In 2015, a marine biologist filmed a plastic straw being pulled out of the nose of a sea turtle in Costa Rica. The video got a hundred and ten million views. The world was furious.
Starbucks dropped straws. McDonald’s switched to paper. The EU banned plastic straws on the third of July 2021… along with plates, cutlery, and cotton swabs.
We felt like we’d done something.
Straws make up 0.025 percent of the eight million tons of plastic that end up in the ocean every year. Zero point zero two five percent. A drop in the ocean. Literally.
This isn’t a guess.
So what’s the other 99.975 percent?
Fishing nets and gear: forty-six to seventy-five percent of all macroplastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Half of the plastic island in the Pacific is fishing waste.
Cigarette filters: thirty-two percent of all beach finds. Every filter is plastic… cellulose acetate. It looks like paper. It isn’t.
Food packaging: nine percent.
And then there’s the category that almost never gets mentioned: personal care and cleaning.
The cosmetics industry produces a hundred and twenty billion units of packaging a year. Ninety-five percent is single-use. A measly fourteen percent makes it to recycling.
Only nine percent of all plastic ever produced has been recycled. Ever.
The average Dane has eight to fifteen bottles standing in the bathroom. Most are primarily water… sixty to eighty percent. Each bottle lasts four to six weeks. Then you buy a new one.
Five hundred and twenty-two million shampoo bottles end up in landfills every year in the EU. And that’s just shampoo.
Denmark recycles twenty-three percent of its plastic packaging. Among the lowest in the EU. Half is sent to energy recovery… which is a polite word for incineration.
No one has worked out how many end up in the ocean. No one has counted them. That’s maybe the most telling thing of all.
McDonald’s switched to paper straws around 2018… years before the official ban. The paper straws couldn’t be recycled. They dissolved in the drink. The lids? Still plastic. To this day.
And then it turned out that paper can emit three times more CO2 during manufacturing than plastic. Oops.
A Belgian study from 2023 found PFAS… forever chemicals… in ninety percent of the paper straws. Only seventy-five percent of the plastic straws had it.
So the paper is more chemically treated than the plastic straw it replaced. Another oops.
The switch didn’t solve the climate. It didn’t solve the chemistry. It solved an image of a turtle.
I love animals. But what about the next turtle that doesn’t get filmed?
For comparison: switching a hundred bottles of liquid soap to bar soap saves three hundred and twenty-eight kilos of CO2. A reduction of ninety-six percent.
No one asked about it. No one filmed it. No one banned the bottle.
Researchers from Stanford and the World Resources Institute have a term for it: moral license. When you do one small thing, you feel like you’ve done enough. The straw ban gave all of us permission to stop thinking.
Waste sorting. Recycled plastic. Paper straws. It feels like a solution. It’s a patch… and not even a good one. Denmark recycles twenty-three percent of its plastic packaging. The rest we burn. But we sort it neatly first… small actions that feel big… and give ourselves permission not to ask the bigger questions. Like why the bottle was there in the first place.
Meanwhile, fishing nets make up half of the plastic island. Meanwhile, we buy a new bottle of some product every six weeks. And the industry creates yet another colorful bottle for yet another surface you didn’t know you needed.
Our soap has no plastic packaging to be recycled… because there is none. It’s a deliberate choice. We prefer it that way. Whatever you choose from here… you can’t say you didn’t know.
One bar replaces four to six bottles. Hands, face, body, hair, dishes. No ingredient list you can’t read. No plastic that ends up on a beach… or in an oven.
It doesn’t solve the fishing nets in the Pacific. It doesn’t solve cigarette filters. But it solves your shelf in the bathroom.
It’s a better place to start than a plastic straw.
Sources:
- TIME, 10. juli 2018: What the Woman Who Recorded the Heartbreaking Turtle Video Wants Companies to Know
- EU-Kommissionen, 3. juli 2021: EU restrictions on certain single-use plastics
- Groffen et al., Food Additives & Contaminants, august 2023: Assessment of PFAS in commercially available drinking straws
- Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability: Do plastic straws really make a difference?
- The Ocean Cleanup, marts 2018: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
- Ocean Conservancy, 9. december 2022: Cigarette Butts are a Plague On Our Beaches
- Klimarådet: Regulering der sikrer, at plastemballage reelt genanvendes