The Last Straw

By Cardiff Garcia,

Published July 12, 2018 at 1:45 PM PDT

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There's a global movement right now to get rid of the plastic straw. Scotland, Vancouver and Taiwan have all put bans in place. So have companies like IKEA, Alaska Airlines and Starbucks. The idea is to start reducing the amount of plastic waste in our oceans. Straws are far from the biggest source of plastic pollution, but it's a start, right? Well... maybe. New research shows that the straw ban could really help the global plastic problem, or could really backfire.

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Cardiff Garcia

Cardiff Garcia is a co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, along with Stacey Vanek Smith. He joined NPR in November 2017.

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Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

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Corrections:

Corrected: July 12, 2018 at 9:00 PM PDT

In an earlier version of this episode, we said that Americans use 500 million straws every day. That number has been cited in many different places, including by the National Park Service. But the data on plastic straw use in the U.S. are hard to pin down. Other estimates have said the number is less but still in the tens or hundreds of millions.

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