Why don’t people reuse plastic straws and plastic spoons? We reuse clothing and other items of plastic, but we throw fully usable spoons and straws. Only from Thailand they give out 2000 kilometers of plastic straws if you would put them after each other and almost none of them are ever reused.
Do You Really Need All These Plastic Straws?
Do you need all the plastic spoons or the plastic straws handed out by convenience stores? In Thailand, there are about 2 million straws dispensed every day from 7-Eleven stores alone. Lined up, that is about 400km of plastic, enough to circle the island of Koh PhaNgan ten times! Add in the other outlets, shops, and supermarkets and we probably have 2000km worth a day, about the distance from Chiang Rai to Phuket. Even if most convenience stores have slowed down their dispensing of straws and plastic spoons, the lockdown has once again made home delivery drastically increase the amount of plastic in nature.
A Plastic Straw will Outlive You!
The straws will be here for 100 years, and even when broken down they are eaten by animals and fish. This can kill them, or lead to poisoning, other digestion and breathing issues, and even Cancer. Trash Trash simply asks all retailers, big or small, as a first step, to simply stop handing out plastic straws automatically. Can we experiment with the idea of letting customers help themselves? If a customer buys drinks, let them choose whether or not to take straws. Trash Trash is also asking all individuals (yes that’s you as well) to simply say no when offered straws or plastic spoons that you absolutely do not need (no you don’t).
Celebrate the Few That Volunteer
Green Pattaya in Thailand has been cleaning the beaches of Thailand’s east coast since 2012, and they are not stopping! Most of the straws that their volunteers pick up are unused and still in plastic wrapping, whether distributed separately or pre attached to the intended purchased products.
Even though their volunteer group has cleaned almost 100 times, they are not winning the battle against the straws; quite the opposite. Most of the plastic straws are washed out to sea, and the volunteers can only pick the one washed up on the beaches. Even if Green Pattaya volunteers clean the beaches, and put them in bags, there is no real solution as they are just put in landfills. Fortunately, this at least keeps the plastic straws from becoming food for sea creatures.
If you want to donate to support the Green Pattaya volunteers, you can use the fundraising Page.
You Don’t Need Plastic Straws
Yes, we are talking about you again. It is so hard for humans to absorb these kinds of things since it is breaking a habit. We have been taught that plastic straws are rubbish from our birth, and when someone asks us to recycle them we really don’t understand why.
But why can you not use a straw multiple times? If you really need a straw from the start because you likely don’t. Unless you have some sort of medical condition that forces you to drink from a plastic straw. Have you seen the memes online that rats pee on the bottles in the warehouse and you can get diseases from them? That is fake news. Even if it were true, have you not heard about something called soap and water that you can use to wash off the bottle or can with?
At this point, all the extra markets of metal straws and other items to replace the plastic straw also make no sense, and create different problems, just sweeping the plastic straw problems under a rug.
How to Clean a Plastic Straw?
If for some reason happened to pick up a plastic straw to use, you should reuse it. First of all, there is nothing dangerous with reusing plastic straws if properly cleaned. The straw is perfectly safe for re-use, and that’s why it is such a waste to keep getting new ones. You can simply submerge them in hot water mixed with baking soda and vinegar if you want to stay nature safe. You can also use a pipe cleaner if you have one, which is good if you use it for smoothies, or pull a thin scrap of rag or even dental floss. For general liquids, usually soaking them for a while in water and rinse will clean the straw enough. Be sure to scrub the ends like you would wash cutlery.
In the End, You Will Be Eating the Plastic Straws
Plastic that ends up in the ocean gets eaten by sea creatures. The plastic that is not eaten, such as bigger pieces, tumbles and breaks down and turns into micro plastic mixed in the water. Maybe you are thinking, “But what if I stop eating seafood? Then am I safe?” That will not work, since we over fish the sea, and much of the fish ends up as animal feed and we eat these animals. They also use fish as fertilizers, so even if you are vegetarian you won’t escape the plastic. (By the way did you know that they use animal cadaver as fertilizers as well!) Even if you stop eating you will still drink water and there is already so much micro plastic in the water that you drink it everyday even if you don’t think about it.
One step in the right direction is banning micro beads, which Thailand did in 2020. For you, yes I am still talking to you, who do not know what it is used for in soap and other skin products. Not all countries have banned it so avoid buying any skin or hair products in countries not on this list of countries that banned microbeads. Do your research on anything that has scrub enhancers to make alternative choices if you’re in a country that hasn’t banned them!
Plastic is making us sterile at a rapid speed, and within this century we will probably be sterile unless we change our way of living.
In a podcast with Joe Rogan talking to Dr. Shanna Swan JRE #1638, is warning us that plastic is changing our hormones.
Please share this article and its content with others. Use hashtag #notostraws #trashtrash you can find more of our work on Inez Foundation, Inez is the founder of Green Pattaya.
