Many people go to restaurants and their drink comes with a plastic straw and nobody bats an eye. Little do we know that those little plastic straws are the 11th most common found ocean pollutant, making up about 3 percent of the world’s waste. According to a study conducted in early January of 2019 it was found that nearly 500 million plastic straws are used every day in the United States alone.

Each year eight tons of plastic waste are pulled out of the ocean, and .025 percent of that is plastic straws. Plastic straws never biodegrades, because the vast majority of them are made with type 5 plastic which is polypropylene. Polypropylene plastic takes 200 years to degrade, it just becomes smaller pieces of plastic that sit in the earth and oceans.

Plastic straws never go away and neither do other plastic products which aren’t accepted by local recyclers. The recycling plants don’t take them for many reasons, they may be a non-biodegradable plastic, they may be made of two different materials that have to be seperated to recycle, or they may fall through the slots when sorting. Either way they end up sitting in the earth or eventually make their way to our water sources and kill marine life within.

There are many ways to keep straws out of the oceans and the earth. You can buy reusable straws made of metal, glass, bamboo, or even paper. The paper and bamboo are easily broken down and don’t end up harming marine life if they end up in the ocean. The glass and metal straws can be used for a long time, you can take them anywhere and use them in lue of plastic straws that are given.

Before you order at restaurants you can ask for no straw, it is becoming more common to be asked if a straw is wanted but you can make sure by asking not to have one. Using reusable straws can help to cut the number of straws in the oceans down. Cleaning up our earth is becoming more important by the day, if we continue on the path we are we won’t have an earth left to live on.