Saving the Oceans One Straw at a Time!

In this article, Dr Marianne Furtado de Nazareth shares her experience of using paper straws in the UK. She feels paper straws are biodegradable and do not take hundreds of years to break down as some plastic products do.

- Dr Marianne Furtado de Nazareth

Two years ago, my son took me to the Bird-in-Hand pub in the UK for lunch and we enjoyed my favourite-Lightly Battered Fish of the day, with a side of crushed green peas, tartare sauce, and rosemary salted hand cut chips. We washed it down with a Diet Coke which had a paper straw that disintegrated before I could finish it. It was horrid trying to drink the coke through a floppy and slimy, paper straw but the pub manager told us that was because the UK had banned plastic straws, he was helpless. So I threw the straw out and drank my coke with bits of paper floating in it!

This year my son decided we should try the Fish and Chips in The Drumming Snipe, another pub. I ordered the Day boat Cod fish and chips, minted peas with tartare sauce and our diet cokes came with straws from the Paper Straw company, based in Woking. The straws were perfect and retained their shape and stiffness right to the end of my drink and my meal. That piqued my interest as it was less than a year and we were served with perfect paper straws.

Just by chance, my son parked his car right near the Paper Straws factory-a lucky twist of fate. The stories I write advocate for a more sustainable world, particularly addressing the products that have become a menace to wildlife and, sadly, to all the inhabitants of our expansive oceans. Connecting with the factory directly was such an exciting opportunity to be privy to man's ingenuity to sincerely work, towards cutting back on the millions of straws that go into the landfills, over the globe. Paper is seen as a more sustainable option, while plastic is seen as a less eco-friendly choice. On the surface, paper straws seem like the clear winner of this debate due to the fact that they're biodegradable and do not take hundreds of years to break down as some plastic products do.