Any to-go beverage you’ve recently gotten likely came with the traditional plastic straw poking out of the lid. You probably quickly forgot about the straw after its usefulness ended. We’re busy people, and even the most well-intentioned environmentalists among us have been handed a plastic straw and taken it without question, maybe in a hurry to get where she’s going. She didn’t ask for the straw, but she got one anyway, and now it seems like a waste to not use it, so she does. Here’s the problem: those forgotten weightless funnels of plastic linger for hundreds of years, so every straw you’ve ever grabbed or been handed for your entire life still exists somewhere. In fact, Americans use 500 million straws every single day. Even as plastic breaks down, it just becomes smaller and smaller fragments of plastic and never fully disintegrates, so these particles can wash out to sea and travel thousands of miles away, even making it into the stomachs of penguins, fish, or other wildlife.