"Teachers here recently put children up to sending a letter to this newspaper proclaiming that "plastic straws are toxic and are destroying our planet" because they wind up in the oceans.
The letter asked Aspen to ban them.
Not that I really care about straws.
I don't like straws — or vegetables or little umbrellas — in my scotch anyway.
But notice that the kids weren't asked to make any real sacrifice....Aspen Skiing Co. also has jumped on the plastic bandwagon.
Always on the lookout for a cheap gesture to signal its virtuous (or is it virtual?) greenness, their marketing gurus boast of banning plastic straws in their restaurants.
They evidently think this little plastic straw ban buys them green indulgences to consume gigawatts of electricity generated by burning fossil fuels (elsewhere of course) to haul people up snowy hills so that they can slide back down on plastic skis, over and over, till they get cold and sit by a fossil fuel fireplace before burning barrels of fossil fuel to fly home.
OK, before someone pries my plastic keyboard out of my cold dead hands, let's look at some facts.
The average American uses about 300 pounds of plastic a year, or nearly a pound a day.
According to the most extreme estimates of plastic straw usage, that includes 1.6 plastic straws a day. (That sounds high, but I'll go with it.)
One plastic straw weighs about 1/67 of an ounce.
Do the math.
Plastic straws account for about 0.15 percent of the average American's use of plastic..."
Read on.
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