How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter? The Problem of Plastic Straws (And How Each of Us Can Make a Difference)
Posted on December 17, 2017 by DrRossH in General, Plastic Straws
A Q&A with Jackie Nunez, founder of the Last Plastic Straw.
Source: The Problem of Plastic Straws (And How Each of Us Can Make a Difference)
Can restaurants and businesses save money by serving fewer plastic straws or switching to a reusable straw?
YES THEY CAN! Cost is actually a non-issue: if businesses simply write on their menus “Straws served upon request” they will find 50-90 percent of their patrons will not ask for a straw. If you think about how many people actually have and use drinking straws at home, you start to get the picture of what is the real “need” for a drinking straw.
The Last Plastic Straw is not against drinking straws, we are against plastic for single-use, and the plastic drinking straw is the poster child for useless single-use plastic. If a business simply served straws upon request for those who need them, it would be cost savings, not only for the business, but for the community they do business in. Consider the savings in waste hauling, landfill, plastic in the environment, clean up, and the overall pollution that results in every stage of a plastic straws existence from manufacture, shipping, health toxicity, and waste.
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