Name: Why Plastic Straws Suck
Uploaded: 2018-08-01T02:01:25.000Z
Duration: 4 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

That's a plastic straw being pulled out of

The video went viral in 2015 sparking a public outcry

And over the years the campaign has gained traction.

Starbucks says by 2020 it will eliminate plastic straws,

pivoting to biodegradable straws and a newly designed lid.

McDonald's UK, American Airlines, and Marriott Hotels

with plastic straws is that they are too small

and lightweight to be captured in modern recycling equipment."

We reached out to various recycling plants across North America to see if that was true.

While some facilities told us they do recycle straws,

two of the largest recycling facilities in the US

said its machines don't always catch straws.

So they end up in the trash and eventually in landfills.

Dr. George Leonard is the Chief Scientist for Ocean Conservancy.

Dr. Leonard: The data from our 2017 international

coastal cleanup and there were 643,000 plastic straws

that were picked up around beaches and waterways all over the world.

Starbucks introduced a new lid that resembles a sippy cup.

These new lids are made from polypropylene

which according to Starbucks can be widely recycled.

Rachel Sarnoff: You know the objective really was to phase out straws

The shift to this lid really increases the amount

of plastic that Starbucks is using per cup.

but I don't think it's the whole picture.

Some critics have pointed out that straws only make up a fraction of our plastic waste.

So why is everyone so worked up about them?

Dr. Leonard: I think straws are a bit of a poster child

here for the bigger question of society's kind of

over-reliance on single-use plastics and the fact

that a lot of the stuff is ending up in our marine environment.

All plastics ultimately sort of break down

and fracture into smaller and smaller bits of plastic

as a result of being tossed around by the waves

and then by the fact that sunlight basically

And so they create what we call microplastics.

We're finding these flecks of plastic in everything from the forage fish

up through the kinds of fish that we end up putting on our dinner plate.

If we get the kind of global plastic users

and some of these other companies like Coca-Cola

that everybody knows about to really take ownership of

and they can bring the rest of the plastic supply chain along with them.

Sarnoff: We need to be more thoughtful about how we use plastic.

Dr. Leonard: We do know that there's about eight million metric tons of plastic overall

that ends up in the world's oceans every year

and that's kind of thought to be one garbage truck worth per mile of beach per day.

countries in Southeast Asia that don't have formal

whether it's behind the house or at a community dump

or in some cases directly dumped into the ocean itself.

For starters pay closer attention to your personal habits.

Sarnoff: Get into the habit of bringing our own cup,

That's what I have in my bag at all times.

Stop flushing things other than human waste and toilet paper down the toilet.

And remember, anything that goes down the toilet, drain,

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Why Plastic Straws Suck

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