Less Waste with Bamboo Straws

It’s time we all did our bit to cut down on waste. Especially plastic. In fact, July is now dedicated to it. Plastic Free July aims to encourage you to stop using plastic for the entirety of the month and, consequently, show you just how easy it is to make significant changes to your plastic consumption habits. So, where’s a great place to start?

Well, how about drinking straws? Think about it. Do you really need to use drinking straws? Probably not.

However, they do make some beverages nicer to drink, such as certain cocktails and anything with ice cubes that may otherwise clatter against your teeth and force the liquid to spill out of the glass in unpredictable ways. So drinking straws are useful. But there’s another question. Do they really need to be made out of plastic?

Absolutely not.

In the 2010 documentary Bag It: Is Your Life Too Plastic, the actor Jeb Berrier asks “why would you make something that you’re going to use for a few minutes out of a material that’s going to last forever and that you’re just going to throw away?”

The Plastic Free July website lists the following reasons for ditching plastic drinking straws for the good of the planet:

• They remain in the environment indefinitely after just a few minutes of use.
• They’re lightweight so easily blown down drains and into waterways, even when honest attempts to dispose of them responsibly are made.
• Straws can get stuck in the airways of animals and become fatal.
• They’re one of the top 10 most common items to be found during beach cleanups.

But there’s also one other reason. Plastic straws are such an easy problem to fix.

The truth is, there are so many more sustainable materials that can be used for drinking straws. You may have noticed reusable stainless steel or glass ones being used in some high-end bars, or disposable paper ones, which, unlike plastic, are at least biodegradable. But perhaps the most environmentally friendly alternative is bamboo.

If you think about it, bamboo drinking straws make a lot of sense. After all, bamboo is probably the closest thing to ready-made drinking straws that exist in nature. A stick of bamboo is literally a long thin tube.

That means they just need to be cut to an appropriate length and sanded down. Compared to making paper for paper straws, which uses a lot of water, working with bamboo is far from resource intensive. And the main resource the straws do use – the bamboo itself – replenishes incredibly quickly. In fact, some species of bamboo can grow up to a meter in a little over a day.

With no synthetic materials involved, bamboo drinking straws are also biodegradable. But they’re also washable and safely reusable. They can be easily soaked in warm, soapy water and then rinsed clean, or cleaned out with pipe cleaners if used at a bar or restaurant where extra hygiene measures would be taken.

They’re not quite as reusable as metal drinking straws, of course. They can get mouldy if not looked after properly so, at some point, you will need to dispose of them – after about a year or so – and that’s where the biodegradability comes in to give you peace of mind.

But while we’re talking about hygiene, it’s worth mentioning that reusable bamboo straws are also very healthy for you to use. Make sure to get bamboo straws from a company that doesn’t use any chemicals in the production process, then they’ll be as good for you as they are for the planet. They are far safer than reusing plastic straws, which not only harbour bacteria and contain chemicals, but degrade with use, meaning you might be consuming toxic microplastic particles.

So start refusing plastic straws at your favourite bars and restaurants until they make the switch to more sustainable materials. Or simply buy your own reusable straw for taking with you.