President Donald Trump is bringing plastic straws back to the US, signing a new executive order that would end a measure begun by former President Joe Biden to replace plastic straws with paper ones.
Mr Trump claimed that paper straws “don’t work” and has ordered government agencies to stop buying them.
The executive order comes alongside calls for a strategy to eliminate paper straws nationwide.
Mr Biden started to gradually phase out plastic straws, along with plastic cutlery and packaging, in 2024, with a goal to end the use of single-use plastics from food packaging, operations, and events by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035.
Why does Donald Trump want to bring back plastic straws?
Mr Trump told reporters present at the White House on Monday, February 10 when he signed the executive order that paper straws “don’t work.”
"I've had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode,” he said. “If something's hot, they don't last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds. It's a ridiculous situation."
Mr Trump’s campaign against paper straws goes all the way back to his 2020 campaign, where he sold branded plastic straws at $15 for a pack of 10, describing them as a replacement for “liberal paper straws”.
The campaign is thought to have made $500,000 from the sale of these straws alone.
What are the dangers of plastic straws to the environment?
Environmental agencies around the world have long since agreed that plastic straws are harmful to the environment for a number of reasons.
The National Institute of Health in the US estimates that there are 8.3 billion plastic straws contaminating the world’s beaches and about 7.5 million plastic straws lying along America’s coastline.
Not only do the microplastics from these straws leach into the water supply, but the straws can also be harmful to wildlife, being mistaken for food and getting stuck in the throats of animals and seabirds, or lodging themselves in the nostrils of aquatic animals.
While it’s difficult to estimate how many animals are affected, it’s thought that over 800 species are impacted by plastic straw waste.
Campaign group Our Last Straw places plastic straws in the top ten contributors of marine debris in the world, highlighting the sheer scale of the problem.
As plastics do not biodegrade, the organisation estimates that, at the current rate, plastics will outweigh fish in our oceans by 2050.
