The fact that you’ve heard and experienced the replacement of plastic straws by supposedly more ecological alternatives is a sad fact. Why? Because plastic straws has received a thousand times more coverage, debate and airtime than its impact on the environment. It’s ludicrous and dangerously distracting.
A big hidden cost to people partaking in small supposedly ecological actions is that they mistakenly believe they are already doing enough to help the environment. It reminds me of the Amazon Smile program, which is the same platform as Amazon but by buying things through the domain of smile.amazon.com donates 0.5% of your purchase to a charity of your choice. It sounds good… until you think about how many people would have gained enough gratification from participating that they stop giving money to charity. If you spend $5000 a year, that would be a grand total of $25 donated to the charity.
This also came at the expense of not focusing on the environmental issues which are actually having the greatest damage on our planet, which only benefited complicit governments and the fossil fuel industry.
Imagine that against your wishes a freeway began to be built right over your house. Hundreds of people including protestors, politicians and journalists arrived. But instead of talking about the freeway, they vigorously focused their coverage on an ant colony on your lawn.
Since so many are eager to focus on the “ant colony,” let’s talk about it for a moment.
Paper straws are a popular alternative to plastic straws. Paper comes from trees, which must be cut down to create paper. So we should be asking, how many paper straws come from certified renewable forests? How much energy does it take to grow, cut and process paper from tree in comparison to plastic? We should have solid answers to these questions before declaring paper straws to be more sustainable.
Another alternative is stainless steel straws. They’re reusable, although who leaves the house with a straw in their pocket? However, steel melting emit considerable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, so I would be highly skeptical of anyone declaring them to be environmentally friendly.
At least we’re not deceiving ourselves with plastic straws.
And both paper straws and steel straws are made by the same manufacturers as plastic straws. The number one winner from this tremendous media coverage was not the environment, but “big straw.” They want us to keep buying straws. Why don’t we ask, do I even need a straw in the first place?
The major burden of carbon emissions lies with fossil fuel manufacturers, not individual consumers. What I find to be a huge omission of almost every news article is how none mention just exactly how much a specific action helps the environment.
Simply saying by doing this you are helping the environment is not enough and actually harmful. I want to know exactly how much I am helping the environment. For example, by taking xyz action I would divert two tons of carbon emissions a year; for context, an average American household emits x tons of CO2 emissions a year and an average new gas car emits x tons of CO2 per year.
I would ask you to imagine the environmental impact of changing your choice of straw to be akin to the impact of combating rising sea levels by taking a bucket of water out of the ocean. There would be no discernible difference even if every person in the world did that (the amount of water in the ocean would decrease by 0.00000001% or about 0.01% of the water in Lake Michigan).
So we should not be saying this helps the environment and ending it there. We must go further and ask, by how much? And if every single person on the planet did that (and let’s remember that nearly half of the world earns $5 a day), will it make a noticeable difference?
These are the questions we need to ask ourselves, not just randomly scatter our time, attention and resources on a whim to the eco trend of the moment that might vaguely help the environment. Let’s focus on what actions generate the maximum impact.
Here are far more worthy solutions to think about:
- Vote with your wallet. If you buy fast fashion, you are helping pollute rivers with toxic chemicals and supporting carbon intensive factories spewing pollution into the air in countries with lax regulations
- Buy things that are locally made and only purchase products with certified sustainability practices
- Make sure your home is well insulated
- Install solar panels on your home
- Buy a used EV or ride a bicycle if you can
- Support fossil fuel disinvestment
- Pressure key decision makers to stop investing in oil and gas
- Create a clean company and steal customers away from “dirty” competitors, thereby diverting carbon emissions
- Support truly green companies
If you found this interesting, share it with your friends. Let’s help make a real, quantifiable difference to the environment (really us and our children) and focus on actions which will generate the maximum positive impact.
