Why not? As long as they're clean and usable, it makes sense to me.
Think about this: virtually every single piece of plastic you've ever used, touched or seen during your entire lifetime still exists in some form. The only things that don't exist as some sort of plastic object after recycling must have been burned, possibly releasing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere as it did.
Plastic is undeniably very useful stuff, but we're addicted to it as a culture. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us prefer to believe that once we get rid of rubbish in an officially sanctioned way, it just disappears. But of course it doesn't.
The problem of plastic waste is huge and constantly increasing. To take one relatively trivial example: In the UK, McDonald's alone used nearly 2 million drinking straws every day last year. Virtually every one of those straws is now in a landfill somewhere, and they will remain there unchanged for hundreds of years, while the straws that aren't in an official rubbish disposal site will clutter up the world somewhere else for a very long time.
Your parents aren't going to change the world single-handed with their personal recycling efforts, but at least they aren't adding to the problem.
Is it normal to clean out used plastic straws and reuse them?
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Why not? As long as they're clean and usable, it makes sense to me.
Think about this: virtually every single piece of plastic you've ever used, touched or seen during your entire lifetime still exists in some form. The only things that don't exist as some sort of plastic object after recycling must have been burned, possibly releasing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere as it did.
Plastic is undeniably very useful stuff, but we're addicted to it as a culture. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us prefer to believe that once we get rid of rubbish in an officially sanctioned way, it just disappears. But of course it doesn't.
The problem of plastic waste is huge and constantly increasing. To take one relatively trivial example: In the UK, McDonald's alone used nearly 2 million drinking straws every day last year. Virtually every one of those straws is now in a landfill somewhere, and they will remain there unchanged for hundreds of years, while the straws that aren't in an official rubbish disposal site will clutter up the world somewhere else for a very long time.
Your parents aren't going to change the world single-handed with their personal recycling efforts, but at least they aren't adding to the problem.