Green HousePack of 8 Rose Gold or Silver Reusable Stainless Steel Straws

Specifications:

• Diameter: 6mm
• Length: 215mm
• Material: Stainless Steel

Straws: Why They Seriously Suck

WITH OVER 8 MILLION TONNES OF THE STUFF ENTERING THE OCEANS EVERY YEAR, IT'S NO SECRET THAT PLASTIC CERTAINLY IS NOT FANTASTIC. HOWEVER, SOME PLASTIC ITEMS ARE WORSE THAN OTHERS.

Single-use plastic is a particularly nasty form of plastic. These items have a shockingly short lifespan, normally used once and then discarded to landfill. Like other plastics, they never biodegrade and take hundreds of years to break down. Plastic straws are one such single-use item, and are ending up in our oceans by the thousands.

Plastic straws made the 'top ten' items picked up on beach clean ups, and it's not hard to see why.

Why are straws so damaging to the marine environment?

Disposable straws are usually made from plastic and plastic never breaks down. As time goes by plastic will separate into smaller and smaller pieces, but never completely biodegrades. Plastic is quickly transforming our oceans into plastic soup, with an estimated

InUSAalone, 500 million straws are used every single day. We use straws for around twenty minutes before we toss them away, which is an astonishingly quick lifespan for an item that will be on the planet forever. Straws also contain BPA, and can't be recycled.

It can be hard to see how using one measly plastic straw is going to cause huge amounts of damage to the environment.

When it comes to environmental issues facing our planet, everybody likes to pass the buck. Conscientious consumers will blame big business for wasteful production practices. Corporations in turn contend they are merely meeting supply and demand. Neither group is completely wrong. The real problem, though, comes when both sides aren’t willing to change their behavior.

For an example, look no further than the humble plastic drinking straw.

It’s estimated that Americans use 500 million plastic straws every single day. Here’s a scary visual to help comprehend that amount: If you were to connect all those straws together, they would measure two and a half times the circumference of the Earth. That’s just the straws consumed in the United States. And the vast majority of them don't get recycled.

Before we get into why this is a problem—and what can and should be done about it—let’s look at what brought us to this proliferation of plastic in the first place.

The notion of drinking from a straw is nothing new. The Mesopotamians drank water out of reeds 7,000 years ago, as did the Chinese for rice wine. In ancient Egypt, straws served as a filtering mechanism against pesky insects that found their way into people’s cups at night. For Western folk, the practice really took off in 1888 with the invention of the paper straw. Not too long after that, the spread of contagious diseases such as polio and tuberculosis led to a fear of contaminated glassware, and with it, a perceived necessity for drinking straws.

Midway through the last century, a few things changed. For starters, the spread of disease became less of a concern (remember, this was before the rise of anti-vaxxers). Around that same time, thanks to the likes of McDonald’s, the world was introduced to the concept of fast food and disposable meal packaging. Another major innovation came in the 1960s, when plastics began replacing paper. Straws went from being an easily recyclable beverage accoutrement to an oil-based, single-use object found in restaurants and bars across the globe.

Fast-forward to today and straws have become so ingrained in our culture that most drinks are served with them by default. If you’re reading this, chances are high that until this moment you've never given these plastic accessories a second thought. But you really should.

Most straws today are made from a petroleum-based plastic called polypropylene. This means straws represent yet another product that requires fossil fuel extraction. You don’t need to be an eco-warrior to know how that affects climate change. Making all these straws puts an undue strain on the climate (the production of 1,000 kilograms of polypropylene releases 3,530 kilograms of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas).

That’s not to mention the many health-related concerns surrounding plastic. Many might recall first hearing about the chemical, BPA, back in 2008 when it was revealed how this toxin was commonly found in plastic packaging. In short, it turned out certain plastics containing BPA released synthetic estrogen that posed serious health-related issues. Later testing would show that even plastics such as polypropylene, that claimed to be BPA-free, still tested positive for leaking synthetic estrogens.

Then there’s disposal—nearly every piece of plastic ever made is still in existence. Items such as straws are notorious for their ability to stick around, and in most cases, like many single-use plastics, end up littering the ocean, where they can injure and kill wildlife!