Stop Sucking: The war on plastic straws

Last year I met Adrian Grenier and he said to me, “I need to mitigate all the harm I did by being an actor, popularizing a vacuous lifestyle.” He wants to make up for all the time he spent as an actor and I can understand that. I ended up creating a school with the same motivation and Adrian created the Lonely Whale Foundation and a powerful anti-straw movement. He has won by getting Starbucks to announce a straw ban by 2020. The movement of going straw-free is important, even if it’s just a drop in the ocean so to speak.

“At Lonely Whale we came up with perhaps the lowest hanging plastic, which is the single-use plastic straw. We say: look, just do one thing; try it on; see how it feels, and see how easy it can be. I think the straw is not only symbolically a great first step, a gateway if you will, but also significant because it is the smaller plastics in particular that we want to prevent.”

Why did banning the plastic straw—something so small and forgettable that it tends not to be recycled—go viral as a form of consumer environmentalism?

Straws are far from our biggest problem when it comes to marine plastic pollution, but of all the single-use plastics, they seem to be the easiest to let go of (except for people with certain disabilities who can’t drink out of cups without them). And activists hope that straws will be a “gateway plastic,” encouraging people to forgo other single-use plastics such as bags and bottles.

Strawbans aren’t going to save the ocean, but they could jumpstart much-needed conversations about the level of non-biodegradable trash in them.”

 

Here at Bambu Indah we’ve been straw-free for years. We use the stems of papaya leaves instead. A grade 8 student at Green School, Parker Murphy, has created this website to help guide you to the straw free places around Bali.

Meanwhile, this summer young green leaders of Make a Change World and Bye Bye Plastic Bags are also embarking on a sailing trip around Bali to monitor levels of marine plastic and help highlight people trying to change the tide of trash around the island.