BANISHING STRAWS ISN’T GOING TO SAVE THE OCEANS.
ENEMY NO. 1
The Western world is having a bit of a moment with plastic straws right now. In a bid to protect oceans from marine debris, Vancouver is the first Canadian city with plans to ban them. In recent weeks A&W Canada, Marriott Hotels and, most notably, Starbucks have announced similar bans. But if we all woke up tomorrow to a completely straw-free world, the global crisis with marine plastic would be almost entirely unchanged. Below, the case for why the world’s sudden fixation on straw bans could well end up making everything worse, writes Tristin Hopper.
OCEAN PLASTIC IS REALLY BAD
Nobody is arguing that ocean plastic isn’t a devastating and steadily worsening problem. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now three times the size of France and expanding exponentially. Ocean plastic often smells like food to seabirds, which is why up to 90 per cent of all seabird species are now eating it. In April, a whale washed up on the Australian coast, dead from nearly 30 kilograms of plastic that had accumulated in its stomach. Trace amounts of plastic are starting to show up in seafood. And according to a report by the World Economic Forum, if current trends continue, by 2050 there will be more kilograms of plastic in the ocean than there are kilograms of fish. In an era of catastrophic threats to marine life, plastics could still end up being among the worst.
THE GUILTY PARTIES
Last year, a study from Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research concluded that up to 95 per cent of the world’s ocean plastic was coming from 10 rivers: Eight in Asia and two in Africa. That same year, a report from the group Ocean Conservancy concluded that 60 per cent of the world’s ocean plastic pollution could be traced to just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Helmholtz report noted that some of the lowest levels of floating plastic were in the drainage basin for the Great Lakes — an area that includes Cleveland, Chicago and more than nine million Canadians. The takeaway here is that waste management works. It also means that the conscientious choices of Western consumers are a rounding error in the global problem of marine debris. Asia’s rapid economic development over the last 30 years has resulted in a tidal wave of consumer garbage that has utterly overwhelmed local systems of containment. The exceedingly rare North American sight of a beach strewn with garbage isn’t all that unusual in eastern Asia — nor are open-air dumps adjacent to coastal areas. A 2015 study in the journal Science ranked countries by their rate of “mismanaged” waste. Ocean pollution heavyweights such as Bangladesh were mismanaging up to 89 per cent of their garbage. In the United States that rate was only two per cent. In an April column, Nottingham Trent University waste researcher Christine Cole wrote that if humanity really wants to slash plastic pollution “the benefits ‘per dollar’ are much greater in poorer countries where even minimal interventions would make a huge difference.”
VIRAL VIDEO
Virtually every article about straw bans mentions a viral video showing a section of plastic straw being painfully removed from the nose of a sea turtle near Costa Rica. Now with more than 33 million views, the video included a specific call for the global elimination of single-use straws. But straws aren’t necessarily a uniquely dangerous category of plastic. A 2015 study led by the group Ocean Conservancy canvassed a panel of ecological experts to figure out which kinds of plastic trash were the most dangerous to marine life. Straws made their list, but they were outranked by plastic bags, buoys, cigarette butts, balloons, fishing equipment, utensils and even other types of food packaging. For sea turtles specifically, straws and stirrers were ranked only as the 11th most dangerous trash category. The main thing separating straws from top killers was that while it can do damage once ingested, it can’t entangle creatures — easily the deadliest consequence of marine debris. Meanwhile, contrast the experience of the Costa Rican turtle with the fate of another ill-fated reptile: An endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle that was found this week on an Alabama beach, strangled to death by a beach chair. Local conservation groups saw the tragedy as a call to action against discarded beach debris, not as a specific indictment of beach chairs. No environmental campaigner is claiming that banning straws is a magic bullet to cleanse the oceans. It’s why the antistraw group Global Wildlife Conservation has claimed that straws should be a “gateway plastic”; the humble beginning of a years-long campaign to ban other single-use plastics. Christine Figgener, the marine biologist who captured the sea turtle video, singled out straws due to their being particularly “useless” and thus easy to remove from the waste stream. Item for item, straws are regularly counted among the top ten things picked up at beach cleanups. But given their relatively light weight, they could be constituting as little as .03 per cent of total annual marine garbage. Earlier this year, a paper in the journal Scientific Reports estimated that 46 per cent of the plastic forming the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is composed of abandoned fishing gear, or “ghost gear.” “When compared to other consumer items discarded in the ocean, fishing gear clearly poses the greatest ecological threat,” warned the 2015 Ocean Conservancy report cited above.
ANTI-STRAW CAMPAIGNER — AGED NINE
An oft-repeated claim is that the United States uses 500 million straws per year. The City of Vancouver recently claimed that Canadians use 57 million straws a year — a number they extrapolated purely by adjusting the 500 million figure for Canada’s population. But in January, Reason magazine traced the origins of the 500 million number and discovered that it came from an unscientific survey conducted by a nine-year-old. Specifically, it came from anti-straw campaigner Milo Cress, who told Reason he got the figure by surveying straw manufacturers by phone as a child. A more reliable figure is probably 175 million, which comes from the food industry consultancy Technomic Inc.