Citron

Water Bottles

I was recently gifted a water bottle. The body has a really nice aesthetic of mostly white and the lid is stainless steel. It's an insulated bottle which means that cold drinks will be kept cold and hot drinks will be kept hot. The lid looks sufficiently wide which makes it easy to dump ice cubes inside for hot days. I was pretty pleased with it until I studied the lid and realised it had a straw built into it. Just... why?

Here is every reason I can think of to explain why I don't like bottles with straws:

  1. They are harder to clean. A strawless bottle takes 20 seconds to clean. A bottle with a straw requires dismantling and, usually, tools like thin brushes to help reach all the nooks and crannies that mold might grow in.
  2. They don't support hot drinks. Even the piece of paper that was inside the bottle says so and that's presumably because the plastic straw will start breaking down with hot drinks.
  3. Ignoring the fact that you can't use the bottle for hot drinks, you are consuming microplastics over time. Sure, studies are still pretty inconclusive on the impacts on health but I'd rather not take my chances.
  4. The lids are effectively disposable. The straw or the other moving parts of the lid will need to be replaced due to mechanical breakage or due to hygiene reasons.
  5. They're heavier. Sure, the straw probably only weighs like 5g but that's not nothing.
  6. They have less capacity than their strawless counterparts. Similarly, it's barely anything but it's still not nothing.

I'm aware that I've assumed that the straw is plastic for most of this but when was the last time you saw a water bottle with a straw that wasn't plastic? I also want to acknowledge that some people might choose a bottle with a straw for accessibility reasons. I'm, fortunately, not in a situation where it matters so I'll stick to my Klean Kanteen bottle that I've been using for more than 6 years now that has the simplest design ever. Now to figure out what to do with this random bottle...