OPINION: Are Straws Really the Issue?

By: Kristen Siciliano

If you’ve recently visited your local Starbucks, then you might have noticed the lids on the cold drinks are now straw free; and if you want a straw, you have to ask for one.

This is due to the coffee company coming out themselves, and claiming, “hello to the lid that will replace a billion straws a year,” a quote straight from the Starbucks website. 
But one begins to question when a billion-dollar company, like Starbucks, goes straw-less: are straws really the issue we need to be worried about environmentally?

Miranda Miron, an environmental advocate from Rincon, GA says that the problem is not the straws themselves. It is the fact that they are something so small that humans use periodically throughout the day so much, that it is an easy fix to start small when trying to better the environment.

“It can be a nice step for people in their day to day lives to realize that they can make a difference,” said Miron. “Little, tiny small things do matter, and if you start to realize that you can do small steps to make the bigger picture better, then I think that straws can be the first step in that.”

According to getgreennow.com, in the year of 2017 Americans used about 390 million plastic straws a day.

While that is a big number, straws still are not on the top of the list of the number one pollutant killing our ocean.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration U.S Department of Commerce, the number one pollutant in our oceans is actually fertilizers and pesticides.

During rainstorms, these harmful chemicals are taken out of the soils they were put in and run off into the ocean’s waters causing major issues for the habitats that live there.

So while straws technically are an issue, they are not the biggest issue.

You can easily start making changes to our environment by switching up your straw usage, and making a small impact in the world, however by simply changing your daily straws to a reusable one, you will not stop oceanic pollution.