At the beginning of July, McDonald's China announced that plastic straws were banned in nearly 1000 stores in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Customers can feel McDonald's love for the earth through the mouth on the cup cover.

They expect that this will lead to a reduction of 400 tons of plastic consumption per year, and thus become the second catering giant to shoulder the task of building a "beautiful China" after Starbucks.

Many netizens affirmed their intentions and sense of social responsibility. However, environmental protection has always been an extremely complex and cross-cutting issue among many groups; There are too many things to argue and think about on the back of the fairy tale.

First of all, let's talk about something easy: when did the straw come into being?

The earliest straw can be traced back to the two-river civilization on the Mesopotamian plain 5000 years ago

 Sumerians are used to making wine in heavy barrels, but it is not easy to carry and pour after brewing, so they simply put the exaggerated cylindrical hollow metal tube into the barrel to drink.

In 1888, an American inventor named Marvin Stone became the first person to apply for a straw patent. It is said that the versatile man who joined the army, studied music, studied theology and became a reporter completed the absorption of Mint Julep with the help of a hollow tube rolled from rye grass in the heat of 1880. While experiencing different tastes, Stone also intends to systematically construct a set of straw manufacturing process. As a natural material, ryegrass is easy to degrade, so like Starbucks more than 100 years later, he focused on paper materials.

Wrap the pencil around the Manila paper roll coated with paraffin, then fix it with glue, and pull the pencil away. The first straw in modern sense is obtained. After obtaining the patent right, Stone began to mass produce this kind of straw in its own factory, Stone Industrial, in 1890.

The first generation of straws were straight, and they began to bend in the 1930s.

Joseph Friedman, the same inventor, took care of his daughter who loved to drink milkshakes and created a flexible and straight thread groove in the straw with a small screw wrapped with dental floss instead of soap. With it, father no longer needs to worry about his daughter's consuming too much milk shake.

Later, Friedman also applied for an invention patent and founded a company to mass produce threaded curved straws. Hospitals are the first batch of consumers to use flexible straws in large areas, because patients have a rigid need to drink water in bed.

In the following decades, paper straws occupied the entire beverage market in the United States.

In the 1950s, the rise of American fast food industry directly promoted the low-cost disposable plastic packaging to become a popular cultural symbol of consumerism. In 1961, the plastic straw was first mass produced. Since then, it has replaced paper straws and swept the United States, and then swept the world.

It is worth mentioning that the mass production process at that time originated from the wild operation of some American bear children around 1940. They don't use paper straws well, but use the circle of hollow glass tubes left on the assembly line of the glass factory to drink. In order to be responsible for the health of the bear children, the glass factories used clean and refreshing plastic to blow out the straws for the children to use. As a result, this unintentional attempt finally triggered industrial change.