WASHINGTON — Cities and nations are looking at banning plastic straws and stirrers in hopes of addressing the world’s plastic pollution problem. Australian scientists Denise Hardesty and Chris Wilcox estimate, using trash collected on U.S. coastlines during cleanups over five years, that there are nearly 7.5 million plastic straws lying around America’s shorelines. They figure that means 437 million to 8.3 billion plastic straws are on the entire world’s coastlines. Each year more than 35 million tons (31.9 million metric tons) of plastic pollution are produced around Earth and about a quarter of that ends up around the water. But a ban may be a bit of a straw man in the discussions about plastics pollution.

Source: National Post April 20, 2018 20:11 UTC