NC State students, faculty and staff are promoting a new initiative on campus and in the surrounding community to decrease the usage of straws and the Wolfpack’s environmental impact.
The #GoStrawless initiative, promoted by NC State Waste Reduction and Recycling, encourages members of the NC State community to decrease or stop their use of disposable straws on campus. Lani St. Hill, waste reduction and recycling outreach coordinator at NC State, said that the initiative aims to help people understand the harms that straws can cause to the environment.
“We believe in waste reduction at the source and straws are, for the majority of people, an unnecessary single-use plastic,” St. Hill said. “There are cases where people do need and require straws. So, we are just trying to jump on this momentum that as a community and as a nation, that people are beginning to understand the harm that single-use plastics can have.”
According to the National Park Service, the United States uses over half a billion plastic straws a day, but St. Hill said that it may be even more.
“There are more than 500 million straws that are sold in the U.S. per day,” St. Hill said. “That doesn’t even take into account juice box straws, straws that are just automatically on items. That’s just an estimate for commercially available restaurant straws, so it’s probably more.”
Additionally, there are more than eight million metric tons of plastic that enter into the oceans each year, many of these being single-use plastics.
“We know that there’s more than eight million metric tons of plastics that enter the oceans and straws are part of that,” St. Hill said. “We look at straws, when you do beach cleanups or cleanups anywhere around waterways, straws are always that top 10 item that’s found.”
St. Hill said that the #GoStrawless initiative will be getting a lot of help from student advocates, like Kyra Levau, a fourth-year studying environmental science. Levau helped to bring attention to the impact of straw waste and going strawless.
“I brought it up to Lani, I believe last semester,” Levau said. “Because I had seen the campaign that Seattle was doing called ‘Strawless in Seattle’ and I thought ‘oh well ‘Strawless at State’ also sounds really cool’. I think it’s really doable even though it’s on a smaller scale, because we’re not a whole city.”
Levau is also a member of the Zero Waste Wolfpack, a club on campus that will be helping NC State Recycling with #GoStrawless.
“The Zero Waste Wolfpack is a new club that started mainly last semester, we got a lot of traction and started gaining members,” Levau said. “What we focus on mostly is just trying to create a network of students that is passionate about reducing their own waste personally and in their own community.”
Levau said the Zero Waste Wolfpack hopes to encourage people to stop using straws through tabling, holding educational events and more.
According to St. Hill, NC State has made some changes on campus to reduce straw usage like removing plastic stir sticks from NC State Dining and having straws only upon request in some campus restaurants.
“We also can see like Talley and On The Oval have moved to compostable straws, which is awesome,” St. Hill said. “We love a compostable straw but we still believe in striving for zero waste, so if you don’t need a straw then don’t even take a compostable straw because you’re still creating waste.”
However, both St. Hill and Levau said that student participation in #GoStrawless is crucial to making a difference.
“Their [students] commitment to not using straws can make a big difference,” Levau said. “By them being part of the movement in general, not only does it help them know that they’re taking an extra step in their daily lives to help protect our environment and our oceans, but they’re also making a difference in the greater NC State community and Raleigh community, and that’s why it matters.”
St. Hill also said that while faculty and staff work to make changes, the student involvement in the initiative will help make a big difference.
“We can do things behind the scenes, you know emailing and letting people be aware, but really it’s that student population that makes a difference when we want to get things done on campus,” St. Hill said.
For more information, students can visit the Go Strawless website.
