Banning Plastic Straws Won’t Help The Oceans. Here’s Why
The disposable plastic straw is a magnificent piece of engineering: Simple, cheap, durable, and unfailingly effective. Then, overnight, we abandoned it for wretched paper tubes that wither at the first sign of wetness.
Such an abhorrent substitution might be justified if it served a greater good, but it doesn’t: We created a world filled with useless paper straws for reasons that are flimsier than the straws themselves.
Don’t believe me? Watch the Everything Should Be Better video or read the transcript below.
As you may have noticed in recent years, governments and the private sector have apparently conspired to ensure you can no longer comfortably drink a Slurpee.
The strong, reliable plastic straw now belongs to the ages, and we modern people must content ourselves with straws that immediately turn into pulp upon coming into contact with liquid.
But here’s the real tragedy: All these paper straws aren’t doing squat for the environment. They came for your milkshake, and they didn’t even do it for a good reason.
Paper straws became ubiquitous starting in 2018 when a video went viral showing a sea turtle off the coast of Costa Rica having a plastic straw painfully removed from its nose.
Almost immediately, major corporations such as A&W and Starbucks announced an end to plastic straws, while cities like Vancouver openly talked about straw bans.
By the end of 2021, Canada is mulling a blanket national ban on plastic straws and other single-use plastics.
Ocean plastic is indeed a major environmental problem. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now three times the size of France, and according to the World Economic Forum, if current trends continue by 2050 we’re going to have more kilograms of plastic in the oceans than kilograms of fish.
But if you take a quick look at where all this plastic is coming from, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that banning straws at North American restaurants was pretty much the least effective way to address this problem.
So where is the ocean plastic coming from? Two places. One: Ghost gear. This is fishing gear that has fallen off of commercial boats and then wanders the ocean needlessly killing wildlife until it disintegrates. Up to 46 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is ghost gear.
Second: Poor waste management in the developing world.
See, if I use a plastic straw at a fast food joint, when I’m done with it that plastic straw goes in a garbage bin, which is then picked up by civil servants who take it to different civil servants who bury it in the ground and cover it with clay.
Notice the lack of any ocean in that equation.
And that’s basically the program throughout Europe and North America: Unless you’re a putz who’s literally chucking your slushie in the sea, your straw’s final resting place is well-removed from any unfortunate sea turtles.
But if you live in a community without proper waste infrastructure, your plastic straw might get chucked in a river or dumped on the beach to be dealt with by the tides. That’s how you get beaches that look like this:
It’s why, according to a 2017 study, 95 percent of the world’s ocean plastic comes from just 10 rivers: Eight in Asia and two in Africa.
The group Ocean Conservancy has similarly estimated that most ocean plastic comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The straw that got stuck in that sea turtle’s nose? It almost certainly came from an Asian community with bad waste management.
But here’s the good news: We actually know how to fix both ghost gear and poor waste practices in the developing world.
With ghost gear, you set up buyback programs with fishers to disincentivize them from simply chucking broken gear overboard. As for poor waste management, countries like Canada are actually really, really good at safely managing garbage.
And the bang for the buck is huge: Kick a few million dollars towards a dump project in Indonesia, and you’re instantly diverting thousands of tonnes of plastic from the ocean.
So with all that in mind, the next time you feel a pang of guilt at the plight of the oceans, ask yourself why the single most visible action against ocean plastic to date was to force millions of people to use crappy technology that does virtually nothing to solve the initial problem.
See more here: climatechangedispatch.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Alan
| #
About time somebody pointed out these basic facts. Like everything else the environmentalists complain about, they get it wrong and so their proposed actions, eagerly adopted by governments, are also wrong.
One point missing here is that a lot of the rubbish I see is at the roadside and it being thrown out of cars. I also see larger sheets of plastic usually on barbed wire fencing that have come from farms or from lorries.
I’m not convinced that the Pacific Garbage Patch actually exists.
Reply
hannah
| #
very good article .. its about time somebody pointed out the basic facts . the environmentalists complain about lots of different topics but they should bring the plastic straws back in my opinion
Reply
hannah
| #
very good article .. its about time somebody pointed out the basic knowledge . the environmentalists complain about lots of different topics but they should bring the plastic straws back in my opinion
Reply
itsme
| #
the amount of face masks probably have done about as much damage in one year, that plastic strawa would tale 20 years to do
Reply
Artelia
| #
Paper may be biodegradable but so are loads of other materials. Cellulose can be made into straws and will last slightly better than paper ones but still biodegrade. It could be mixed with agar jelling agent. Why not have a competition for the best biodegradable straws which last long enough and are cheap enough, biodegradable enough, very environmentally friendly and easy to produce as well as to dispose of. They should be so good that we can leave them in a river or at the beach with a good conscience.
And how about working on plastics to make them safer for human use, for the environment, and have them to be biodegradable or easy to recycle.
Reply