Stop With The Paper Straws

From 2021, with the directive 2019/904 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 5 June 2019 plastic straw and disposable plastic utensils are banned in the European Union. This is an ambitious attempt to reduce marine pollution on Europe's beaches.

In the case of plastic straws, these problems include overflowing landfills, dead marine life, and a clogged sea of rubbish. Plastic straws are a luxury, not a necessity. Even so, we use an astronomical amount of it every year. Shelf life is short: they are pulled out of a paper wrapper, they swim in the drink for three minutes, they die, and their afterlife is long.The plastic gets entombed in the sanitary landfills.

Replace plastic straws with paper straws, you solve part of the problem, right? Yes, even if it's only a small part. Straws make up only 0.025 percent of the plastic that reaches the oceans each year; On the one hand, the straw bans will result in thousands and thousands of fewer straws in the sea; on the other hand, false bans will not change the underlying environmental calculation at all.

Additionally, paper straws remain a single-use consumable, a greener option but not a green one. To m ake a paper straw, a tree needs to be grown, cut, polished and pressed into a tube. Manufacturers then use fossil fuels to deliver the straws to shops and cafes. Many paper straws on the market aren't even compostable or recyclable as promised. Metal straws could be better for the environment if used often enough.However, this requires environmentally damaging mining work and considerable amounts of energy.

Or maybe using a paper straw lulls consumers into the wrong feeling that what they are doing is important and enough. This is a real problem: studies have shown that using a green alternative gives people a "moral license" to continue or even misbehave.

There are bigger and better political proposals that we urgently need to implement: fishing bans, high taxes on plastic etc.

With this proposal we are trying to get plastic straws to be unbanned in the European Union and for people to take a look at the bigger problem, that is plastic pollution not only created by plastic straws.