Why plastic straws ARE so bad
Did you know that 500,000,000 plastic straws are thrown away every single day which means that over the course of a year, over 175,000,000,000 plastic straws will have been thrown away. To make things worse, plastic straws are generally too light to be recycled so they tend to end up at landfills where they will spend around 200 years biodegrading, while the straw is leaching micro plastics which create harmful chemicals to soil and ocean wildlife. Today, it is estimated that one quarter of all organisms in the ocean have traces of plastic in them and by 2050 studies say that 100% of all living organisms in the ocean will have traces of plastic in them. Plastic straws alone are the 10th highest contributor to plastic debris in the ocean, and with over 100 million tons of plastic estimated to be in the ocean, that is a lot of straw debris.