00:00Hey, I'm Elisa Kreisinger and every Tuesday I unpack my strong opinions with the help
00:05of an expert who might not have all the answers, but they certainly know more than I do.
00:10That's why this is Strong Opinions Loosely Held.
00:13This week, what is the deal with plastic straws and why is everybody banning them?
00:17Okay, so it all started when a video of a sea turtle getting a plastic straw extracted
00:22from its nose went viral.
00:24And then Tom Brady urges us all to just say no.
00:29Starbucks announced that they will eliminate their classic green straw, McDonald's will
00:34start testing out plastic alternatives, and the city of Seattle banned single-use plastic
00:40straws altogether.
00:41To replace it, you can now buy Instagram-friendly rose gold reusable metal straws.
00:47And yes, they do come in bronze, thank you for asking.
00:50Many people are refusing straws.
00:52And so many people are doing it that it's actually been dubbed the straw wars of 2018.
00:58But why do plastic straws suck so much?
01:00And will eliminating them actually save anything?
01:04I talked to a badass marine biologist, Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, and found some pretty
01:10startling stats.
01:11We're in the U.S. alone using hundreds of millions of straws a year.
01:16The problem with straws is they're really hard to recycle because they're so small and so like
01:20the machines that do the sorting and stuff can't really handle straws.
01:23It just sticks around forever.
01:25Even if we don't see it anymore, it's still there.
01:28They're actually in the ocean.
01:29They're impacting marine life.
01:31Dr. Johnson explained to me that it's not just plastic straws that don't get recycled.
01:35It's all plastic.
01:37Under 10% of plastics actually get recycled.
01:40And 8 million tons of it leak into the ocean every year.
01:44There is so much plastic in the ocean that we're actually on track to have more plastic
01:49than fish by 2050.
01:52Now, why is this?
01:53Well, Dr. Johnson explained that it's because plastic is really durable and really cheap.
01:59In fact, it's so cheap that it's designed to be used only once and then thrown out.
02:04But it's also so durable that it never really breaks down.
02:08So the result is that we have a ton of something that never really goes away.
02:13Kind of like my depression after making this video.
02:16So every piece of plastic we've ever created still exists.
02:21It's all still on this planet.
02:23And so there is really no away.
02:25Like, it doesn't just disappear, right?
02:27When Western culture has created this disposable approach to the things that we buy, we've
02:34exported that lifestyle that literally comes back to us on our beaches.
02:40The average plastic bag is only used for 8 minutes before it's thrown out and then it
02:44lasts forever in smaller and smaller pieces.
02:47And that's what happens in the ocean.
02:48It's the sunlight and the salt that break it down into smaller pieces.
02:54Those smaller pieces form a confetti of plastic debris floating in what's known as a garbage
02:59patch.
03:00The largest one is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
03:03And it's twice the size of Texas.
03:07It's not an accumulation of big things floating.
03:10It's a higher concentration of small pieces of plastic, which actually makes it harder to
03:14clean up.
03:15It's like confetti, right?
03:16Yeah.
03:17I've got a million terrible facts about plastic, but I don't want to depress you.
03:20I mean, I think, yeah, we're using a million plastic bottles every minute.
03:25Straws are far from the biggest problem facing the ocean.
03:29Plastic bottles, wrappers and bags, they make up more beach trash than straws do.
03:34And by the way, banning plastic straws also ignores the needs of the disabled who need those
03:40straws to drink.
03:41But Dr. Johnson sees straws as a gateway plastic to a larger conversation.
03:47Once we start thinking about saying no to straws, then we start thinking about all the
03:51other things in our lives we don't need.
03:53And China just announced that they're not going to accept any of our trash anymore.
03:57We've been shipping a lot of our trash to China.
03:59Really?
03:59And they're like, we're done.
04:00We just all need to be really thoughtful about whether or not we actually need the plastic
04:05that we're using.
04:06And the answer for the vast majority of people is absolutely not.
04:09So the Straw Wars of 2018 isn't about straws.
04:12It's about having hard conversations about our habits and changing how we consume things
04:17we might not need.
04:19Literally, a metric ton of plastic every four seconds enters the ocean globally.
04:24And so once you know that number, you can't get it out of your head and you can't ignore
04:29it.
04:30And you walk through the supermarket and you walk into a cafe and you just see the world
04:34differently.
04:35And you think about what do you actually need versus what you can pass on.
04:42How can we make people care about the environment?
04:44I think people do care about the environment, actually.
04:47Millennials care a lot more about the environment than any other generation and people of color.
04:51So you're just as likely to have a Latina grandma in Nevada really care about the environment
04:59and have that be her number one voting priority as a college kid in Massachusetts.
05:04So people do care.
05:05I just think we need to focus on engaging those people.
05:09There's this theory called spillover.
05:10And it's the idea that engaging in a single behavior can psychologically motivate us to either
05:17engage in more or less similar behaviors.
05:19And this is what ocean advocates are hoping will happen with the straw wars.
05:24It definitely happened to me once I noticed how much trash that I was making every day.
05:29I couldn't unsee it.
05:30I couldn't unsee it.
