Everyone keeps saying Americans use 500 millions straws a day (Jacopo, 2018). The claim originated in 2011 with then nine year old Milo Cress (Langone, 2018). Since then, the claim has been published everywhere and had a huge impact on public policy. In the last two years, straw bans have been moving across the country one city at a time (Gibbens, 2019). This despite the fact that the central claim, that Americans use 500 million straws, has been widely debunked. Even Cress has said that people “should take it for what it is, which is a rough estimate from seven or eight years ago by a nine-year-old” (Graves, 2018). What gets lost in this debate is the truth. Straws aren’t a huge source of plastic pollution.
No one actually knows how many straws are used in a day. It’s well below 500 million (Graves, 2018). Neither does most plastic come from the US. Close to 90% of all ocean plastic comes from only ten rivers in Asia and Africa (Patel, 2018). Not only do straws contribute little overall plastic to the world, eliminating them could be worse for the environment. Starbucks has developed new lids to replace straws. Those lids actually contain more plastic then the straws they replaced (Mahdawi, 2018).
We’re left with a dilemma. Is it better to signal to the world support for the environment with straw bans that might be counterproductive or should the messy truth be the message instead? Like most issues, reality is more complicated than the debate we’re having.
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