National Geographic calculated that of the 8 million tons of plastic deposited into the world’s oceans each year, only 0.025 percent is comprised of plastic straws.
Not too long ago, plastic straws were enemy number 1 of the environmental movement. And the movement was successful. Large fast food chains like McDonalds moved to paper straws. Supermarkets such as Woolworths stopped selling single-use plastic straws. Some of the ‘solutions’ to the plastics straw challenge were comical. None more so than Starbuck’s announcement in 2018 that they would be replacing plastic straws with plastic ‘sippy’ lids. This article looks back at the movement to ban plastic straws and wonders how we lost sight of the forest for the trees. If plastic straws are only 0.025% of the plastic waste ending up in the ocean, why is it we became fixated on it.
The world has moved on from plastic straws and is now focused on all single use plastic. Last year, Canada announced a single-use plastics ban that included bags, cutlery, food service ware, and stir sticks. A year earlier, in 2021, the European Union announced a similar single-use plastic ban that captured plates, cutlery, straws, balloon sticks and cotton buds. These feel like great steps, but we should take a lesson from our experience with plastic straws.
The amount of plastic we’re using is still growing. Global plastics production doubled from 2000 to 2019. Twiggy Forest’s Minderoo Foundation publishes the Plastic Waste Makers Index and found the world generated 139 million metric tons of single-use plastic waste in 2021, which was 6 million metric tons more than in 2019, when the first index was released. The OECD have predicted that the amount of plastic waste produced globally will triple by 2060.
These numbers are a reminder that there is still a long way to go to address the volume of plastic waste we create. And while announcements of bans on single-use plastic are a great step, they are only slowing the growth. We still have a long way to actually reduce the volume of plastic waste we’re creating.
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