Of course, says Lucas Schmitz, he also drank Capri-Sun as a child. “Who doesn’t?” he says. But since he started thinking about the ocean and plastic waste, the silvery plastic bags have been taboo. “My children won’t get them.” Instead, Schmitz is now engaged in a duel with the company that is now called Capri-Sun. Both have chosen the same weapon: signatures.
Gone are the days when you had to chat to people in the pedestrian zone with a clipboard. Schmitz has his petition launched ten days ago on the change.org platform. “Protect our environment,” it is called. “No to plastic straws and the efforts of Capri-Sun.” Almost 27,000 people have already signed, with around 400 more signing every day. “My goal is to get more signatures than that,” he says. “To show that the environmental protection community is larger than the ignorant community.”
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Because Capri-Sun also has A petition has been launched, the Swiss juice company is fighting for a central part of its business model: the drinking straw. For decades it was made of plastic, but then a EU Directive the disposable products that most often ended up on Europe’s beaches. Among them were plastic straws. Since 2021, the fruit juice can be sucked out of the disposable packaging using a cardboard straw, which, however, also becomes quite soft after a while.
Since the end of August, the company has been calling on its fans to initiate “positive change” through the online petition. The paper straws are “not ideal for many of you” and, on top of that, they have to be recycled separately. The counter-offer: a return to the plastic straw, but in a drinking bag made of the same material. This way, both can be recycled together and no more paper straws “pollute” the recycling process. “Join in, sign today,” Capri-Sun advertises. “We need a million signatures.”
Even millions of signatures are unlikely to change the current law
So far, 128,000 people have signed, making the race against the counter-petition 5:1. Take it easy, says Schmitz, his petition is only just beginning. Years ago, he already got 147,000 people to sign against disposable cups at Aral gas stations – which then disappeared. He himself is an oceanographer, works for an environmental association and founded an association that campaigns for clean seas. When the opposing side called for this, he was completely shocked, he says. “That completely ignores the problem.” After all, the plastic waste in the sea, with long-term consequences such as microplastics in the food chain, will not decrease just because plastic is theoretically easier to recycle. Capri-Sun, on the other hand, points out that only 0.02 percent of the plastic in the sea is made up of drinking straws. And only a portion of that is made up of drinking bags.
For the online platform, which boasts of having already successfully launched 100,000 petitions worldwide, counter-petitions are nothing special – after all, that’s part of an open democracy. Other companies have also initiated signature campaigns there, they say. But not always for their own benefit.
Either way, even millions of signatures are unlikely to change the current law. Whether the drinking straws can be recycled together with the packaging is “irrelevant to the ban,” says the Federal Environment Ministry. “What is more important is that the drinking straws end up in the environment.”