The snack bar at the Carolina Club golf course is stocked with the hits. Peanuts, packs of Nabs, draft beer and a warming oven packed full of foil-wrapped hot dogs.

Nothing is out of place at the golf course bar in Grandy, half an hour inland from the Outer Banks.

Nothing except the straws, which are paper, not plastic, and stamped with the declaration “Earth Friendly.”

These straws place the course squarely on the razor’s edge of an environmental movement gone mainstream, one that’s finding its way from major cities to the Triangle and North Carolina.

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The rising tide against plastic straws includes Starbucks, which wants to eliminate its plastic straws by 2020, as well as cities like Seattle, which has banned straws and plastic utensils in restaurants.

Though challenges remain to eliminate plastic straws altogether — including municipal infrastructure, costs and the difficulty in changing long-held habits — what was once plopped into a drink without a second thought is increasingly considered thoughtless, as opponents argue a straw’s convenience doesn’t justify eternity in a city landfill.

“I call it being ‘Straw Woke,’” said Crystal Dreisbach, the executive director of local environmental group Don’t Waste Durham, and a crusader against plastic straws for the better part of a decade.

“The problem with typical plastic straws is they cannot be recycled, so you use it once and it lives in the environment forever,” she said.

Dreisbach is so devoted to her home of Durham that she mailed 250 personal letters in 2012 to local restaurants, challenging them to rethink their environmental practices, mainly targeting Styrofoam boxes. She heard back from only one, the Durham bar Bull McCabe’s, which switched to compostable containers.

“Back then it was, ‘Oh Crystal, she’s a tree-hugger,’” Dreisbach said. “Now we’ve reached a point of awareness, and it’s really created a tipping point as consumers. I’m glad I yelled at the brick wall.”

Locally, Durham has led the move against straws, including a “skip the straw” campaign in March organized by the group Keep Durham Beautiful and endorsed by Mayor Steve Schewel. More than a dozen restaurants pledged to cut out plastic straws for the month.

This summer, Duke University’s dining services department announced its on-campus eateries and dining halls had banned all disposable plastics, including cutlery and straws. The Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill announced on social media that it, too, is eliminating plastic straws and stirrers in its restaurant, Crossroads.

WHY STRAWS?

While banning straws could keep tons of plastic out of landfills, even opponents are unclear why straws are being singled out, and why momentum seems to be building this year. Dreisbach said Styrofoam is likely the bigger environmental concern, and plastic cups contain much more plastic than straws.

“Maybe it’s because to drink you need a cup, but you don’t necessarily need a straw,” Dreisbach said.

Dreisbach also considered “The Turtle,” perhaps the patron saint of the war on straws.

The Turtle refers to a moment in 2015, when for the first time, straws seemed like something more than litter. Thanks to a now-famous viral video, they seemed dangerous.

In the video, scientists off the coast of Costa Rica had pulled a sea turtle into their boat, a plastic straw lodged in its nose. Over eight excruciating minutes, they struggled to extract the straw with a pair of pliers, the turtle writhing in pain.

Michelle Paye, the general manager at the Carolina Club golf course, said the video of the turtle weighed on her. The Turtle ended up being one of the driving forces behind their switch to paper straws this May. Customers aren’t crazy about them, she said, and thinking green is far from any branding campaign at the course.

Complaints about environmentally friendly paper cups leaking led to a switch back to Styrofoam, she said, but she wants to stick with the paper straws.

Fast-food chain, which uses 1.8m straws a day, says plastic straws will go by 2019
 

McDonald’s will end the use of plastic straws in its British restaurants next year, after nearly half a million people called on the company to ditch them.

The decision by the US fast-food chain to switch from plastic to paper straws follows a trial at a number of outlets in the past two months. The firm uses around 1.8m straws a day in the UK.

The switch will affect McDonald’s 1,361 outlets in the UK, but not the rest of its 36,000 restaurants worldwide.

The Sum of Us petition calling for the change had warned that plastic straws ended up polluting the ocean, harming seabirds and marine life.

McDonald’s said it had listened to customer concerns and would begin phasing out plastic straws in September, completing the process at some point in 2019.

Paul Pomroy, the chief executive of McDonald’s UK and Ireland, said: “Reflecting the broader public debate, our customers told us they wanted to see a move on straws but to do so without compromising their overall experience when visiting our restaurants.”

The paper straws will be sourced from suppliers in Northern Ireland and Wales.

Initially, only a limited number of the chain’s restaurants will have recycling facilities for the paper straws, but the company has committed to ensuring they can be recycled at all stores by the end of 2019.

The government warned earlier this year that plastic straws, along with other single-use plastic items such as cotton buds, could be banned as part of its efforts to cut marine pollution.

McDonald’s is the latest in a string of high street names in the process of replacing plastic straws with paper or biodegradable straws, including Costa Coffee, Wetherspoons and Pizza Express.

Waitrose has said it would no longer stock them, while Pimms and other drinks at Wimbledon will be served with paper rather than plastic straws.

Other parts of McDonald’s global empire are experimenting with alternatives to plastic straws, and trials are due later this year in the US, France, Sweden and Norway.

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.

Stop the plastic tubes

At the beginning of July 2018, Seattle became the largest U.S. city to ban plastic straws.
They’re not alone.

Starbucks plans to phase out plastic straws by 2020. McDonald’s recently announced it will ban plastic straws at its U.K. and Ireland restaurants. Bon Appétit Management, a food service company with 1,000 U.S. locations, announced last May it will phase out plastic straws. Alaska Airlines will be one of the first airlines to phase out plastic straws and stirrers, in part thanks to an environmentally conscious girl scout.

These groups are responding to public outcry demanding action against a product that, on one hand, seems very simple—but which is harming the world’s oceans, experts warn.

In just the U.S. alone, one estimate suggests 500 million straws are used every single day. One study published earlier this year estimated as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches.

Eight million tons of plastic flow into the ocean every year, and straws comprise just 0.025 percent of that.

But that hasn't stopped the straw from becoming the major focus of recent environmental campaigns. This is in part because, for most able-bodied people, the straw is something you can easily do without. Eliminating plastic straw usage rarely requires a drastic change in behavior.