Stop Using Plastic Straws: The start of your Personal Anti-plastic Campaign. Everyone should start to remove plastic from their lives somewhere, and plastic straws are totally unneeded by most people, so they should be easy.
The reasons are legion (look at the suffering Turtle to the right): plastic never goes away (it just gets smaller and smaller), plastic is fossil fuel based, plastic is killing both marine and freshwater life, plastic litter is unsightly, plastic kills land animals, and, why the list goes on and on. Worse, most plastic is used because people are too lazy or thoughtless, or of course both, to avoid it. Want coffee? Well take your own cup or refuse it! A couple of days of doing without will inspire you to take your own cup, or encourage you to insist that coffee served at meetings is served in reusable cups (tough if you have to wash them, it’s hell to have to look after yourself).
CACOR, in an internal discussion has been questioning how we can make a difference. So, here’s an example from The Washington Post, where the story shows that one 9 YEAR OLD kid can make more difference than a large group of “high powered” thinkers:
“It started so innocently. A kid ordered a soda in a restaurant.
“It came with a plastic straw in it,” Milo Cress recalled. He glared at the straw for a while. “It seemed like such a waste.”
Not only did Cress yank the plastic from his drink, but he also launched a campaign, “Be Straw Free,” targeting all straws as needless pollution. He knocked on the doors of restaurants in Burlington, Vt., where he lived at the time, and asked managers not to offer straws unless patrons asked. He was 9 years old.
Today Cress, 15, is one of the faces of a growing movement to eliminate plastic straws. They have been found wedged in the nose of a sea turtle, littering the stomachs of countless dead marine animals and scattered across beaches with tons of other plastics.”
Why straws, you ask? Well, “Straws are among the most common plastic items volunteers clean from beaches, along with bottles, bags and cups, conservationists say. Americans use half a billion straws every day, at least according to an estimate by Be Straw Free, based on information from straw manufacturers. That many straws could wrap around the Earth 2½ times.”
We all can get a lot of plastic out of our lives if we want to; it’s hard at first but gets easier as one goes along and gets used to thinking that way. So, start with a straw!
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