Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

by Hannah Ritchie

Paper and water don’t go together. Paper is made of a compound called cellulose, which dissolves in water. Why anyone would think it’s a good idea to make drinking straws out of paper is beyond me. They really are useless. Yet ‘paper straws’ have become the sustainability badge for restaurants and bars across the world. I’m not an advocate for plastic straws. I don’t really care about them. But I do care about ineffective policies, especially if they take the place of ones that could really make a difference. Plastic straws are just not a big deal in the scale of the world’s plastic pollution. Especially in rich countries, the odds that your plastic straws will end up in the ocean are pretty small. Even if they’re not recycled, they’re probably being sent to landfill. We don’t know exactly how many plastic straws end up in the ocean, but they’re probably around 0.02% of ocean plastics. If we want to get strict on single-use plastic straws, fine. But it can’t be a government’s leading policy for tackling plastic pollution.