Plastic straws perform better than your average paper straw, no argument there. I think the talking point is a lot of people do not care that much and paper straws are good enough.

Wax would help way more for most use cases, but the added material would help for thicker mediums.

Waxed paper straws are a thing and are almost as good as plastic straws. I am not sure why they are not more common. Pretty rare actually.

Minute amounts of wax will be ingested into the body with every use. It will be similar to the current situation with microplastics (mostly polyester – coming from the sportswear and clothing in general that fray at the microscopic level) that have been detected in human body organs pervasively and are being investigated for their side effects on the hormonal system.

Moreover, wax is not one chemical compound but is a broad term for a variety of very different chemical compounds shoved under the «wax» umbrella term due to sharing same properties: being solid, lipophilic and malleable. Anything that shares such properties is a wax.

There are four broad categories of wax:

– Plant based (e.g. soy, carnauba, castor, jojoba, tallow and others)

– Animal based (beeswax, lanolin – from sheep, Chinese wax – from insects)

– Petroleum (paraffin and microcrystalline)

– Mineral waxes (peat and ceresin are most important ones).

Other than beeswax, long term health effects of ingesting a wax are unknown. Plant based waxes can't be completely purified and will contain miniscule amounts of potentially harmful phytochemicals that may have a detrimental effect on the human body. Animal based waxes are already known to cause irritation in some people and are likely to mess up the hormonal system in the long term. They can just a have a rancid or a funny smell – sufficient to be unsuitable to put in one's mouth.

Petroleum based waxes… Food-grade paraffin wax has been used in foodstuffs for a while since it passes the digestive tract unchanged, yet it is an open question whether it also creates microparticles that settle in the body and have a potential to affect our health. Impurities in petroleum and in waxes overall are a major source of concern, and it is a matter of time when somebody unscrupulous quietly swaps out a higher grade product for a cheap and nasty one.

The bottom line is that long term health effects of the wax ingestion on the human body are unknown, and – by extension – wax coated paper straws are probably not a solution, not a safe one anyway until proven otherwise.

Metal straws are the most inert ones, but even then aluminium leeching into food through cookware has already been implicated as a potential contributor to the onset of Alzheimers and steel has an amount (albeit small) of nickel in it… it just never ends.

The reason we use plastic straws is because we've ALREADY used paper straws and consumers preferred the plastic ones. Especially now that all of our drink portion sizes are gigantic and straws tend to sit in drinks for hours.

That and they are cheaper to produce. Now we're learning more and more that using plastic for everything is not just bad for the environment, but also bad for our health. Consumer sentiment is shifting accordingly.

For the record, I'm in camp, "Don't care that much, whatever straws are fine". I'd be happy if as a society we could just get people not to litter like other developed countries manage to. I have a lot of junk which ends up in my front yard (people tossing garbage from passing cars) and my backyard (a river where all kinds of styrofoam, plastic cups, plastic bags, etc. all wash up). If all the junk was biodegradable it wouldn't hang around my yard and require me to pick it up (or I could at least toss it on the burn pile).

I'm in camp "I would rather gulp it right from the glass", which seems like a better stance anyway. But I heard that some people really need straw, and if I'm in that position I'll 100% ask for the plastic one everytime.

Then again if only <1% of people use plastic than it used be, we're already winning very much.