In the United Kingdom, JD Weatherspoon, a giant business with over 900 pubs across the UK, will stop offering plastic straws to customers in a move towards reducing plastic straw waste that ends up in landfills or oceans. If customers request a straw with their drink, they will be offered a biobased, biodegradable paper straw instead of the usual plastic straw. JD Weatherspoon hopes to stop 70 million plastic straws from being wasted each year at their pubs and are one of many retailers moving towards biodegradable straws or no straws at all as part of the “Refuse the Straw” campaign that is now global.
Plastic straws are used for a mere seconds or minutes but end up taking about 500 years to decompose causing a huge plastic pollution problem considering 500 million straws are used in the U.S. alone every day.