Why are we all fixating on plastic straws?

Plastic is amazing; and our modern lifestyles depend on it. It is used in thousands of products to add comfort, convenience and safety to everyday life, from protecting food to disposable syringes. But single-use plastic is now undoubtedly passé and plastic straws are the latest disposable commodity to find themselves in the firing line.

Every year, one trillion single-use plastic bags are used; that’s 2 million per minute. In 1993, Denmark introduced levies on plastic bags and saw a reduction of 60 percent in usage. In 2002, Ireland followed suit with the bag tax whereby consumers would have to purchase each bag. Usage dropped by 90 percent; when it began to pick up again in 2007, the price of each bag was increased. All across Europe, countries are considering ways to reduce consumption of plastic bags with the European Union targeting an 80 percent reduction by 2019.

The main driver behind banning plastic bags was to lower how much plastic finds its way into the oceans. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicts by 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish as just 14 percent of plastic packaging used globally makes its way to recycling plants. It’s this concern and the heart-wrenching images of waves of plastics rolling up on beaches that have inspired the public to take on plastic straws.

Businesses around the world have already banned single-use plastic straws, and governments are starting to take notice, considering bans at national level. Americans throw away 175 million straws per day and their small size means they tend to be missed in recycling plants—taking up to 200 years to decompose, straws have plenty of time to wreak havoc on the oceans. Consuming plastic is said to give a marine animal just a 50 percent chance of survival, with 71 percent of seabirds and 30 percent of turtles found with plastics in their stomachs.

Knowing this, it makes sense a ban would reduce the volume of plastic in the environment but plastic straws aren’t the reason the oceans are so contaminated. Despite the volume of plastic straws, bags, bottles and packaging, the majority of the plastic in the ocean is abandoned fishing gear. Fishing nets comprise 46 percent of the waste, while the majority of the rest is ropes, oyster spacers, eel traps, lobster crates and the like. An estimated 100,000 marine animals are strangled, suffocated or injured by these plastics every year.

If plastic straws aren’t responsible for most of the damage to the ocean life, why are we fixating on reducing our usage?

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem; the images of an ocean inundated with plastic haunt social media feeds and the scale of the damage can make individual efforts seem inconsequential. But that’s also where this fixation stems from—refusing a plastic straw with your cocktail is an easy sacrifice, something most people can do. The plastic guilt is real and it’s surfacing in small steps which can have a large impact. Not to mention, focusing on a small change can snowball into a more conscientious approach to consumerism. If you give up your plastic straw, next you’ll think about the amount of plastic in your drinks cup and be much more likely to swap to a reusable tumbler. This new mindset can then apply to all other areas of life; if everyone starts to think like this, the change we can collectively make will have a real impact.

Targeting a single item at a time feels less restrictive and encourages greater participation. Rather than banning single use plastics outright and forcing a society to change the way it consumes items overnight, focusing on bags, then on straws, then on cutlery, etc. allows the public to make lasting change. The ubiquity of the plastic straw makes it an easy focal point for people to encourage the switch in their peers—while there are many disabled people who genuinely rely on plastic straws, for most people, straws are not compulsory when having a drink.

However, the plastic guilt is also an easy way for manufacturers and industry to place the onus on the consumer. While we worry about our individual use, manufacturers escape the intense scrutiny required to make a change at industrial level. Industrial systems continue to flood the planet with plastics and businesses need to be held accountable for their safe disposal and reduction. This does not need to come in the form of a blanket ban. The European Union’s Circular Economy Package encourages manufacturers to use renewable and bio-based materials, while its Plastic Strategy intends to reduce single-use plastic packaging through extended producer responsibility. This will increase accountability for all companies using plastic. The European plastics industry involves more than 60,000 companies and the only long-term solution to reducing plastic waste is for these businesses to recycle and reuse more.

This is a challenge that citizens, industry and governments must tackle together. We are all responsible for our planet.