Drinking straws are a popular utensil and should not be missing at any party or children's birthday party. Even in bars or restaurants, the idea of serving drinks without the practical straw is almost utopian. Nevertheless, this above-average consumption of drinking straws unfortunately shows hardly any positive effects, especially not for our environment. Around three billion plastic straws end up in the trash every day after only a short period of use. For this reason, more and more people are looking for alternatives to disposable straws - and with great success!

Pasta dough drinking straws

The use of plastic straws is becoming more and more questionable. It is a real waste to throw these straws away after just a few minutes. Although drinking straws only make up a small part of plastic waste, the consequences for our environment are nevertheless serious.

Therefore, one thing is certain: Healthier alternatives for our environment are needed. A baker from Bielefeld has already taken the first step in this direction - drinking straws made from pasta dough. According to his own information, the homemade drinking straws are extremely popular with his customers. Of course, we want to follow up on this and start our exciting drinking noodle test.

To this end, we set out on a search and soon found what we were looking for: Drinking straws made of macaronis seem to be the future alternative for plastic. These are available either on the pasta shelf of a local supermarket or at the aforementioned bakery in Bielefeld.

Hans-Martin Rolf, a passionate baker, uses nothing special for his creation, just classic ingredients: Water, salt, egg yolk, a few drops of oil and durum wheat flour are on the baker's list. Rolf received a lot of positive encouragement for his efforts and, contrary to our expectations, the new drinking straws don't look bad at all.

Just do not soften

Whether it's a noodle straw from the supermarket or from Hans-Martin Rolf, we want to get to the bottom of it. What is behind these drinking noodles and could they really be used as an alternative one day? For this purpose, we conducted the following test:

For this experiment, we only needed two glasses. We filled one with water and the other with cola. Then we put a macaroni in each glass as a drinking straw. After about an hour, we looked at the result. It looked anything but appetizing, but macaroni would still be an interesting alternative, since we generally always drink our drinks faster. In other words, the macaroni drinking straws would not dissolve anyway.

Plastic straws soon to be history?

Whether sooner or later, one day all plastic products will disappear - this is especially true of the disposable straw. The UK and the EU are already working on a solution to this serious problem.

The results of this are even already visible in some areas: Companies such as Rewe and Penny have already largely removed their plastic straws from their product ranges. They are followed by Kaufland and Lidl, which want to have the product out of their stores by the end of 2019. Nevertheless, more companies will opt for it in the future - even Mc Donald's and Starbucks want to do away with the unnecessary plastic soon.

Unfortunately, stopping single-use straws does not immediately mean that all the world's plastic problems have been solved. Nevertheless, according to the EU Commission, it is an acceptable step in the right direction to show that it really is possible to reduce plastic waste.