Starbucks announced on Monday it plans to eliminate plastic straws from its 28,000 stores worldwide by 2020.
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Every year we use massive amounts of plastic is another year that much of that plastic ends up in the oceans. Some estimates claim that over eight metric tons of plastic enter the oceans every year and others put it significantly higher. That constant influx of ever-increasing amounts of plastic can have some pretty devastating effects on both marine and terrestrial life, including people.
The oceans help protect our environment and maintain our world the way it is. As famed explorer Sylvia Earle likes to say, “No water, no life. No blue, no green.” This means the oceans are what allows life to flourish on our planet. The more polluted they become, the harder it is for our oceans to thrive. While we aren’t in danger of seeing them evaporate, we may be seeing another mass extinction event, and that would mean the seas could become essentially lifeless.
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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.
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Eko Nugroho, Indonesia’s leading visual artist, has collaborated with such iconic and recognizable brands as Louis Vuitton and IKEA – now, he has created a piece meant to highlight the issue of the plastic pollution of our planet. The piece, called Bouquet of Love, is a 30-by-20-foot installation created using 660 pounds of local plastic debris. It will be installed on a popular beach club in Bali.
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Did you know that every piece of plastic ever created from the time of invention in 1905 until now is still in existence today? Did you also know that by 2030 (just shy of 2 more decades) there will be more plastic in the oceans, than fish? Follow along in this conversational and action-oriented book as author Geordie Wardman presents a simple solution to the reasons why you should be worried, nay terrified, about the plastic that is piling up, literally, on the planet. In Our Plastic Legacy. How to quit plastic, want less, and live green daily, you will find: Why plastic pollution is arguably the single most important environmental crises in the world today, perhaps greater but most certainly contributing to climate change -Facts about how plastic affects our environment, particularly our oceans and our health -How a single person can do more to help solve the problem than ever imaginable.
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