Starbucks will stop using disposable plastic straws by 2020, eliminating more than one billion straws a year, the retailer announced on Monday.

Instead, Starbucks, which has more than 28,000 stores worldwide, will use recyclable, strawless lids on most of its iced drinks. The Frappuccino is the one exception: It will have a straw made from either paper or compostable plastic.

The plastic straw, a once ubiquitous accessory for frosty summer drinks and sugary sodas, has been falling out of favor in recent years, faced with a growing backlash over its effect on the environment.

In the United States alone, an estimated more than 500 million disposable plastic straws are used every day, according to Eco-Cycle, a nonprofit recycling organization. Although plastic straws are made from polypropylene, a recyclable plastic, most recyclers won’t accept them.

“Plastic straws are pretty small and lightweight, so when they’re going through the mechanical sorter, they’re often lost or diverted,” said Sam Athey, a plastics pollution researcher and member of the Plastic Ocean Project, a nonprofit based in Wilmington, N.C., that aims to reduce plastic use.

That means plastic straws get tossed in the garbage, ending up in landfills and polluting the ocean.

It takes “about 200 years for polypropylene plastic straws to break down under normal environmental conditions,” Ms. Athey said.

During that time, the plastic becomes brittle and breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, called microplastics, which can be eaten by organisms, she added.

Further complicating matters, when the plastics break down, their surface area to volume ratio increases, Ms. Athey said, “so they have the ability to attract and absorb more pollutants like BPA, which is a known endocrine disrupter.”

In areas where plastic straws are not already banned or limited, businesses like SeaWorld, McDonald’s and Alaska Airlines are taking some measures to reduce their use.

Starbucks earned $22.4 billion in annual revenue last year, making it one of the largest businesses to announce it would eliminate plastic straws.