By Elliot Lewis
Plastic, then paper, and now... pasta?
The humble straw, which became a symbol of the environmental battle, continues to evolve.
And while there isn't as much fanfare, non-plastic straws are making their way.
Companies make straws from steel, silicone, glass, bamboo, hay, grass, algae, flour, pasta and, conveniently, straw.
Interest in continuing to create plastic straws has also grown, although companies have appeared that have developed them from biodegradable and compostable plastics.
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The growth in the sale of these alternative straws has been significant.
Kayla Via, category manager for disposable beverage utensils and accessories at Clark Associates, a company that runs several national and international distributors of restaurant supplies, said that eco-friendly and alternative straws make up 22% of sales (compared to the 65% from plastic and 13% from paper), but they are the fastest growing, with growth of 150% in 2022.
While traditional plastic straws are made from polypropylene, a growing number of straws and other single-use plastic products are made from biodegradable or compostable plastics such as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) and polylactic acid (PLA).
Straws made from these bioplastics are now well represented on the market, offered by companies such as beyondGREEN and phade.
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“It looks, acts and behaves just like a traditional plastic straw,” explained Michael Winters, president and chief revenue officer of WinCup, the company that makes phade's straws.
According to Yale Environment 360, bioplastics such as PHA and PLA account for a $9 billion share of the $1.2 trillion plastic market.
Ramani Narayan, distinguished professor in the department of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University, said that while traditional plastics have backbones made of very strong carbon-carbon bonds, bioplastics like PHA and PLA have a weaker ester backbone, which allows them to be consumed by microbes and therefore degrade much more quickly than traditional plastics.
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However, Narayan is concerned that the use of bioplastics is often exaggerated.
“There is no magic solution, where you use it and regardless of whether we manage it properly or throw it away, that product will disappear and be removed from the environment.
That doesn't exist," Narayan explained about some of the alternatives to plastic.
The shift away from plastic straws began in 2018, when a 2015 video of researchers removing a plastic straw from a sea turtle's nose went viral.
Environmental groups began to focus on plastic straws and other single-use plastics in order to reduce plastic pollution, especially in the ocean, where it had the potential to harm marine life.
The trend quickly spread, with cities like Seattle and Washington DC banning plastic straws.
Several major companies, including Starbucks, Disney, and Marriott, promised in July 2018 to phase out plastic straws, and many more have since joined the transition.
Entire countries have recently pledged to phase out single-use plastics like straws.
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As plastic straws were phased out, paper straws became the quick substitute, with the previously unknown product appearing in restaurants and stores across the country.
Fortune then reported that a paper straw company, Aardvark Straws, saw its sales increase by 5,000% in 2019.
A customer of the Wipeout Bar & Grill uses a paper straw in her drink on June 21, 2018 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
But when paper straws were adopted, they also received their fair share of criticism.
Avid science writer Bill Nye told our sister network, MSNBC, in 2019: “A plastic straw is just better.
It just works better than a paper one.”
And the punctures continue, with a viral tweet from last month saying: "Wonder if the inventor of paper straws ever considered that they would be in prolonged contact with liquid."
The concerns are not unfounded.
A 2019 study revealed that paper straws lose 70% to 90% of their strength after being in contact with liquid for less than 30 minutes.
Since then, various companies have tried to market straws stronger than paper but with a smaller environmental footprint than plastic, and the COVID-19 pandemic provided a boost.
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Achyut Patel, vice president of sales and co-founder of beyondGREEN, said his company began manufacturing PHA straws around April 2021. During this time, the need for single-use products was increasing due to the rise of takeout during the early part of the pandemic, and in states where single-use plastic was restricted or banned, restaurants and stores needed alternatives.
Since then, the company has sold about 250 million PHA straws, according to Patel.
Although beyondGREEN started out as a company selling compostable pet waste bags and to-go bags, 50% of its sales are now straws, Patel said.
But other straw manufacturers disagree with compostable plastics like PHA and continue to push even greener alternatives like paper.
One company, SOFi Paper Products, designed straws strong enough not to break down in liquid and with a food-grade coating to combat the papery taste of other straws.
SOFi straws are now available in more than 3,500 commercial establishments in the United States, such as La Colombe and Pret a Manger, according to Brandon Leeds, who co-founded SOFi with his brother.
Leeds said that regardless of where SOFi straws end up, be it landfill, ocean or soil, they will biodegrade within 90 days.
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Leeds added that it does not consider compostable plastics to be a viable, environmentally friendly alternative.
“You will see that there are many solutions out there: PLA, PHA, agave, all these different bioplastics,” he pointed out.
“They're just compostable, and most people don't know that.
But what this means is that they have to be sent to a special facility to break down, a special industrial composting facility.
And if you throw it away, and it ends up in the regular trash, it's the same as plastic."
In fact, beyondGREEN PHA straws are only certified compostable in home and industrial settings.
However, Patel said that while straws should ideally be composted so they can be reused for energy, straws will continue to break down in a landfill.
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“It would be as if the green waste from a juice machine went to a landfill.
It will continue to break down.
It's not going to be around for hundreds and hundreds of years like traditional plastic products,” he stated.
In contrast to Leeds' claim, Winters asserted that phade's straw is not only compostable, but can also biodegrade in multiple environments, such as soil and oceans.
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Although straws are far from the most significant contributor to plastic pollution (in 2018, straws represented only 0.02%, or 2,000 tons, of the nearly nine million tons of plastic waste in the ocean), the small tubes of plastic have served as a battlefield for broader discussions on this type of waste.
"I see straws as the first step in the conversation about reducing plastic," Leeds said.
"I think it was kind of a lower start in terms of getting rid of larger pieces of plastic, and just kind of a way to start the conversation," she added.
