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| I like to have a cup of coffee in the morning and another after lunch.
I like it with a bit of sugar, so naturally I use a wooden stir stick, which is what you normally have in your average coffee shop.
Sometimes it may happen that I would grab more stir sticks than needed - "just in case". A few days ago I had an insight. I was playing with my stir stick
and I notice that it is very strong. This made me think about it and I realized was that the depth of the stir sticks is approximately the same as that of a
matchstick and its total size is that of about 25 matchsticks. My next thought shocked me - for the two cups of coffee I have every day I use as much timber
as if I burn a whole safety match with its 50 sticks in it.
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I could not find information about the worlds production of wooden stir sticks, but based on the data for
production of safety matches and some elementary mathematics, I could deduce that the numbers are staggering. The world produces and uses so
many safety matches every second that a big highest quality timber tree is burned every five seconds. Of
course no one notices it, as it burns on many places at the same time. The problem with the wooden stir sticks is that one uses the same amount of timber as
if they burn a whole match every day by just drinking two cups of coffee if they use wooden stir sticks. |
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| What is the alternative? Well, one alternative is to carry your own tea spoon with you all the time, which I
think is very considerate but perhaps not very likely to happen. Using plastic straw is another alternative. As it turns out using a plastic straw to drink
coffee can also help to protect your teeth and keep them white. Finally, not using sugar at all is perhaps the best option:
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Miroslav B. Bonchev
July 2008
London, England |
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