A world drowning in plastic waste!

🌊 By 2050 There Could Be More Plastic Than Fish in Our Seas

There’s been no shortage of doom-laden news coverage about the staggering amount of rubbish — and in particular plastic — that’s been finding its way into our rivers and seas. It has been going on for decades, if we’re honest, but it took the internet and a few viral videos of sea turtles in distress to properly get people’s attention. Better late than never, I suppose.

The most talked-about example of this slow-motion catastrophe is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known rather dramatically as the Pacific Trash Vortex. Discovered in 1997 by racing boat captain Charles Moore, who stumbled across it somewhat accidentally while sailing home from a race, it has since become the poster child for everything wrong with how we treat our oceans. The Patch is an area of floating debris estimated to cover more than 600,000 square miles — that’s roughly twice the size of the state of Texas, or for those of us who think in British terms, about six times the size of the United Kingdom. It weighs in at around 3.5 million tonnes. Yes, tonnes. Let that sit with you for a moment.

🗑️ Where Is All This Rubbish Actually Coming From?

According to the non-profit organisation The Last Plastic Straw, a whopping 80% of all marine debris found in the ocean is land-based — meaning it didn’t fall off ships, it came from us lot on dry land. And of that debris, somewhere between 80% and 90% is made from plastic. So it’s not sailors tossing things overboard. It’s us, with our carrier bags and takeaway containers and general couldn’t-care-less attitude.

The United States of America — and I say this without any particular glee — is one of the worst offenders. For a country that represents just 5% of the world’s population, it manages to consume around 30% of the world’s resources and generate roughly 30% of the world’s waste. That’s quite a trick. The rest of the world is looking on with a mixture of admiration and horror.

🔬 It’s Not Just the Big Stuff

It’s easy to get distracted by the images of plastic bottles and bin bags floating about in the Pacific, but there is a quieter, more insidious threat from microplastic particles — tiny fragments of plastic measuring 5mm or less in length. These come from two main sources. First, there are microbeads: those little scrubbing granules found in facial washes and exfoliating creams that, after you’ve had a good scrub, wash straight down the plughole and into the water supply. Second, there are clothing fibres shed from synthetic garments — polyester, nylon, acrylic — every single time you bung them in the washing machine. A single wash cycle can release hundreds of thousands of fibres. Lovely. As the CNN article on microplastics pointed out, these particles are now turning up in tap water, bottled water, seafood, and even table salt. Genuinely hard to avoid.

☠️ Why Plastic Is a Proper Problem

As the Plastic Pollution Coalition website sets out rather bluntly, plastic waste is bad news on multiple fronts. Plastic never goes away — it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces over hundreds of years. It piles up in the environment, spoils our groundwater, poisons our food chain, attracts other pollutants like a magnet, affects human health in ways we’re only beginning to understand, and threatens wildlife at every level of the ecosystem. Other than that, it’s absolutely marvellous.

🥤 Enter the Humble Drinking Straw

Now, amid all this cheerful news, we wanted to focus on one specific contributor to what we’ve taken to calling the plasta-apocalypse: the humble drinking straw. In the United States alone, over 500 million plastic straws are used and discarded every single day. That’s not a typo. Five hundred million. Per day.

A number of organisations have sprung up with the specific mission of reducing straw consumption, including The Last Plastic Straw, Strawless Ocean, and the Plastic Pollution Coalition. Good people, doing important work.

♻️ So What Can We Actually Do?

Glad you asked. Here’s the short version:

REFUSE disposable plastic wherever possible. Choose products that aren’t wrapped in unnecessary plastic, carry your own bags, containers and utensils, and simply say “no straw, please” when you order a drink. It takes about two seconds and nobody has ever died from it.

REDUCE your plastic footprint by cutting down on goods with excessive plastic packaging. If it’s going to leave behind a pile of plastic rubbish, question whether you really need it.

RECYCLE what you genuinely can’t refuse, reduce or reuse. Think about the full life cycle of what you buy — from where it was made to where it ends up.

REUSE durable alternatives: glass, stainless steel, wood, ceramic, bamboo. These things exist. They work perfectly well.

Beyond the personal stuff, being a bit of an activist actually helps. That means joining one of the organisations listed above, writing to businesses that routinely hand out straws without being asked, or simply telling friends, family and colleagues what’s going on. There is also a documentary film on the subject — simply called STRAWS, made by Linda Booker — which can be hired for community screenings at schools and local groups. Worth a look.

🥤 Our Personal Bit

We’re not exactly straw enthusiasts in our house — we don’t sit around sipping cocktails through straws on a Tuesday evening — but we still felt it was time to do something. So we bought a set of stainless steel reusable straws and, rather to our surprise, they are genuinely excellent. There are other options too — silicone, glass, and even bamboo — and these two articles cover the field rather well:

• New York Magazine: Best Reusable Straws
• Good Housekeeping: Best Reusable Straws

One personal favourite is the FinalStraw — a collapsible, foldable straw that fits into a small case you can carry in your pocket or bag. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel absurdly virtuous at a restaurant. The inventors ran a Kickstarter campaign to get it into production and it rather took off, which is genuinely heartening.

💭 A Final Word

Anyway. The oceans are in trouble, the fish are suffering, and an awful lot of it comes down to our collective laziness with single-use plastic. We can’t fix everything, but we can all do a little bit. And if that starts with just saying “no straw, please” — well, that’s not a bad place to start.