Americans use more than 500 million straws per day, which is enough to wrap around the earth 2.5 times.But Knox College won’t be adding to those figures any longer as they have stopped use of plastic straws at all campus food and beverage outlets and have moved to paper straws.
General Manager of Bon Appetit, Knox’s food service provider, Mark Daniels says paper straws are more expensive but says its “far outweighed by the savings to the environment.”
It began with the Knox Student Senate Sustainability Committee asking for a complete ban on plastic straws.
Director of Sustainability Initiatives with Knox, Deborah Steinberg discussed the matter with Daniels and they decided a good first step would be to switch to paper straws.
Knox is only the third school in the nation to move away from plastic straws after University of Portland did so on April 18, followed by a California school on 23 and then Knox on April 25.
According to thelastplasticstraw.org that advocates for less plastic straw use, 80 percent of all debris found in the ocean is land based and 80 to 90 percent of it is plastic.
