Single-use plastic straws are an environmental problem that few people think about. But consider the popularity of drinks like fountain sodas, iced lattes and bubble teas; all the accompanying plastic straws add up to a lot of plastic waste.
According to Australian researchers, as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws litter the world’s beaches, roughly one for every living human. Those straws are difficult to recycle and seldom accepted by curbside programs or at transfer centers, but most importantly they add to the plastic catastrophe happening in our oceans.
By switching to a reusable, you’ll reduce the demand for single-use polypropylne (#5 plastic) straws, the manufacturing of which produces about 1.5 grams of CO2 emissions. That may not sound like much, but the approximately 500 million straws used in the U.S. each day account for 1.6 million pounds of CO2 emissions —…