The last (plastic) straw
How one Santa Cruz woman helped launch a movement to save us from an ocean of plastic
SANTA aRUZ >> A straw is not just a straw. According to Jackie Nuñez, it’s a symbol of a world gone blind to plastic.
Nuñez is the founder of The Last Plastic Straw, a project dedicated to changing the way people think about plastic that gets used once and then thrown away. Her campaign began in 2011 as a single Facebook page urging people to refuse straws at restaurants. Now, nearly a decade later, these same ideas are being shared at corporate meetings and in legislative chambers.
It all started when a server handed Nuñez a glass of water in 2011 at Santa Cruz’s Ideal Bar and Grill. Then a 46-year- old kayak guide, Nuñez was dining with friends when she noticed a single plastic straw sitting in her glass. It looked just like the dozens of straws she had picked up on local beaches as part of a volunteer project for the environmental nonprofit Save Our Shores.
It was a jarring realization for Nuñez. “It was literally in front of our noses,” she said. “And we were not taking stock.”
At that moment, Nuñez said she knew plastic straws would be a “tipping point issue” inspiring action against a product that on one hand seems very small and simple — but which represents a far larger threat.
Plastic is everywhere. It encases our food. It cushions our online purchases. It wraps our medicine in individual packets. For better or worse, plastic is an essential part of modern life.
Harmed by plastic
But every year, 8 million metric tons of plastic makes its way into the world’s oceans, where it gets eaten by wildlife and integrated into the food chain. Some of that plastic inevitably ends up in the food we eat. Christine Figgener, a marine biologist and conservationist, estimates that about 2,200 species of ocean life are harmed by plastic, including all seven species of sea turtles.
Those numbers are likely to get worse as our use of plastic grows. Research shows that roughly half of all plastic in the world was made in the last 15 years. “It’s more than a problem. It’s a crisis,” said Diana Cohen, cofounder of the Washington-based Plastic
Pollution Coalition, the parent organization of The Last Plastic Straw.
Straws have become the poster children for wasteful, single-use plastic. Environmentalists carry sleek metal and bamboo straws and deck their laptops with stick
ers sporting the slogan “Skip a straw, save a turtle!” Corporations such as Starbucks and American Airlines are phasing them out.
Yet, with every piece of legislation limiting the use of plastic straws in cities across the coun
try, they have also become a symbol of over-the-top environmentalism.
“T hey want to ban straws!” President Donald Trump railed at a rally in September. “What about the knives and the spoons that are plastic? Oh, they’re OK — but the straws we got to ban.”
Nuñez is a big part of the reason that plastic straws are in the national consciousness, Cohen said.
“I think she’s prescient,” Cohen added. “She’s really one of those people who is a true collaborator, and has worked hard to create content and make it available to everyone.”
Not backing down
Tenacity is another cornerstone of Nuñez’s approach to activism. “I was the crazy straw lady going around talking to restaurants asking them not to serve straws at our table,” she recalled.
Nuñez said that her insistence on refusing plastic straws, even asking servers to remove straws if they were brought to the table, sometimes embarrassed her friends and her wife. “I’m super stubborn,” she admitted, chuckling.
By 2015, Nuñez recalled, local attitudes were changing, and she convinced Santa Cruz County supervisors to include straws and cutlery in an ordinance requiring restaurants to provide sustainable containers. But progress was slow, and by that summer Nuñez was struggling to make rent.
“It was hard,” she recalled. “I had three parttime jobs. I was doing all of this on my own time and my own dime.”
T hen, in Aug ust of that year, someone else had a last- straw moment. Figgener, at the time a doctoral student at Texas A& M University, was filming a sea turtle when a colleague began pulling a straw out of the turtle’s nose.
T he si g ht sho c ke d Figgener to the core. “Such a small item can cause so much suffering,” she said. “And the thing is: Now all of us could be the culprit, right? Because we have all used plastic straws at one point in our lives.”
Figgener put the video online, and it went viral. Within 24 hours, Nuñez was bombarded by people trying to reach her. She became a sought-after resource for nonprofit groups and major media outlets, including NBC News, the Washington Post, Fox News and CNN.
Nuñez remembers 2018 as the year the movement reached its peak. The trade magazine Ad Age called plastic straw bans the biggest food story of 2018. The Collins English dictionary followed suit by naming “single-use” its word of the year. And in September 2018, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill preventing restaurants from handing out straws unless requested.
It appeared that the crazy straw lady was vindicated.
Not over yet
But the debate around plastic straws is far from over. Members of the disability community point out that while plastic straws might seem wasteful to some, they are a crucial part of other people’s well-being.
“One person’s social prop is another person’s conduit for nutrition,” said Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project in a 2018 op- ed in Eater. “It’s as if people who rely on straws — older adults, children and disabled people — don’t matter and that our needs are less important than the environment.”
Other critics point out that straws are only a fraction of the plastic in the ocean. Nonprofits have responded by turning their gaze toward other plastics — and Nuñez welcomes the change.
“If we were still focusing just on straws today, then I’ve failed in my job,” said Nuñez, who is now looking for new ways to tackle plastic pollution.
As soon as the pandemic is over, Nuñez will be setting out on a roundthe-world research sailing trip with 300 other women to raise awareness about ocean plastic. But for now, she spends much of her time on Zoom telling school kids across the country about her work.
“You have more power than you think,” she tells them. “And you have to use your voice.”