It was the last straw for Jackie Nunez, and it was stuck up the nose of an olive ridley sea turtle.
In 2015, Christine Figgener, a graduate student in marine biology at Texas A&M University, filmed the extraction of a plastic drinking straw from the nostril of the turtle, which like most marine creatures swims through a sea of plastic discarded by humans. Figgener posted the video online. Nunez saw it and went on to found “The Last Straw,” a movement to eliminate single-use plastic products, including the straws reflexively stuck into drinks by bars and restaurants.
That movement is spreading. We first encountered it at Hopkinton’s Lake House Tavern, where a note on the menu discusses the threat posed to sea life by straws, which are provided only on request. Kudos to every establishment that forgoes straws or replaces them with biodegradable straws or reusable varieties made from materials like glass, bamboo or stainless steel.
A straw or plastic coffee stirrer casually flicked into the Merrimack River will float on to the ocean, where it can litter beaches and endanger sea life for generations. Globally, more than a half-billion straws are produced every day, with most of them coming from Asia. Americans use 500 million per day, according to the advocacy group For a Strawless Ocean. Very few are recycled; in fact only 9 percent of all plastic is recycled.
Every year, according to the World Economic Report, 8 million metric tons (1 metric ton equals 2,205 pounds) wind up in the world’s oceans. There it strangles, starves, entangles or otherwise kills millions of creatures of all sizes, including tens of thousands of dolphins, seals and whales.
About half the plastic is lost or discarded fishing nets and gear. The rest is essentially garbage. Plastic garbage coats the beaches of paradise and is clustered by currents. The Pacific Trash Vortex is not an apocalyptic image from science fiction but a real garbage patch twice the size of France. It’s swirling in the ocean between Hawaii and California.
Last year, a consortium of environmental groups published Ban 2.0, a report on ocean plastic pollution and efforts to eliminate it. The report named the red-and-white-striped straws dispensed by McDonald’s as the most common ones found, with Starbucks’ green straws coming in second. McDonald’s shareholders recently rejected a proposal to study the problem. We hope Starbucks is more open to change.
The movement to ban plastic straws, like an earlier one to ban single-use plastic bags, is being embraced by a growing number of cities and nations. San Francisco banned the bags a decade ago. New York City, Seattle and Miami Beach are among the cities that will vote on banning plastic straws this year.
The “skip the straw” movement has hit New Hampshire’s Seacoast, where last year volunteers collected 800 straws on Hampton Beach alone. Last year, as reported by Seacoastonline, the Blue Ocean Society, a group founded in Portsmouth by whale naturalists, removed more than 8,000 pounds of trash from Seacoast beaches, a haul that included more than 2,000 straws.
So far, in the Granite State, the campaign has called upon consumers and businesses alike to voluntarily reduce the needless use of plastic products – and why not? People got along without them for most of human history. So when ordering, save a turtle and ask the server to skip the straw.
(Correction: An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated the amount of trash the Blue Ocean Society removed from Seacoast beaches last year. The group has removed more than 90 tons since cleanups began in 2001, including 8,000 pounds last year.)