I find it fascinating that as our Earth has twelve years left before being majorly threatened by Carbon Dioxide and the biggest stride big corporations think they can make is doing away with plastic straws. One of the main companies that have gone public about making this change is Starbucks. Still, as I walk around campus and see girls with their Starbucks cups full of acai refreshers and iced coffees, I see a green plastic straw and a plastic cup. If we're trying to create a sustainable society, why are we so concerned with plastic straws when single-use plastic cups haunt our lives every single day and even more frequently than straws. If Starbucks were so willing to save the environment they would draw their focus to all plastic products and not just straws. Now many may think, how would we even solve this problem and I have a solution. I'm not saying my idea is the be all end all that will 100% work, but it is a thought.

So my idea is to offer Mason Jars or cups to serve drinks inside Starbucks. For people who are on the go, offer them to buy the reusable travel cups and if they bring it back, they are gifted with an exclusive reward program. It just seems like something along these lines would help make a bigger step in reducing the Starbucks carbon footprint than getting rid of plastic straws (which seems to still be a work in progress). It upsets me so much that a company striving to be sustainable posed such a small stride as a huge accomplishment. I want big corporations to stop using sustainability to gain clout unless they are actually doing something extremely effective that will actually help to make an active change in the saving of our environment.

Hearing about the amount of time we have left until this world is at risk, makes me fearful that more of these companies will play along as friends to the environment when in reality a change in one plastic product will not help the years and years of carbon emissions and trash buildup that is present in our world. I love visiting local coffee shops where you're given a ceramic mug or glass cup, but a Starbucks is so much more accessible than most local places. Until the easy access stores and companies make sustainability easy for a mass of people that aren't aware of this arising problem, we'll never fix the problem. My biggest wish is that these changes can happen soon because there is only one Earth. Let's celebrate and accept sustainability because it is the future.