Time to start drinking like grown-ups and take responsibility

Not long ago I was out to dinner with a friend in Downtown Los Angeles. We ate nachos with spicy salsa and drank beer. All was well in La La Land.

Since the salsa was a little too picante for my sensitive self I ordered water that promptly appeared – two glasses and two straws. My friend thought nothing of it.

I did.

Why do I need a straw to drink a glass of water? Why does anyone need a straw to drink anything? My friend said that he didn’t like drinking from the rim of the glass, because “maybe some woman had left lipstick on it”. The glasses seemed clean.

Are people generally afraid of cooties? Or are we simply creatures of habit?

According to Plastic Pollution Coalition, over 500 million plastic straws are used every day in the United States. That is, according to News Deeply, enough to fill 125 school buses. Sometimes the straws end up in the bin after they served their purpose, but many times they don’t. Sometimes they end up in a sea turtle.

In August 2015 a team of marine biologists from Plastic Pollution Coalition found a sea turtle outside the coast of Costa Rica, who had a straw jammed up its nostril. The video of the turtle bleeding from its nose went viral and broke animal lovers’ hearts’ all over the world. According to The Washington Post, the video had by June 2017 been viewed 11.8 million times.

“Straws regularly appear on the Ocean Conservancy’s list of most-collected items at annual beach clean-ups,” says News Deeply.

Environmentalist groups work hard to stop the madness. Catchy memorable campaign names emerge, such as “Straw Wars” and “Strawless in Seattle”. The latter campaign was initiated by the Lonely Whale Foundation and featured Seattle Seahawks Quarterback Russell Wilson. When the quarterbacks get involved things must start to happen, right?

And if the sports stars don’t do the trick, we always have the celebrities. Adrian Grenier, founder of the Lonely Whale Foundation, Ellen Pompeo and the superhero of environmentalists, Leonardo DiCaprio, try their best to make people ditch the straw.

Twitter is flooded with hashtags: #StrawlessOcean, #StopSucking #SkiptheStraw #RefuseTheStraw #StrawsSuck #NoPlasticStraws and why not #StrawsAreForSuckers, just to give you a taste of what’s out there. Some people obviously do care and fight to protect the oceans, the animals and in the end, us humans. Shelby O’Neil, a sixteen-year-old from San Juan Bautista, California, has founded the Jr. Ocean Guardians and spends her weekends cleaning beaches and weekday afternoons teaching children about plastic pollution.

But tons of hashtags, campaigns, activists and celebs will do nothing about the tons of straws in our oceans if not every-day-Joe gives a shit. And sadly, it seems like he doesn’t. Neither do Jane, John, Maria or Bob. One small step for Shelby O’Neil does not equal one giant leap for anybody else.

We all know by now about microplastic in our food and what they could do to our bodies. They could cause poisoning, infertility and genetic disruption, according to the UN, reported by Independent. Straws can take up to 500 years to rot, if sent to a landfill, according to the Daily Mail. Do people of today trouble themselves with that information?

There are only so many ways to scare people with the truth. There are only so many pictures of bleeding turtles and choking birds that people can see before they go numb. People like to drink their Frappuccinos through a straw and think happy thoughts. End of story.

So, what can be done to wake people up? Where is the Achilles heel located?

In the wallet.

If Starbucks and McDonalds would make people cash up for their straws, I bet we’re going to see some action.

On November 8th, 2016, The California Plastic Bag Ban Veto Referendum, also known as Preposition 67, was approved. Plastic bags are now sold for 10 cents each. Countries all over the world have shown that the approach works. Retailer Marks and Spencer in the UK introduced a five-pence-charge on plastic bags in 2008, and in 2015 food chain Tesco followed. Both retails saw a drop of about 80 percent in usage of plastic bags by costumers. Clothes and make-up chain H&M started charging for plastic bags in Sweden in June 2017. And the result is encouraging with less and less costumers asking for a bag, according to Swedish Public Television, SVT.

Why cannot this be applied to straws? Why not start taking 50 cents per straw? Hit people where it hurts.

It may sound cruel, but sometimes tough love is what we need.