Freezing a Straw Around a Metal Tube The Manufacturing Method Behind a Drinking Straw Made of Ice

This application covers a way of manufacturing drinking straws out of ice. The claimed method stands a chilled tube upright in a tank of water, freezes a cylinder of ice onto the outside of that tube, then pushes hot fluid through the same tube to melt the contact layer and let the finished straw drop off. It was filed by Prive Products, LLC of Dallas, Texas, and names Thomas Surgent as the sole inventor. The application is a divisional of Australian application 2020276303, and the specification states that it claims priority from United States provisional application 62/848,963, filed 16 May 2019.

The Problem

The background section is short and it is about rubbish. The specification states that in the United States alone, over five hundred million drinking straws are used in a single day, and that over eight billion plastic drinking straws currently pollute the world’s beaches. Those figures are offered without a source, which is worth flagging, but the direction of the argument does not depend on the exact numbers.

The more interesting part of the background is what it says about the obvious substitute. Paper straws, the specification argues, merely swap one environmentally adverse single use item for another. It lists the impact as cutting down trees, pulping and pressing the derived tree product into a tube, and then burning fossil fuels to ship the finished paper straws to users across the country. The document does not mention the other well known objection to paper straws, which is that a lot of people simply do not like drinking through them.

What is wanted, the specification concludes, is a device made from a renewable resource, and the renewable resource it picks is water. A straw made of frozen water dissolves into the drink it was used with. There is no waste stream, no collection, no recycling and no shipping, because the straw is made where the drink is served. The technical field paragraph frames it as a renewable resource cooled to or below its freezing point while comprising a fluid conduit running from one end to the other.

What This Invention Does

Claim 1 is a method of making a degradable drinking straw, and it has six steps in sequence.

First, a tube is positioned within a reservoir configured to hold a liquid to be frozen. Second, that tube is brought into contact with a base plate, with the tube at least partially inserted into the plate, and the plate forms the base of the reservoir. Third, the reservoir is filled with liquid. Fourth, the tube is filled with a first fluid at a temperature at or below the freezing point of the liquid, causing at least a portion of the liquid in the reservoir to freeze around the tube, forming the straw. Fifth, that fluid is maintained in the tube for an amount of time to form a desired wall thickness. Sixth, the tube is filled with a second fluid at a temperature at or above the melting point of the straw, causing the straw to partially melt at the contact points with the tube surface and release.

The key move is that nothing pours into a straw shaped cavity. The ice grows outward from a chilled mandrel, and the bore of the finished straw is simply the space the mandrel was occupying. That also explains why the fifth step exists as a separate limitation: because the ice accretes from the inside out, residence time is the wall thickness control. Leave the cold fluid running longer and the straw gets thicker.

The release step is the other half of the trick. A solid cylinder of ice frozen onto a metal tube will not slide off, so the same tube is flushed with hot fluid just long enough to melt the interface. The body text is explicit that the second fluid must be hot enough to release the straw from the tube without completely melting it or affecting its integrity. Dependent claims 2 and 3 add the option of draining the reservoir and withdrawing the base plate before the hot flush, and claim 4 puts partitions on the base plate to guide each straw into a receiving receptacle as it comes free.

Claim 5 repeats the method for a plurality of tubes at once. Claim 6 covers the apparatus: a base plate forming one side of the reservoir, one or more tubes contacting it, at least one connecting bar in fluid communication with the interiors of the tubes, and two separate fluid sources feeding that bar, one cold and one hot. The body describes the cold source as a refrigeration device with a compressor and a pressurisable fluid, and the hot source as a hot water heater or a forced air heating device, with only one of the two active at a time.

Claims 8 to 14 cover a smaller, domestic sized mould instead: a flexible base of silicone, latex or polyurethane, a rigid top of stainless steel, high density polyethylene, polycarbonate, styrene acrylonitrile resin, melamine or copolyester, and two concentric tubes, the inner one forming the bore and the outer one forming the outside. Claim 18 notes that pulling the inner tube out first reduces the air pressure forces that would otherwise resist removing the ice.

Then there is claim 19, which is worth quoting in full because of how little it asks for. It claims a degradable drinking straw comprising a frozen liquid, wherein the frozen liquid forms a wall which comprises an inner void, wherein the inner void provides a fluid conduit which passes through the frozen liquid. That is a claim to a hollow tube of ice as such. Claim 20 adds a cap over the top end so the user’s lips do not touch the ice directly, described in the body as paper, plastic or wax.

The dimensions come from the worked embodiments rather than from the claims. Straw length is given as roughly 4 to 10 inches, with 5, 5.5, 5.75, 7.75, 8.5 and 8.75 inches all named as specific options. Outer diameter runs from 0.5 to 1.5 inches, with 0.75 inches as the recurring figure. Inner diameter runs from 0.1 to 0.5 inches, with 0.25 inches named. Four geometries are drawn: constant wall, tapered outside with constant bore, both tapered, and constant outside with a tapered bore. The taper is not decoration. The specification says it lets gravity assist the release of the frozen straw from the tube, and that the thicker end lasts longer in the drink.

Key Features

• The bore is formed by the cooling element itself. The chilled tube is both the heat sink and the core. Ice nucleates on its outer surface and grows outward, so the hollow left behind when the tube is withdrawn is the drinking channel. No separate coring or drilling step appears anywhere in the claims.
• Residence time sets the wall thickness. Claim 1 makes the holding period an express step. Because the ice thickens progressively around the tube, the operator controls straw wall thickness purely by how long the cold fluid is maintained, with no change of tooling.
• The same tube does the freezing and the releasing. A second fluid at or above the melting point is pushed through the identical channel to melt only the contact layer. It is a thermal release rather than a mechanical one, which avoids cracking a brittle ice cylinder by pulling on it.
• A base plate that becomes a trapdoor. In the first position the plate seals the bottom of the reservoir so it can be filled. After freezing it articulates away from the tubes, and claim 4 adds partitions beneath each tube that guide each released straw into its own receptacle. The body describes receptacles that rotate on request to dispense a straw into a waiting glass.
• A parallel connecting bar for batch production. Claim 6 puts a shared manifold in fluid communication with every tube, with the cold and hot sources plumbed to that bar, so a whole grid of straws freezes and releases together on one thermal cycle.
• A domestic scale two tube mould. Claims 8 to 14 describe a flexible base and rigid top with concentric inner and outer tubes, aimed at a household freezer rather than a production line, and claim 13 requires the inner tube to be configured to conduct heat.

Who Is Behind It

Prive Products, LLC is a Dallas, Texas company with no findable web presence. Searches for the company return an unrelated hair care brand trading under a similar name and an unrelated Dallas medical practice, and there is no corporate website, product page or online store for the ice straw business that could be verified. This appears to be a small private venture rather than an operating consumer brand, and readers should not expect to find ice straws for sale.

The one solid piece of third party confirmation is a January 2026 item in Dallas Innovates, a North Texas business publication, which lists the grant of the corresponding United States patent to Prive Products, LLC of Dallas and names Thomas Surgent of Dallas as inventor. That granted patent is US 12,484,726, the US family member of the same disclosure. The specification’s own drawing pages carry the header WO 2020/232423 and PCT/US2020/033309, which is the international application the Australian parent came from.

On priority and lineage, this document is unusually clear for a divisional. The cross reference paragraph states that the application claims priority to United States provisional application 62/848,963, filed 16 May 2019, and that the complete specification of Australian application 2020276303 is incorporated by reference. So the priority country is the United States and the parent is the Australian application filed off the PCT.

Why It Matters

Between 2018 and 2020 a wave of single use plastic restrictions moved through cities, states and national governments, and the drinking straw became the symbolic target out of all proportion to its share of plastic waste. The replacement that the hospitality industry reached for was paper, and paper has been unpopular ever since, because it softens. This specification was drafted at the peak of that moment, and the priority date of 16 May 2019 sits right in the middle of it.

An ice straw is a genuinely different answer to the disposable product problem, because it does not create an item that has to go anywhere afterwards. It melts into the drink. But the specification is also notable for how much it leaves unaddressed. There is no figure anywhere for how long a straw survives in a drink at room temperature, no dilution calculation, no statement of the temperatures the cold and hot fluids actually run at, and no discussion of hygiene, storage or transport between the freezing rig and the customer. The document names cap materials so the user’s lips do not touch the ice, which suggests the drafters knew cold lips were an objection, but that is as far as the practical engineering discussion goes.

The commercial logic that does come through is the machine, not the straw. Claim 6 describes something that belongs behind a bar: a manifold, a chiller, a heater, a grid of tubes and a set of rotating receptacles that dispense a straw on demand. The economics of the idea depend entirely on whether a venue will install and clean that rig, which is a much bigger ask than buying a box of paper straws.

The final point worth making is about claim 19. Claiming a tube of frozen liquid with a hole through it, in the broadest possible terms, is the kind of claim that survives only if nobody ever made one before. Whether that is true is a question for the examiner, not for this article, but its presence tells you the applicant is chasing the product and not only the process.

Related Concepts

• Drinking straw – the object the invention replaces, including the plastic and paper versions the background criticises.
• Plastic pollution – the waste problem the background cites as the reason for the whole exercise.
• Freezing – the phase change that forms the straw wall around the chilled tube.
• Ice – the material the claimed straw is made from, and the reason it melts into the drink instead of into a bin.
• Mandrel – the general engineering term for the core the tube plays in this process, forming the bore by occupying it.

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AU 2026202182 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.