How DANGEROUS are Metal Straws?

are you going environmentalism is quite the trendy trend around the world at the moment and it's great everybody is pretending they're helping the environment from normal people to governments to big companies like everyone's favorite environmentally friendly oil refinery cheers and a big focus has been on plastic waste and it's harm to the environment and in particular the oceans and one of the biggest plastic culprits that really gets us riled up are stupid plastic straws and it seems like we have specifically designed plastic straws to torture sea turtles can you imagine you're just gracefully swimming along in the ocean and then you unwillingly deep nose a straw down your nose hole and then worst of all you have flippers for hand so you can't take it out so you have to live the rest of your life with a red straw up your nose until eventually you die a painful painful embarrassing death and i honestly don't know how anything without fingers and hands is still alive but regardless we shouldn't let all fingerless things fall victim to straws so to stop turtles from deep nosing all our straws some pubs and non-alcoholic pubs have started to phase out plastic straws because people apparently require straws to drink people are buying fancy metal reusable straws as alternatives [Music] and to be honest i don't really know why you need to use a straw at all like when is it not all right to just use your mouth like unless you're smashed in a bar and you accidentally ordered an expensive cocktail and it's got leaves and other things hanging out of it you don't want to spill it on yourself or poke yourself in the eye then you can use a straw or if you actually have a physical impairment that means you need a straw then i don't really think you have an excuse and you can just pour liquid into your mouth like humans have been doing for the past three million years so these metal straws market themselves as great alternatives they are reusable cheap and most importantly they don't deep nose sea turtles which is definitely a good thing but then i read these articles 60 year old woman in england reportedly died after a metal straw and the media is going crazy over this with over 50 articles from news outlets all around the world so what i wanted to do today was test whether this was just a freak accident or if these straws actually are a safety concern and we are basically replacing all our plastic straws with drinking knives i know from experience that even plastic straws are sharp i remember when i was a wee lad and my mate told me to stab myself as hard as i could with a straw and i stupidly did it and dug the straw probably half a centimeter into my arm and look i still have the scar now so i can totally imagine that the metal straw is going to be more dangerous than plastic ones and i'm going to test it in two parts first i'm going to make some kind of human head analog and then i'm going to get a normal object that we are used to having in our mouth like a fork and see what happens if you fall face first on that then i'm going to do the same thing with a metal straw and see which one is worse and then if that doesn't work i'm gonna either shoot the straw out of an air cannon or fire it with a bow or something just to get some destruction and the first thing i need to do is order some more metal straws and i ordered a three pack which is presumably for people that want to drink their drink really fast and for some reason it arrived with this ominous card you may not have tomorrow where will you spend eternity death is a reality we all must face and the question you need to ask yourself is where am i going to go when i die these are all very valid questions which i think about every day but i refuse to engage in an existential conversation with a packet of straws especially not after last time ah and there's also a little nose cleaner which is very kind of you ebay.com thank you so i was kind of shocked it's immediately obvious that these straws are super sharp like they feel intentionally sharpened and looking at it after a magnifying glass i can see that there's actually a bevel on the end and this is very strange the bevel the ominous death card this has convinced me that i have uncovered a conspiracy in which large corporations are attempting to kill environmentally friendly smoothie drinkers so before we do the full scale test i just wanted to quickly see how much force it takes to pass this straw through a potato and the potato took 2.145 kilos for the straw to pass through and now i'm going to do a knife and the knife took 1.5 kilos so that's surprisingly close so with those numbers you could technically say that that straw is 60 knife all right on to the big test and i'm going to test the cutlery first as i want to know what i'm dealing with as it's not really a fair criticism of metal straws if we are also putting cutlery in our mouth every day which might be equally as deadly although i guess you don't usually move around doing active activities like eating a plate of spaghetti with a fork in your mouth the whole time and i thought this would be a great time to thank my patreons because of all of you lovely people i am able to afford high quality coal spaghetti and sometimes when i'm feeling a little indulgent i even treat myself to buying fettuccine thank you so much [Music] so the first stage of making my human head analog is mixing up a batch of my mum's famous ballistic gelatin and this recipe was passed down from generation to generation and i was going to buy a piece of meat or an animal head to test the straw on but that would have been a little freaky and i don't want to get demonetised and all i did was mix up gelatin in cold water until it looks and tastes like mashed potato then just give it a bath in some warm water to calm it down and liquidate it so once it's set this ballistic gelatin here is meant to simulate human flesh and i also put a piece of thin plywood inside which should simulate bone and then this is a sophisticated dropping rig i came up with and i made this to simulate a person falling completely flat onto their face with a straw in their mouth and this is how it works you put the impaling object in this side and then the ballistic gel on the other side so then when you drop it and it hits the ground the straw pokes through and comes out the other side and obviously this whole rig doesn't weigh quite the same as a person but people also don't fall flat in a motionless arc onto the ground so hopefully the speed of this rig makes up for the lack of weight and the forks up first and that was a solid solid hit absolutely terrifying and even though it's just ballistics gelatin i feel a little bit sorry for it and look at that the fork has penetrated the plywood and i was not expecting that and on closer inspection it doesn't look like the fork went all the way through but just caused the wood to blow out on the other side which is still probably cause brain damage so now onto the straw and i have high hopes [Music] and that is insane the straw easily went through the wood in the ballistics gel so we're going to do it again this time but now with slow motion and a thicker piece of wood and that is dumb the wood offers no resistance it just pops through and i don't know what to say i guess it kind of makes sense if you fall straight onto a sharp metal object it is going to go through you and even though i got the results i wanted i am still going to shoot it with a bow even though i have no reason and also i kind of love the idea of americans watching australians shoot stuff with a bow and thinking what is this weak firepower my 24f sock pistol does more damage than that but yeah back to the straw i was not expecting that amount of damage and after these results i don't think that person's death was a freak scenario these straws are really dangerous and that's gonna happen if you fall on one and i'm a bit confused why we're not warning people about it like we tell kids not to run with scissors and in america they ban kindly surprise for being dangerous why are we not telling people not to take photos of themselves on instagram with straws in their mouth and i think the thing that actually makes this the most terrifying is the seeming lack of danger like if you put scissors in your mouth you're aware that you're an idiot and you're doing something stupid so you're not going to jump or run or do push-ups but with something like a straw you don't really think of it as a dangerous object so you go about your normal daily activities so now i'm going to try and wrap up this video but i don't really know what i want my point to be but i reckon overall the metal straw trend is definitely a good thing for the world and i'm a little bit torn because on one hand plastic straws are horrible for the environment but they won't go through your head if you fall on them so i reckon the safest thing for everyone to do is just stop using any straws unless you're drunk thank you so much for watching if you liked that please subscribe and check out some of my other videos

Channel: I did a thing

Views: 7,398,983

Keywords: william osman, william osman finger, eco friendly, plastic waste, 4ocean, 4ocean braclet, ocean cleanup, sea turtles, plastic straw, sea turtle plastic straws, sea turtle plastic straw in nose, metal straw, science, recycling, plastic waste in ocean, charity, mythbustying, balistics gel, zero waste, reusable straw

Id: 8_sB6aDKZCQ

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 28 2019