I have never heard or read about straws more than I have this past month. This July, Starbucks and the entirety of Seattle announced plans to eliminate the use of plastic straws altogether. Plastic pollution accounts for the most dangerous threat to ocean life today, with research showing that by 2050, the plastic in the world's oceans will outnumber the fish if we continue consuming plastic at our current rate.
So this plastic straw ban seems like a good and welcomed change, right? As it turns out, wrong! The straw ban, while it should be a positive light at the end of the news tunnel, actually reveals the darker implications of the current social, economic, and environmental climate of today's society.
1. The straw ban provides no flexibility for disabled people
While many people were ecstatic about the plastic straw ban and took to social media lauding the companies and cities for their decision, disabled people spoke up against it. Plastic straws are extremely useful and a NECESSITY for many disabled people around the world.
As one Twitter user explained in a thread of tweets, that without straws, their lives would be much more difficult and many straw alternatives simply would not work.
By banning straws, we have ignored 56.7 million people. Even if not every disabled person relies on straws, by refusing to listen to those who do, we are silencing an entire community and making them feel as if their struggle and way of life is irrelevant.
2. Plastic straws: More Dangerous than Guns!, apparently
Guns violence kills 96 Americans a day (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). As of today, July 11, 2018, 7,613 people have been killed by guns.
The movement to reform gun laws has been around since the Gun Control Act was passed in 1968 with the purpose of "keeping firearms out of the hands of those not legally entitled to possess them because of age, criminal background, or incompetence". Since then, people have been working tirelessly in the movement to reform, restrict, and recently, repeal the use of guns.
Compared to plastic straws which have only been widely used since the 1960s, the path to gun control has been far longer and exhausting. And which got banned first in America?
3. The real enemies
Multi-million dollar corporations are the biggest offenders of environmental protection and conservation in the world.
Nestle, the company behind a bottled water brand, is one of the biggest contributors to plastic waste in the world. Silos containing 125 tons of plastic resin are used to bottle water. This water mostly comes from sources in California, a state that is being affected by an extreme drought. Another source is in Flint, Michigan, where its residents have been suffering from a lack of clean drinking water. The bottles of water being sold by Nestle take advantage of people who need the water they are packaging. And the packaging goes straight into the ocean.
Gas and oil companies have been long criticized for the part they play in environmental pollution. In January, the city of New York filed a lawsuit against big oil companies BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell on the claim that together, the companies produced 11% of all of global-warming inducing gases through the oil and gas products they have sold.
Why have plastic straws been targeted, but these companies haven't?
Banning straws is a step in the right direction, although it's more of a baby step. Will we as a country ever been able to take the jump to improvement we clearly need?
