Plastic straw, the scourge of the oceans for centuries and centuries

If we are looking for a quintessence of videos summarizing our time and its absurdity, the one where we see a poor sea turtle with a straw stuck in the nose arises there. Almost a horrific blockbuster. In front of our eyes, with a simple tweezers, a valiant oceanographer tries with great difficulty to remove the object which obstructs the nasal cavity of the animal, which snorts, bleeds, suffers for several minutes, until the final extraction. of this foreign body almost 10 centimeters long.

The images, which toured the world in 2015, are unbearable because of the palpable pain of the turtle, but also because a part of our mind cannot help but trace the thread of this catastrophic scenario… It is a bit like our bad conscience, our decades of errors, which one extracts there from an innocent nostril. At first, everything was fine though. There was undoubtedly a moment of recklessness, perhaps a mojito, a granita or a soda consumed without thinking badly, then the object with which we absorbed the drink left the mainland we do not know how to to find oneself there, off Costa Rica, planted in tortured flesh.

“Don’t tell me it’s a plastic straw!” It’s just stupid! “, exclaims one of the oceanographers, after having rescued the turtle. What is “stupid” here is the kind of great mental gap to which this dispensable tube forces us, both a sign of carefree hedonism (the cocktail spirit) and of a disturbing ecological disaster (the plastic tsunami. not recycled).

Reed, rye and paper

“It’s just a moment of fun, that’s not what will lead to disaster”, We said to ourselves until then, siphoning our Spritz, without realizing that, each doing his little part in the direction of the worst, we were collectively transformed into hummingbirds of disaster. However, straw, used for over 6,000 years, has not always been synonymous with deadly pleasure. It was used in Mesopotamia then among the Sumerians, to drink beer from the vats. Associated with an act of sharing, the straws were then made of reed and decorated, reflecting the status of their owner.

It is at the end of the XIXe century that the American Marvin Stone has reinvented straw. Tired of the rye models with which we drank whiskey, he imagines one made of paper, coated with paraffin. In the 1930s, Joseph Friedman added a small accordion to it to make it flexible. A few years later, having become plastic, straw experienced an endemic development with the fast-food fashion, representing 6% of the most frequently found waste on beaches (Ocean Conservancy report, 2016).

You have 25.04% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.

source site