Fast-food giants, McDonald’s, announced they would no longer be using plastic cutlery and straws in their Australian branches! This will remove a whopping 860 tonnes of plastic waste per year from Australia alone, which is pretty epic!

McDonald’s has been actively scoping and introducing initiatives that reduce the plastic used within its packaging requirements for more than a decade. Including the removal of plastic lids from McFlurry cups, salad bowls being replaced with fiber-based alternatives and sundae cups now being lighter in weight.

Those changes alone removed nearly 250 tonnes of plastic from McDonald’s Australia restaurants, and by weight, now 85 percent of McDonald’s packaging is fiber-based.

The announcement comes as a national plastics summit aimed at reducing pollution that got underway in Canberra this month. A statement said all Australian franchises would transition to fiber-based cutlery by the end of 2020, in a move that follows a similar phase-out of plastic straws in 2019.

Sounds like good news, right? After all, we are all aware of how terrible single-use plastic is for the environment. Yet, there is always someone there to spoil a good thing and who apparently cares more about their milkshake than the pollution suffocating our oceans. 

Despite it removing 500 million plastic straws from circulation annually, a petition has been started against the change in policy. Yes, A PETITION to bring back plastic straws ‘So I can drink my milkshake proper’. Unbelievable right?

What is even scarier is that it currently has 56,933 out of 75,000 signatures! 

Apparently this is a pressing issue and soggy straws are more important than the marine life surviving, priorities. Not only is this the most ignorant petition we’ve ever seen, but also shows how much work needs to be done on educating people about plastic pollution. To those people, we suggest you go buy yourself a metal straw and then you can drink your milkshake without killing turtles.