I do not fault any individual for loving straws, or any other single use plastics such as disposable forks and knives, or water or soda bottles. The majority of people in the US, and even the world, have been raised knowing these as 'norms'. I was the same until just a couple of years ago myself. I would use single use forks every day for my lunch and then throw them away, thinking nothing of it. It's not until I learned about the impacts that plastics are having on the oceans, and the rest of the food chain, that I started to worry about how much they are being used and tossed away every day. Pregnant women are already not supposed to eat fish because of high levels of mercury - introduced to the oceans through toxic waste dumping. Now there is a garbage patch three times the size of Texas floating around just in the Pacific. People are using 500 million straws per day in the United States alone. If only a small fraction of those reach the ocean, we are helping that patch grow at an exponential rate. Plastics do not break down into organic matter the way woods and papers do. Instead, they break into smaller and smaller pieces, and then fish and other sea life eat those pieces. They either die from them filling their stomachs, or we catch them and
we end up eating those plastic pieces.
Whose job is it to stop us from introducing all this plastic to the oceans? It's really hard to say. It's easy to blame companies like Disney. I was on
Castaway Cay just two days ago and noticed that their smoothie stand was located just 30 steps from the ocean, and that they gave out plastic straws with their smoothies. I also personally pulled two straws that were not mine out of my small patch of the ocean that I was playing in that afternoon. Obviously Disney is contributing to the problem, but what other choice do they have? We have all been raised to be accustomed to plastic straws, and if they went to something else, more people would just run to their competitors. I do blame those who are lazy enough to let their straws get into the ocean, but they are hard to catch and it does seem unfair to punish everyone. Really the only solution is some sort of government regulation, but we all know that will never happen. Instead, our oceans will continue to get more polluted, and our food sources will continue to become less viable. I think that's why there are people on this thread trying to convince others to stop, but even if the 20 people who read it all stop using plastic straws, that still leaves 330 million more people who are.
By the way, I am just sharing this as an observation, not as a passing of judgement of those who use plastic straws daily. I just ordered a double order of filet mignon as my final dinner last night, and cows are
much worse for the environment than straws are, so I am just as guilty as everyone else.