Plastic straws are everywhere, we have come to expect them in every drink, from adding a flourish to a cocktail to some saying it even makes a drink taste better, straws have been commonplace in almost every restaurant and bar in the UK for decades. But these short lived tools are usually thrown away without further thought, instantly becoming a source of plastic pollution.
Most straws are made from plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene, which unless recycled take hundreds of years to break down into tiny pieces of micro plastic that do not disappear. This means small plastic items like straws are finding their way into our oceans and landfills sites, even though the majority of the time they would have only been used for the time it takes to finish a drink.