• Donald Trump has signed an executive order blocking federal offices from purchasing paper straws.
• Paper straws are described as expensive, inconvenient and not so advantageous in environmental terms.
• Straws are one of many single-use plastic items that the European Union – among others – is trying to limit due to their disproportionate environmental impact.

While the European Union has been working for years to reduce the presence of single-use plastic in people's habits (and consequently in the environment) as much as possible, the United States is doing the exact opposite. Through an executive order signed on Monday 10 February, Donald Trump declares war on paper straws and promises to bring back mass use of plastic ones.

What Trump's executive order on plastic straws entails

Last year, the Joe Biden administration had set a goal of gradually phasing out the purchase of single-use plastics by federal offices: not just straws, then, but also cutlery and packaging. Now everything changes. "The irrational campaign against plastic straws has forced Americans to use non-functional paper straws. All of this ends with President Trump," reads the executive order, which is structured around two points. The first requires the federal government to stop purchasing paper straws and ensure they are no longer used in federal buildings. The second, meanwhile, calls for a national strategy to be developed within 45 days to put an end to their use.

"Enjoy your next drink without a straw disgustingly dissolving in your mouth," wrote the US president on the social network he founded, Truth. In addition to branding them as expensive and inconvenient, the new American administration objects that paper straws are often packaged in plastic, which negates their environmental benefits. It also argues that they contain harmful substances such as PFAS (a finding that is indeed confirmed by some scientific studies) and that their production has a greater environmental impact than plastic straws, in terms of water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

The countless good reasons to limit single-use plastic

In recent years, plastic straws have been at the centre of highly successful awareness campaigns. Because, in their own way, they are a symbol: essentially useless objects that last a few minutes and then end up in the bin (in the best case) or scattered in the environment (in the worst). They naturally represent a small fraction of the enormous problem of plastic pollution: according to a study published in 2018 in Nature Sustainability that aggregates data from 36 different databases, together with coffee stirrers they account for just 2.3 per cent of waste found in the oceans. But they are also the fraction that is easiest to do without. With a small change in habits that can be the trigger for paying greater attention to single-use plastic as a whole.

As reported by the European Environment Agency, global plastic production amounts to around 400 million tonnes per year and, at this rate, will double by 2050. Yet of all the plastic ever manufactured in history, just 9 per cent has been recycled and another 12 per cent has been incinerated. Everything else is still in circulation, has been sent to landfill (where it releases greenhouse gases) or has been dispersed in the environment, where it remains for decades, often breaking down into microplastics. A study by the Minderoo Foundation claims that in 2021 humanity generated 139 million tonnes of single-use plastic waste. Another study calculates that 171 trillion plastic fragments are floating on the surface of the world's seas and oceans, with a combined weight of 2.3 million tonnes.