Plastic Straws 🥤

I think we all know about the damage plastic straws can do. They are single use plastic and when they are not thrown away properly the wind can blow it into the oceans and kill animals. They are not biodegradable and so can't break down naturally so they break down into smaller and smaller pieces and pollute soil, water and the environment. The Sea Turtle Conservancy say that more than half of the world's sea turtles have ingested plastic and one hundred million marine animals die each year from ocean plastic😔.

There are lots of ways you can stop using plastic straws. For example; you can buy metal straws which are good but sometimes you get a little hint of metal in what you're drinking.  You can also buy foldable metal straws which you can take wherever you go so you don't use plastic straws outside of home either. You can get rubber straws, which I've personally never tried out but I know people who have. There are also paper straws, but after using them for a while they can get a bit soggy. And of course, the easiest thing to do is just not use them at all!😅

Plastic straws facts:

• In 2018, it was said that 8.5 billion plastic straws were thrown away every year in the UK. That's about one hundred and thirty straws for every person. 
• There are 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic in the world and seven percent of it is plastic straws. 
• While the majority of straws is made of polypropylene, which is recyclable, they don't usually enter the recycling process so without it they can take up to two hundred years to decompose.

I got these facts from Green match and you can see more facts and about how Starbucks and McDonald's are two main contributors to plastic straws (Starbucks uses over 1 billion plastic straws per year worldwide and McDonald's uses 1.8 million plastic straws per day in the UK).

Thank you for reading this blog, we really need to cut down on plastic straws.

Violet

         xxx