Reducing Single Use Plastic – Can you banish straws from your life?

I recently had lunch at a lovely food truck with wonderful farm fresh food, all organic and delicious. Imagine my shock when my food was delivered in a styrofoam container. And my drink in a styrofoam cup with a plastic lid and a plastic straw! Four pieces of plastic into the trash from one meal.

If you haven’t thought about the volume of single use plastic in your life, I’d like to respectfully suggest that you pause for a moment now  to consider how many single use plastic objects you use every day.  Water bottles, grocery bags, vegetable wrappers, drink cups, shampoo bottles, candy wrappers, straws…the list goes on and on.

Finished thinking about it? Are you mind boggled?

We can look at single use plastic from a couple of angles. You know I’m always looking at the contamination of our food with toxins. You can’t get much worse than adding hot food to a Styrofoam container that will immediately release endocrine disrupting phthalates, toxic BPA and who-knows-what-else into your food.

That’s a huge worry in our toxic world, but that’s not my major concern today.

Probably most of you have heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), an island of plastic trash twice the size of Texas that covers 600,000 square miles and is floating in the Pacific between Hawaii and California. The GPBP grows larger every year, thanks to the 2.4 million tons of plastic waste that makes its way from our rivers to the ocean, adding up to 1.87 trillion pieces of plastic.

Plastic never decomposes, even after decades of floating in the ocean. A photo of a plastic crate manufactured in 1977 and scooped out of the garbage island painfully illustrates the case in point. You could probably use it today to store stuff in your garage.

Yes, friends, that means our plastic grocery bags, our plastic cup lids, Styrofoam containers, water bottles and yes, straws. We use them once and we throw them away. And they find they way into the ocean.

If you have seen photos of whales dying from starvation because they had massive amount of plastic in their stomach, I assure you it’s not a pretty picture.

A study recently published in Scientific American reported that the huge garbage patch is more than 16 times what scientists originally estimated. It’s spinning out plastic from the edges of a vortex that is being caught up in ocean currents that cast it farther adrift.

We must stop this mindless consumption and this mindless destruction of our oceans and our Earth.

More than 60 countries have banned single use plastic, including countries that many of us would consider pretty far out of the mainstream of the developed world, like Rwanda.

In fact, the single use plastic explosion is a symptom of the sickness of the developed world, fast food and all.

So, my friends, please ask yourselves what you’re willing to do, as an individual, to stop the plastic explosion.

You’ve probably been carrying your own bags to the supermarket for years. How about carrying them into Walgreen’s or Home Depot or Walmart? Yes, you absolutely can dramatically reduce your personal use of plastic bags.

How about refusing plastic straws? I started doing this several months ago as a personal commitment to Mother Earth.

It’s not easy. Even higher end restaurants may automatically put a straw in your water glass or lay one on the table for you to take. If you don’t use it, the straw will be thrown away anyway, I guess for sanitary purposes, even if it’s still in it’s paper wrapping.

So, get into the habit of saying, “No straw,” when you order drinks wherever you are.

Some restaurants are offering biodegradable paper straws, but I’m not really fond of cutting down trees for single uses, either.

Yes, you can buy those silly foldable stainless steel straws. They come with a tiny brush so you can scrub them out. I hate to think of mold and bacteria growing inside them and you know if you buy one, you won’t scrub it out every day.

What’s wrong with drinking out of a glass? Why do we use straws, anyway? Who needs straws?

We have no problem drinking coffee directly out of a cup (how silly to think of drinking coffee through a straw!).

Yes, indeed, each of us can make a difference simply by refusing straws.

Or, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could persuade our local governments to ban plastic straws? What’s next? Water bottles? Plastic drink lids? Let’s go for it!