "re-melt" into stable material. If you ever 3d printed anything with matte/gloss filament, you'll know that it is more finicky than plain one. Second, uncoloured plastic can be coloured into anything, while other needs to be either sorted by colour or mixed with strong dye (black, gray, dark brown, etc) to have consistent colour.

PET itself is pretty easy to turn into something new, actually. A workshop near me had a live demo of the whole process - chipping it into small pieces, feeding to the heated tube, and then injection molded into trinkets. Industrial grade processing usually have "turned into pellets" step in between, but it's basically the same.

Plastic-covered paper, on the other hand, should be somehow separated first, and then handled with two different approaches - one for paper, another one for plastic film. Doable, but much harder. Paper straw can probably decompose by itself, without any special conditions.

UPD: Be wary that recycling is not a panacea. There's multiple videos about how recycling plastic isn't actually a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68zjxTTl5Ik for example.

Still waiting on straws made of dry pasta. Biodegradable, strong, edible if you really want

Many people don't understand why plastic straws are considered more harmful than plastic cups. The key issue is that straws are far more likely to escape waste management systems due to their small size, allowing them to pass through filtration screens and enter waterways. As a result, they reach the ocean at a higher rate and pose a greater threat to marine life, including sea turtles. Larger items like plastic cups are generally easier to capture and contain before they become environmental hazards.

I mean waxed paper cups aren't super, they are likely better than plastic, but the wax is likely a fossils fuel byproduct

The real trick all along was always reducing your consumption of disposable products.

I'll take a PLA cup over a paper cup lined with PFAS, BPA, etc.

There should really be a law that people should be able to bring their own reusable drink cup for any drink.

Sidenote: all 4 include plastic.

Fair point. IIRC though the primary reason for banning plastic straws was not CO2 emissions but wildlife protection, as plastic straws are (or were) the single most frequently found foreign object in the stomachs of dead sea turtles.

paper straws are quite literally a strawman project against environmental pollution. they do not actually solve environmental pollution while pretending they do ..

I've never seen the one on the right. I'm guessing this is an American thing?

Paper cups still have a plastic lining, and it's related to PFAS chemicals iirc

The cup wasn't just made of paper. It was paper with a Wax Coating.

There needs to just be a blanket, punitive, 100+% tax on any and all single use plastics that are not medical devices. Obviously there's lots of other bigger environmental issues that need to be tackled but this really seems like a pretty obvious one imo.

i remember the great plastic transition of 1995. on the trek though GRAND UNION to buy macaroni salad ingredients and store brand chips, i asked my mom why there were so many plastic bottles, and she replied 'we're like pioneers' and she referenced little house on the prairie, and i still didn't understand what she was getting at, so she slapped some sense into me right in aisle 13 and i pretended i understood so she'd leave me alone for five minutes.

a few weeks ago my MD said that i have colon cancer and i assume that's from pounding cases of fruitopia when it was in vogue but who am i gonna sue? is big plastic a thing?

i tried to tell my mom it was her fault but when i tried to call all i heard was a dial tone. i thought that was weird at the time because cell-phones don't have dial tones but my therapist said i was hallucinating; she still won't prescribe me xanax.

Ppl have been mentioning the plastic in the paper cups but I haven't seen anyone mention that large cups used to all be Styrofoam. Some places all the cups were Styrofoam. And that was god awful for the environment. They were amazing though. Getting a giant sweet tea in a cup that never sweated was phenomenal. Shame they suck so bad.