Straw

Straws are bad. I've learned this loud and clear. The consciousness around bad straws is very loud and very prevalent right now. My kid has been instructing me for the better part of the school year on the forever and evil impact of the nefarious, single-use straw. NPR has been instructing me via various show topics about the malevolent presence of straws in our oceans and in the bodies of our ocean animals. The quantification of the straw impact is so mind-boggling that I can't remember it correctly. It's all: the number of single-use straws used in a day could circle around the earth twice, and six billion mega tons of straws are dumped in the ocean ever year, and here's the youtube video of the scientists painfully extracting the straw from the tortoise, and enough single-use straws are used every week to build the Eiffel Tower in every back yard of America, and all the straws that you've used in your life would weigh as much as seven pods of killer whales, and the straw is plastic which never goes away but only breaks down into tiny micro straw plastic particles that stay in our oceans and our bodies and our children's children's bodies forever causing endocrine disruption and death and surliness and disease and that is actually really terrifying, especially the forever micro particles aspect.

But I have some questions. Because I thought I was throwing away my straws into the garbage and that garbage was going into the dump and the landfill far from the ocean. How did those straws leave the landfill and end up in the ocean? Are people all over the world throwing theirs straws, just their straws, into the nearby ocean? Do the straws jump out of the landfill and dive into streams and waterways and wend their way to the oceans?

I am very guilty of the straw problem. Just think about all the Diet Cokes I drank in high school. How many times did I drive through somewhere and order a large Diet Coke and suck it down and slouch around and stare at boys? I did that, like, every twenty minutes. Single-use straws were complicit every time. Just think about the entire carbon footprint of that very ritual: the driving; the Diet Coke; the garbage; the swimming, single-use plastic straw; the slouching. I can't undo that rot. Not a single aspect of that ritual was good for me or my planet. And there is no Planet B.

So, what happens to the straw manufacturers? Do the Koch Brothers make 85% of all straws? What's at play here with the supply-and-demand of the straw marketplace? Can the straw makers make straws out of bamboo pulp or corn plastic or something that disintegrates or evaporates? I realize that nothing, no matter on earth, ever goes away. So, can we work on having new straws made of good stuff that we can throw in the oceans? Or is the request here that we just eradicate all straw use? Aside from, like, medical uses. There will be medical straws. Or there will be re-usable straws? I realize there already are re-usable straws. We have some laying around somewhere. So people are going to start toting around their reusable bpa-free aluminum straws then. I'm just working this through.

Back when I was young and had deeper thoughts, I used to think about what would happen if one day all the plastic in the world just vanished. I used to think what would that look like if it all vanished in 1960, and then by comparison what would happen if it all vanished in 1970, or 1980, or 1990, etc.  I would imagine how empty our shelves would be, or how things would come crashing down, or airplanes would fall apart, or entire industries would face catastrophic despair... I have always been very preoccupied by "the olden days" and they certainly didn't have plastics in the olden days, so the olden days were better? A mind can spend a lot of time in this analysis.

Here's what I did. I've had this massive box of single-use straws for ages. We've been slowly making our way through them. I bought them before I knew I wasn't supposed to, for the record. Because, like I said, I thought my straws were going into the non-ocean garbage landfill, where they would not breakdown respectfully with the rest of the single-use plastic that we consume by the armfuls every day. (We're screwed.) So, recently I've started washing and re-using these single-use straws. They're the kinds with the bendy necks and they have the perky red stripe going down the side. I consume a fair amount of smoothies at home and I like to use a straw with them, so now I'm washing and re-using my straws. The washed straws have a special place in a drawer by the blender. The system has been working well.

The system works well when you THOROUGHLY wash the straw. Don't not-thoroughly wash the straw. The other day I made a smoothie. I grabbed a washed straw from the drawer by the blender. I smugly plopped that straw in my vanilla-protein-banana-rainbow-sparkle smoothie. I jubilantly sucked down my first taste of the smoothie. But something was very, very wrong. Something tasted rotten. I gagged. Pre-vomitted, really. But I knew what had happened. I hadn't washed the straw well enough. Old smoothie bits had turned to compost in my straw and I had sucked it down.

The only way I was going to survive the compost-in-the-straw incident was to move past it very quickly. I grabbed another washed straw from the drawer by the blender. I held it up to the light to see if any chunky bits of filth were lurking. (No.) And I plopped it in my smoothie and I sucked that smoothie down. It was delicious. I did throw that first filthy straw away, though. And throwing away a multi-used single-use straw was morally confusing, I admit. Because I'm not going to not use the straws I already have. Those straws already exist. They are already pre-garbage, like the majority of material we touch every day, and so I might as well use them. Slowly. Cleaning them thoroughly. Then I'll get my re-usable bamboo aluminum straw from REI or wherever. And thoroughly clean that one too.