Why fuss over straws?

The oldest reference to a drinking straw comes from ancient Sumeria, where a drawing on a 5,000-year-old tomb depicts two men drinking beer from straws. Up until the late 1880s in America, straws were simply the hollow tubes from rye stalks, and they left a natural grassy flavor in your drink. As the story goes, that grassy flavor ruined a man’s mint julep, so he figured out how to wrap a strip of paper around a pencil and seal it with wax, and in 1888 the first patent for a paper straw was issued. By the 1960s, with the advent of new materials and manufacturing processes, we began to make straws cheaper and more easily from polypropylene, plastic No. 5—and for 50 years nothing much changed.

That is, until August 2015, when a video surfaced of a team of marine field biologists removing what they thought was a parasitic worm from a sea turtle’s nose. After the first two inches are removed, the lead biologist on the boat, Christine Figgener, sees what looks like familiar black lines from the straws she knows from Germany. The team painstakingly pulls out the remainder of the straw—it takes almost two minutes—as the turtle struggles in pain.

Chico business owner Linda Storey watched that video and says it changed her whole outlook.

“I started by just not using straws anymore myself, but then I realized, wait, I have a business, and I can do it there, too,” she said.

That was last October, and by the next month, Storey had instituted a straws-by-request-only policy in her Hula’s Chinese Bar-B-Q restaurants, which now offer only biodegradable paper straws. And she didn’t stop there: She created the Strawless in Chico Facebook page to encourage local folks and businesses to go strawless, as well as raise awareness of the issue.

Storey also began to work with the Sustainability Management Association (SMA), which assigned an intern, Sophia Graves, to collaborate with her on Strawless in Chico. Since her internship, Graves has taken up the fight on her own, as project leader on the Strawless Challenge project through the SMA, further challenging local businesses and residents to go straw-free through the strawlesschallenge.com website, on the Strawless Challenge Facebook page and with the #stopsucking hashtag.

The campaign has been a success. In April, Chico State’s Associated Students went plastic-straw-free. (A.S. doesn’t account for every straw on campus, but does run the dining halls and other eateries.) Since then, Cal State Stanislaus became the only other college campus to do the same.

At least nine local restaurants, and many other businesses, have committed to cutting back on plastic straws through the Strawless Challenge, including Fresh Twisted Cafe, which, among other menu items, sells smoothies. Its owner, Doug Hernandez, said he hasn’t experienced pushback from his customers, telling the CN&R: “We still offer both options—we still have plastic straws available, and I got some real good paper straws, too.”

Starbucks announced over the summer it would phase out single-use straws in its cafes around the country by 2020. Seattle was the first city in America to ban plastic straws; a few others have followed, such as Fort Myers and Miami Beach in Florida, and Malibu and Berkeley in California. Gov. Jerry Brown just signed a bill that will make plastic straws available by request only at full-service restaurants statewide, starting Jan. 1.

Most anti-straw organizations with a presence on the web offer similar information and resources for going strawless, including links to purchase stainless steel or bamboo straws. Each seems to use one common statistic: 500 million straws used per day in the United States. That’s about 1.6 straws per person per day.

What those sites tend not to disclose is the source of that statistic—a 9-year-old boy named Milo Cress (now 17), who noticed while out at restaurants that people would just remove straws from their drinks and set them on the table without ever using them.

He wanted to bring awareness to the issue and launched Be Straw Free in 2011 to do so, but he found a dearth of data on straw usage in the U.S., so he decided to do the research himself. That’s when he called the manufacturers and came up with his number. Critics have since used his age and method to rally against the straw movement; proponents say the number may be too small.

Natalie Carter, executive director of the Butte Environmental Council (BEC), says 500 million is probably pretty accurate—it’s on par with the Ocean Conservancy’s figure, 1.5 straws per capita daily.

For added perspective, during the California Coastal Cleanup Day in 2017, volunteers found 20,155 plastic straws along 1,900 miles of beaches, shorelines and waterways.

Locally, on Sept. 15, BEC held its 31st annual Bidwell Park and Chico Creeks Cleanup. In one 15-minute period, Carter said, volunteers picked up 133 straws among 2,050 pieces of garbage.

“And that’s only the 15 minutes we counted—we’re out there for hours and hours,” she continued. “It adds up, it makes an impact.”

The average straw weighs 0.42 ounces. Going by the 500 million per day number, then by weight, Americans use about 2.4 million tons’ worth of plastic straws a year.

These days, we can recycle plastic No. 5, but according to Waste Management, we can’t recycle straws because the machine doesn’t exist to handle them. The shape and size of straws gets them stuck in recycling equipment, which can clog up the whole process. They’re difficult to wash out, too.

Storey calls the straw “a gateway plastic,” adding: “My hope is that if people start thinking about whether or not to use a plastic straw, maybe they’ll start thinking about the other plastics they’re using, too.”