Grasping at straws – Produce less waste: Refuse the straw
You might have heard about several campaigns trying to minimize the use of disposable plastic in order to fight ocean pollution. Some of them being about plastic bags, others about (edible) six-pack rings… Those are all good and valid points and a lot of things can be changed by governments or supermarket chains banning plastic or breweries introducing the eco-friendly self-dissolving wrappers for your favorite drinks. But there is actually one tiny little thing that YOU can do yourself.
That is: do not use plastic straws and politely refuse them when ordering drinks. It is so simple and easy and can have such a big effect if everybody sticks to it!
What is the problem with straws you might ask? It’s just a tiny little straw, it can’t be that big of a problem, right? Wrong!
Straw fact #1: Plastic straws make the top 10 list of litter items found during International Coastal Cleanup Day. 🙁
So how bad is it really? How many straws are used every day?
Straw fact #2: Well, in the United States alone, 500 million straws are used and discarded every single day. (source: thelastplasticstraw.org ) That is enough to wrap around the earth’s circumference 2.5 times a day!! And even though the US might be one oft he biggest users, that doesn’t make the global perspective look much more cheerful.
But, why all this fuss about plastic? I mean, it might take some time to decompose, but then it will get there sometime, right? Unfortunately not…
Straw fact #3: Plastic straws do not biodegrade, they photodegrade into smaller and smaller pieces, which then get ingested by marine and land animals. These typically get eaten by even bigger animals and those end up on our plates most of the time – and so do the plastic particles in them. Yuck!
So the solution to avoid all of the above is quite easy and self-explanatory. Should you, however not be able to skip the straws in your drinks for whatever reasons (I do admit they can come in handy as a spill-free solution when handing your toddler a drink), then go for either reusable ones or compostable ones – both of which you can easily find online. The biodegradable option is also the one my husband settled for when I asked him to kindly skip the straw in his iced latte 😉
And if you happen to run a restaurant or a café/bar or you know somebody who does, then tell them to skip the straws in drinks in general and put “straws available upon request on their menu” instead. I’m certain there will be very few customers asking for one (and if they do, here come the corn-based or paper-super-bio-degradable ones).
If you want to keep up to date on some of the numerous straw projects, you can find a few links below – the last one’s slogan being the one I liked best and would like to close this post with:
“Don’t suck – refuse the straw!”
http://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/no-straw-please/
http://thelastplasticstraw.org/