When my family and I were driving home from Louhisaari Manor today, we stopped at a hamburger restaurant in Naantali. The chain in question, Hesburger, has replaced plastic straws with ones made of cardboard.
This is my milk shake. Notice the condition of the cardboard straw. The milkshake would flow through it as easily as blood through the coronary arteries of the average 60-year-old man from North Karelia in the 1960's.
The reason the plastic straws were replaced with cardboard straws was said to be "ecological responsibility". Notice the material the lid is made of.
The truth is that it makes little difference which material anything on this tray is made of. The cup or the straw cannot be recycled as cardboard because they're soiled with food left over.
Instead, everything is burned in an incinerator like this:
This is Vantaa incinerator in Greater Helsinki. It generates nearly a half of all district heat the city of Vantaa (population ca. 235,000) needs and about a third of all electricity used in Vantaa.
All the waste we left at the hamburger restaurant 150 km to the west of here ends up burned in Norrköping, Sweden, in a plant like Vantaa incinerator. A similar plant will be built in the region of Finland proper where the restaurant is.