Banning Plastic Straws Won’t Help The Oceans.
Here’s Why
by John O'Sullivan
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.