Straw wars: consumers fight back
Plastic straws aren’t all we should oppose, but they’re a start
● A few weeks ago, I asked my teenage daughters where they would like to have dinner. “Anywhere that doesn’t use plastic straws!” they declared.
It was a telling moment. Until recently, the main warriors against plastic straws were committed environmentalists — green campaigners have warned for years that singleuse plastics cause alarming pollution, since they are ubiquitous and not biodegradable. (It’s estimated that between 200-million and 500-million plastic straws were used in the US each day in 2017.)
Plastic straws were so ingrained in consumer culture, particularly in the US, that it was hard to imagine they might ever disappear.
Anti-plastic protests have exploded suddenly — and will undoubtedly be repeated at the UN Climate Action Summit this week.
Many cafés, bars and restaurants have committed to replacing the offending plastic with sippy cups and/or paper straws. Trendy joints in New York have gone even further and are now selling reusable metal ones. Municipalities in liberal-voting places are banning the plastic straw.
The issue even surfaced at the most recent debate for the Democratic presidential nominees, where some candidates were grilled about whether they would adopt a national ban.
The issue has become such a cause célèbre that it has sparked an inevitable backlash. At the start of the northern summer, US President Donald Trump decried the straw bans, and his campaign started selling bright-red plastic Make America Great Again straws (tagline “Liberal paper straws don’t work”). His devoted base has bought so many of these that it has reportedly raised more than $800,000 (R11.7m); welcome to the new cultural straw wars.
What should we make of this? Part of me feels tempted to cheer — getting rid of singleuse plastic is undeniably a good idea. However, I am also tempted to sigh.
After all, one reason straws have captured the public imagination — particularly among Instagram-loving teenagers — is that they fit so easily into our modern cultural definition of a campaign issue. Another reason is that the problem can easily be photographed (check out pictures of the “plastic berg” of ocean plastic waste, or the horrifying video of a turtle with a straw stuck in its nose).
Depending on your response to these images, your tribal identity is readily on display. Most significant of all, the “battle” can be embraced without making too significant a lifestyle change; indeed, if you are a teenager, you can declare war on plastic straws without even needing parental permission.
But there are many other — more serious
Understand [that talking about straws] is exactly what the fossil-fuel industry hopes we’re all talking about
— environmental issues facing the world that are not so readily visual and emotive.
“Understand [that talking about straws] is exactly what the fossil-fuel industry hopes we’re all talking about,” presidential aspirant Elizabeth Warren observed during the Democratic debates. “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers, when 70% of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries.”
There is another thing the straw wars clearly show: consumer sentiment is now able to shift with startling speed, in a manner businesses are finding hard to ignore.
One sign of this is the rapidity with which groups such as Starbucks have been forced to act; another is the degree to which chemicals companies are facing pressure from shareholders over the issue.
More specifically, these days investors who are affiliated with the so-called “environmental, social and governance” movement are getting more vocal about calling for a plastics rethink. Hordes of entrepreneurs are jumping in, too.
So cheer — or sneer — at the straw wars, but also note the degree to which shifts in public sentiment are causing real business dislocations.
Sometimes symbolism does pack a financial punch, even when it comes from a pouty teenager.