Grasping at straws

Today the Government announced that from April 2020, plastic straws, drinks stirrers and cotton buds with plastic stems will be banned from sale to the general public in England. Much of the commentary I’ve seen on social media seems to see this as a victory for sustainability advocates, but while I’ve never understood the point of drinks stirrers, and as far as I am aware paper-stemmed cotton buds work just as well as plastic ones, I’m horrified by the straw ban.

A great deal has already been written on the ableism of straw bans, and I would urge you to seek out one of the many excellent articles written by disability advocates on the subject. For abled people who can lift a glass and drink from it there really is no need to use a straw, so they can do without or substitute anything they like, but for some people with disabilities plastic straws are essential and none of the existing substitutes work as effectively. Hard metal or bamboo straws can injure people who experience tremors or spasms, paper straws don’t work in hot drinks and get soggy and collapse if someone who takes a long time to drink uses them, and reusable hard plastic or silicone straws require time and a degree of manual dexterity to clean.

I do worry about how plastic straws have become a sort of token gesture that everyone seems to want to get behind banning because of one emotive picture of a turtle, when in reality they make up a microscopic fraction of plastic pollution – it seems that the original data on the fraction of marine litter they constituted cam from and estimate made from a survey for a nine-year-old’s school project.  And the disabled people who really need them are already stigmatised by government policy and in the media as a drain on society (as if the wellbeing of society were anything different to the wellbeing of all the people who make it up, not just those who are increase the country’s economic output).  I don’t want to see the environmental movement, which likes to consider itself more progressive than society more broadly, additionally stigmatising disabled people as a drain on the planet’s resources. While the legislation does say that disabled people will be able to acquire plastic straws from pharmacies, this may require further demeaning proof of eligibility from people who already have to fight for every scrap of assistance they get in a system determined to withold it from them. And not all disabilities are visible, it’s very easy to envisage a scenario where people are shamed for drinking with plastic straws in public if they don’t look disabled enough.

We should be asking ourselves why 80% of respondents in a government consultation supported a ban on plastic straws, which will seriously inconvenience disabled people but have no significant impact on the lives of abled people, but very few people would be willing to support a total ban on takeaway packaging which would require everyone to bring their own food containers whenever they planned to eat out and so inconvenience everyone. If there are to be costs and inconveniences in adopting a more sustainable way of living, and though there will also be benefits there will be, they should be borne equally by everyone in society rather than disproportionately by those for whom life is already hardest in a society not designed to cater for their needs. I really don’t think disabled people should have an additional burden placed on them of having to find more sustainable options for essentials when abled people aren’t forced to, just choose to if they want. We should also be asking ourselves why the government is being applauded for political leadership for asking companies to stop supplying a product that they give away for free, but wouldn’t be willing to legislate to force companies to use more sustainable but expensive packaging that would cut into their profits.

This is a cosmetic measure from a government that has proven entirely unwilling to make any substantive changes to promote sustainability and has in fact done exactly the opposite, most recently by increasing VAT on renewable energy generation systems.

This isn’t a victory, this is greenwash that will hurt those already marginalised and neglected.