I seem to read almost every day about how environmentally unfriendly plastic straws are, how they should be banned, etc, etc. Several municipalities have indeed banned them (including Vancouver, Washington, Seattle, Miami Beach) and many others have plans in the pipeline (including New York City, California, Hawaii, and the whole of Britain).
But what's the big deal about straws? Aren't they recyclable anyway?
Apparently, Canada (population about 35 million) uses 57 million plastic straws EACH DAY, according to some stats, which just sounds plain unlikely. That's nearly two straws a day by every single man, woman, child, baby, senior and prison inmate(!), and I'm afraid I just don't believe that. I have not been able to find the source of that particular oft-quoted statistic. The USA (population about 320 million) apparently gets through 500 million straws a day, which is a similarly implausible and unverified statistic, however widely disseminated. But, however inflated those figures might be, the numbers are clearly large, and just as clearly we don't want all those straws ending up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Millions of people have watched the YouTube video of a straw being pulled out of a sea turtle's nose (hell, that single video is probably responsible for most of the recent calls to ban straws!)
What is undeniable, though, is that straws make up a tiny percentage of the single-use plastic we use, as well as a tiny percentage of the plastic found on our beaches. But, for whatever reason, straws have become a major focus of the push to deal with our single-use plastics problem, and a bunch of organizations and pressure groups have sprung up, including The Last Plastic Straw, For A Strawless Ocean, Stop Sucking, and others.
Anyway, can't plastic straws be recycled? Well, yes and no. Straws are typically made from polypropylene, which can be recycled in most jurisdictions with a halfway decent recycling program. The problem is partly that, even though they can technically be recycled, not all municipalities have the required faculities, and partly that sraws often don't actually make it to the recycling plant (many straws are used in restaurants, for example, and many restaurants just don't bother, and most of the straws used on the street are just thrown in the regular garbage regardless).
Another problem is that small items like straws and bottle caps tend to fall through the gaps and cracks in recycling conveyor belts, and so end end up in the landfill anyway. For this reason, many municipalities discourage the recycling of plastic straws (Toronto is an example of a good recycling program that will not recycle straws).
And, yes, there are alternatives. Plastic straws have only been around since the 1960s, and paper straws were certainly good enough for us when I was a kid. And to say that we need to keep plastic straws for everyone because a few disabled people need them to drink with, as André Picard argues in today's Globe and Mail, sounds like a red herring and an example of excessive political correctness to me. If anyone actually NEEDS (as opposed to wants) a straw, I'm sure they could arrange to carry a reusable one around with them.
Anyway, I am not actively against the ban-the-straw movement (I don't even use them myself). It just seems to me like a bit of a bandwagon phenomenon, a bit of greenwash, and perhaps a bit of misplaced zealotry. If straws should be banned, then so should other single-use plastics. To their credit, many governments around the world - including India, Kenya, the EU, Britain, but NOT Canada - are pursuing just such a ban, and even the United Nations is starting to get behind the idea. And, of course, what we really need to be doing is reducing packaging, and establishing a manufacturers' responsibility program and a supplier-pays system on packaging, similar to what the Green Party proposes, and to what already exists in a few responsible countries like Germany.
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