A splash of cold water on straw-ban fervor

I take pride in keeping up with burgeoning social movements, but the battle against plastic straws was one I seem to have missed.

I got caught up this week, after I heard Starbucks’ announcement on Monday, July 9, that the company will eliminate single-use plastic straws in all of its branches over the next year.

Seattle became the first major U.S. city with a plastic straw ban on July 1. Miami Beach, Malibu, San Luis Obispo and San Francisco all have anti-straw legislation in the works.

California’s Legislature is also considering a bill that will prohibit restaurants statewide from handing out plastic straws like candy. If it passes, plastic straws will become an item “on request,” like the secret menu at In-N-Out Burger.

I’ll confess to feeling flummoxed by the sudden influx of news about how the plastic straw has become internationally taboo.

What can I say? As an unrepentant beverage gulper, I’ve never cared for plastic straws myself. Plus, the country is coming apart at the seams, so I’ve had a lot of other things on my mind.

But I made it my business to catch up with the issue this week. I read what the Ocean Conservancy had to say about the issue.

Straws are “among the top 10 items collected every year during Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup,” writes the organization on the “outreach and education” section of its Skip the Straw campaign.

Eco-Cycle, a zero-waste organization in Boulder, Colo., estimates that Americans consume 500 million single-use straws every day. That’s an average of 1.6 straws per person, and a tremendous amount of waste that builds up in our landfills and clogs our oceans.

I found all of this alarming, and apparently, I’m not alone. The anti-straw brigade has a slick celebrity campaign.

Lonely Whale, a foundation co-founded by the actor Adrian Grenier, has a (slightly hilarious) YouTube video showing an octopus slapping straws from the mouths of luminaries, including model Brooklyn Decker and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins is apparently narrating an anti-straw-pollution documentary.

So there I was, ready to march to the barricades in support of plastic bans. Life is filled with muddy moral choices, endlessly complicated problems and ugly compromises with hideous people. A straw ban was simple, clean and effective.

If single-use plastic straws are taking hundreds of years to break down in the environment, doing nothing beyond choking dolphins in the process, why not ban them? Especially when there are alternatives, like paper straws.

Of course, no sooner had I settled into the righteousness of straw bans than I came across something to the contrary. Thanks to the #StopSucking hashtag, I learned that the disabled community is furious about straw bans.

Curious, I asked Lawrence CarterLong about it. Carter-Long is the communications director of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund in Berkeley. He told me that the angry tweets I was seeing were indeed reflective of a perspective I had not considered.

He explained that those of us who are able-bodied can easily cope with the imperfect efficiency of compostable or reusable straws. Alternatively, we can just do without.

But for many people with disabilities, flexible plastic straws are the best way to drink liquid or food. There’s no technology that can replace them yet.

“Most paper and silicone straws aren’t flexible, which arguably eliminates the most important feature used by people with mobility disabilities,” Carter-Long said. “Metal, glass and bamboo present dangers for people who have difficulty controlling their motor functions — from stroke survivors to people who have cerebral palsy.”

Oh. There’s more. Carter-Long told me that many cities, restaurants and other organizations are blasting ahead with straw bans before they consult people with disabilities.

For example, the Seattle ordinance banning single-use straws has a yearlong exception for people with disabilities. But it’s up to businesses to decide whether they want to provide single-use straws at all. Some of them have chosen not to do so, effectively shutting out customers with disabilities.

“All of this controversy could’ve been avoided if the people making the decisions had just thought to ask actual disabled people about what policies would actually work,” he said.

I found myself agreeing with Carter-Long. The environmental movement has frequently failed to listen to women, children and people of color, so it didn’t shock me that it had failed to listen to people with disabilities.

But as a society, we’re not going to get any progress on environmental protection if we trample on civil rights and equal access in the process. So everyone considering a straw ban had better be prepared to think of solutions that work for everyone.

Personally, I’m trying Twizzlers.

For many people with disabilities, flexible plastic straws are the best way to drink liquid or food.