First they came for our gun emojis. Now they’re coming for our keyboard straws.
Bacardi announced their new “The Future Doesn’t Suck” campaign on Friday, taking a brave stance against emojis depicting straws and single-use plastic cups. The drink company teamed up with ocean activist organization Lonely Whale to announce they are dedicated to eliminating all plastic straws, even the digital ones.
“We think if humans are going to get used to the idea of using less plastic straws, they should use less emoji straws, too,” the company said in a statement.
“Be cool and delete all emoji straws.”
The eco-war against straws began in 2018 as multiple states and municipalities passed laws and ordinances against restaurants serving plastic straws to customers. But corporations have taken the environmental trend to a new level of woke marketing and virtue signaling. Last July, Starbucks announced they would remove straws from all of their stores, replacing their lids with an “adult sippy-cup.” Airlines and hotel chains like Hyatt and Hilton shortly followed suit.
Now, Bacardi wants to get in on the action but take it even further by expanding their concerns to mere cartoonish pictures of straws. Bacardi’s logic here is not just senseless, but a slippery slope. If emojis are encouraging human behavior threatening to the environment, then won’t we need to ban all the cars, trucks, and factories emojis too? If any image or picture depicts something a corporation doesn’t like, then it’s up for censorship?
It’s doubtful this campaign will succeed in its heroic mission, but should it gain traction, I guess we will brace ourselves for the awful, useless PAPER straw emojis.
